Read Online Double The Risk by Samantha Cayto - Free Book Online Page B

bother to put the discs back in the case at all?
    The thought occurred to him that the place may have been tossed. Messy as it was, it would be hard to tell. He stared around the room to see if there was any sign of greater chaos amid the mess.
    “Callaghan, in here,” Diego shouted.
    Ronan hustled to the source of the voice and found his partner on his hands and knees on the threshold to a small closet. Clothing, dirty laundry he’d bet, was scattered around his partner. Diego got more props for rooting around in another man’s soiled stuff. He was peering inside the closet with a small flashlight leading the way.
    Ronan squatted beside him. “What am I looking at?”
    Diego glanced up at him. “A hiding place.”
    Stretching his neck, Ronan saw the hole in the flooring. Diego had pulled up a few shortened planks of the old wood floor. A small square hole had been carved into the subflooring. Something hard and black lay inside. “Is that a laptop?”
    Reaching into the hole, Diego pulled the object out. “Netbook.”
    “Same difference. Interesting how O’Malley hid it.”
    “Very,” his partner agreed.
    “There’s more.” Ronan wedge himself between the other man and the door jamb to stick his hand in the hole. Under the computer was a stack of one hundred dollar bills held together by a paper bank band. Holding it up to his forefinger to measure its thickness, Ronan said, “About ten grand, give or take.”
    Diego whistled. “Nice chunk of change.”
    “Yeah, but not enough to live on for long. I wonder if he has any more hidey holes.” Ronan scanned the room. It was as messy as the living room. “How’d you manage to find this one, anyway?”
    “I’ve learned that people with a modicum of imagination hide things where they think others would be disgusted to look. I worked robbery for a while, and this woman stole a packet of diamonds and hid them in her box of tampons like I’d be too squicked out to look there.” He shook his head. “I thought it was weird how O’Malley’s dirty laundry was jammed in the closet. Seems like he’d just leave them on the floor where he took them off, given the state of the rest of the apartment. The place where the floorboard had been cut was easy to spot once I cleared the clothing away.”
    Ronan stared at the size of the hole again. “Looks like he might have hid a lot of money at one time. Even given the space taken by the laptop, sorry, netbook , if he had hundred dollar bills, he could have easily fit tens of thousands in here.”
    Diego shook his head. “I still don’t understand what he could have done or been in on that would have yielded that much of a pay-out. And with that much left hiding here, there’s no way he was out on the streets. Even if he’d run out completely, he would have hung around here until the landlord got him evicted. I bet that takes months here the same way it does in New York.”
    When Ronan nodded, Diego continued. “Dirty and smelly as they are, these are decent clothes. He’d have been better dressed than he was when we found him.”
    Ronan rubbed at his chin. “I got the feeling out in the living room that this place has been tossed. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear someone opened up all of his porn DVDs.”
    Diego gave him a thoughtful look. “Sounds like they were looking for something in an effort to tie up a loose end, covering their tracks.”
    “God, the infamous ‘they.’ Who are they?”
    Diego stood up and Ronan followed suit. “You said O’Malley was one of your father’s snitches? Is there anyone we could talk to that would have known him back then, O’Malley that is? Maybe your older brother?”
    Ronan smiled at the thought. “Naw, Daire was a shiny new cop when our parents were killed. He wouldn’t have known anything about my father’s informants. Uncle Jack was already in a wheelchair by then, and he was a beat cop anyway. Never had a reason to deal with snitches.” He wracked his brain