Read Online Move to Strike by Perri O'Shaughnessy - Free Book Online Page A

death?”
    “She did, but she blamed herself more for giving in. Why couldn’t Robin see how beautiful she was? Anyway, Linda would never hurt that man. She just has a big mouth. Makes her a good minister.”
    “Has she said something about Dr. Sykes’s death, Sandy?”
    “Talk to her if you want to know her side of the story.”
    “So she blamed him for her daughter’s death,” Nina said, thinking about it. “I can imagine how she must have felt.”
    “Maybe you can,” said Sandy, and Nina felt a rare current of sympathy pass between them. Sandy knew all about her, all her foibles and fears. Her preferred lunches. How her husband had died.
    For a big woman, Sandy moved lightly. Swinging the door to the office open in one movement, she motioned to a waiting client.
    “Linda’s been hinting that she has some information for you. I’ll set it up,” she said, pulling the door shut behind a man that scurried forward fast as a rabbit into one of the orange chairs in Nina’s office, planted himself there and crossed his arms, as if daring them to try to displace him.

CHAPTER 4
    “MR. VAN WAGONER—may I call you Paul?”
    “Please do,” Paul said. The interviewer had very pretty knees, sharply outlined by the black stockings she wore. The face in its trendy specs was about fifty, with a warmly interested look he distrusted. She was a high-school teacher working as a stringer for the
Monterey Herald
, the biggest paper on the central coast of California. Which wasn’t saying much.
    And he was the interviewee. Call me Ishmael, call me a cab, he thought. Just so you write it up so I sound experienced, charming, and brilliant.
    Which should be no stretch. All he had to do was act naturally.
    She had warmed up by nosing around his condo while he was in the kitchen fixing ice water. He had caught her eyeballing the bed, which was large, the better to eat you with, my dear, he had wanted to say, although he refrained. She had stopped under the paintings of mountains and a blowup of himself and his friend Jack climbing at Pinnacles many years before. “Your brother?” she asked, but Paul told her no and she lost interest. Then, drifting around the living room, putting her hand on the back of his leather chair, fingering a bowl of eucalyptus he had just picked out back to fight the dusty smells, she had stopped at a picture of his mom and pop, telling him, “You look like your dad,” something you might not find so flattering when the woman is saying that you resemble a man you will always consider ancient.
    “So you’ve just returned from Washington,” she said, setting a recorder on the table between them. She wore a red AIDS ribbon and a camisole rather than a bra under her shirt.
    Paul deduced that she was a former hippie whose radical politics had cooled to a tepid PC temperature. “I got back a couple of days ago. Haven’t even been into my office yet. I was head of a security detail for Senator Ashford of Kentucky.”
    “How did you and the senator get along?”
    “He plays a great game of golf.”
    “Is he still trying to keep the women of our country from exercising their reproductive rights?”
    Ah, a trick question. And so early in the interview. “Not at all,” Paul said. “I’m sure he is in favor of reproduction of all kinds.” A picture formed in his mind of the senator and his current lassie in the back of the limo, exercising.
    “I see. Well, you have had a very exciting career, Paul. I’ve been hoping to have a chance to talk with you for some time. You won a scholarship to Harvard for your undergrad studies, and have an M.S. from Northeastern University in Criminal Justice, I believe you said on the phone?”
    “Right.”
    “You were a homicide detective when you left the San Francisco Police Department a few years ago, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “How many murder cases would you say you worked on during the years in San Francisco?”
    “Dozens. I couldn’t say.”
    “What would