Read Online My Boss is a Serial Killer by Christina Harlin - Free Book Online Page B

than I ever expected. I searched his old saved letter
files for the word “sorry.” Sorry is a bad word for attorneys, who
must never imply that they are wrong, mistaken, or regretful of—or
about—anything. Laugh though you may, I promise you that the word
“sorry” appears so seldom in litigation correspondence that the
only place I found it was in letters to bereaved families that
said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
    Since Bill has been doing estate work for
over fifteen years, and since much estate work has to do with the
elderly, many of his clients had passed away. I found almost a
hundred archived condolence letters. I eliminated the men, and then
I searched through the women to find the one who hadn’t died of
entirely natural causes. I could do this because of Bill’s closing
memos, which often stated the cause of death. Once I had a list of
dead women’s names, I just searched their files for a closing memo.
As luck would have it, only the second file I searched, Bonita
Voigt’s, was the one I wanted.
    The memo, entered some time after the file
had actually been closed, simply stated, “Memo to File: Bonita
Voigt died August 15, 1998. Unfortunately she took her own life.
What a shock for all of us who knew her. She was a very nice woman
and always a pleasure to speak to. I had a good conversation with
her brother about her funeral services…” Bill went on for a couple
paragraphs after that about dates and various conversations that
he’d had. It made me want to look at his handwritten notes, which
would contain all the details, and the only way to do that was to
get Bonita Voigt’s entire file.
    And, as I’ve said, people will do just about
anything to amuse themselves at work.
    “ Why do you have to have it today?”
demanded Lloyd. “A file that’s this old?”
    “ Oh, never mind, then,” I said,
plucking the request slip back out of his hand. “I’ll go get it
myself.”
    “ I already locked up storage for the
weekend,” he said, “and if this ain’t an emergency, I can’t see the
point of opening it all back up again.”
    I grimaced at him, not sure I believed that
storage would already be locked when it wasn’t even three yet.
“Can’t a clerk just run down and get it?”
    “ This is an old file number,” Lloyd
said, pointing accusingly at the slip. “That file’s got to be
almost ten years old.”
    “ Yes, it may be about that
old.”
    “ Ten years old, that’s going to be
pretty far back.”
    What the hell did he mean? Pretty far back in
time? Pretty far back in the storage room? Lloyd would go to any
trouble and beyond any limits to complain. He was probably
disgruntled for both reasons and a couple I hadn’t yet thought of.
It would have given me perverse glee to send him on a particularly
disagreeable mission, if only I could say that it was really for an
urgent matter happening that afternoon. But the age of the file
didn’t support that little ruse.
    “ Fine,” I said. “Fine, Monday morning,
then.”
    “ So it’s not an emergency?”
    I didn’t care for how much he enjoyed saying
that. “Apparently it’s not,” I said dryly.
    Then I forced myself to forget about Lloyd.
Other than my irritation with him, I was surprisingly cool-headed
and patient, not anxious in the least about the next day. I had
plenty to occupy my attention that evening. I had my little summer
project to work on, repainting my kitchen chairs in sunshine orange
and green apple, which may not seem offhand like a wise color
choice unless you’re a woman who discovered after a long winter
that everything she owned was brown. Also I had a disk of Prime
Suspect to watch.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Gus picked me up right on time, which was
automatically a gold star in Carol’s Little Book of Dating. I
cannot stand tardiness. He’d called me briefly the night before to
confirm my address and a pickup at 12:30 p.m. He also said there
was no need to dress up because we both dressed up all