Read Online In Too Deep by Jayne Ann Krentz - Free Book Online Page A

graceful. He was not hungry, but whatever she was making was starting to smell good.
    He had been surprised when she had suggested that he come to her apartment for dinner after he finished with the county cops.
We both need to decompress
, she said. He wasn’t accustomed to decompressing with anyone else, but it had suddenly seemed like an excellent idea.
    Isabella’s apartment was a warm, cheerful space filled with thriving green plants and cast-off furniture. The former tenant had disappeared one night, leaving no forwarding address, not an uncommon event in the Cove. Ralph Toomey owned the shabby rooms above his shop. He had offered them to Isabella and told her she could have the previous occupant’s furniture as well.
    She had taken the apartment but declined the furniture. Fallon had helped Toomey haul a battered table, a couple of wobbly chairs, an unattractively stained mattress and rusty bedsprings to the town dump.
    On the final expedition to the dump, a plastic baggie full of marijuana had fallen out of one ripped cushion.
    “Always wondered how he managed to pay the rent,” Toomey remarked, pocketing the baggie. “Guy had no visible means of support. Figured he was in the business.”
    “Probably explains why he disappeared in a hurry,” Fallon said.
    Scargill Cove was on the fringes of the Emerald Triangle, a tricounty region in Northern California. In these parts it was freely acknowledged that marijuana was the largest cash crop, an economic engine that supported a multitude of businesses from gardening supply stores to gas stations. It also brought with it the usual law enforcement problems.
    Toomey contemplated the stained mattress that they had tossed over the cliff into the ravine that served as the Cove’s dump.
    “You know,” he said, “Isabella fits right in at the Cove. It’s like she belongs here with the rest of us or something.”
    One more lost soul in a town where lost souls constituted the majority of the citizenry, Fallon thought.
    When the apartment had been emptied out, Isabella, together with Marge from the café, Harriet Stokes, proprietor of Stokes’s Grocery, and the innkeepers, Violet and Patty, scrubbed the place from top to bottom. The cleaning had been followed by a fresh coat of sunny gold paint.
    After the paint had dried, several people in the Cove had offered Isabella replacements for the furnishings and kitchen equipment that had been tossed. She had accepted each used item with glowing pleasure, as if it were a treasured housewarming gift or a valuable antique. The table and chairs and the heavy crockery had come from Marge. The secondhand sofa and the end table were courtesy of Violet and Patty. The Elvis lamps were a gift from Oliver and Fran Hitchcock, owners of the Scar.
    The only new furniture in the place was the bed. Everyone in town had witnessed its arrival. The big van bearing the logo of a discount mattress store had blocked the street for half an hour while the new mattress and box springs were unloaded.
    Fallon had watched the operation from the window of his office. Keen detective that he was, he had observed that the mattress was a traditional double. Unfortunately, that information was inconclusive. It did not tell him what he really wanted to know. Single people often used double beds.
    On the other hand, the size of the mattress could indicate that there was a man in Isabella’s life. If so, the guy had not yet put in an appearance. On the whole, though, the evidence appeared to indicate that Isabella was alone.
    Like me
, Fallon thought.
    The weariness was getting heavier, weighing him down. He had used a lot of energy to take down the killer. Energy was energy, and when you pulled on your reserves, you had to allow time to recover. But he knew that the soul-deep exhaustion that was sinking into him was more than just the result of having pushed his para-senses to the max. It was not the first time he had killed and it might not be the last but