Read Online The Widower's Wife: A Thriller by Cate Holahan - Free Book Online Page B

The man was too young to have already retired from the force, he decided. The woman could have served, but the warm smile she flashed as he approached lacked the customary suspicion.
    He asked for Michael, flashing the “private investigator” badge, purchased off eBay for ten dollars after he’d had to turn in his real one. The glint of metal did the trick. The male guard nodded respectfully and flashed an ID over a sensor to open the gate. The woman picked up her phone. “I’ll tell him you’re on your way up.”
    Ryan could hear her announcing him as he walked through the gate. He entered the fourth of six elevators and hit the button for the twenty-eighth floor. When the doors opened, Michael’s admin stood directly in front of him, inappropriately dressed as ever in a white button-down tight enough to be a bodysuit. She slipped through the open doors and double tapped the first-floor button.
    “Hey, what are you doing?”
    “Helping,” she hissed.
    Ryan snaked around her to the elevator panel, intent on reopening the doors. “I need to talk to Michael.”
    She stepped in front of him, blocking the buttons. A flowery perfume assailed his nostrils as she drew close. Her shoulder bag bumped into his thigh. “You want to know about Ana, right?”
    Tile pressed against Ryan’s feet as the elevator began its descent. He tried to read the woman’s expression. Her intent look didn’t give away what she wanted to tell him, only that he was unlikely to get to Michael until he listened.
    “I heard you on the phone last time,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you then, but Michael was watching. He’s out this week. Bahamas.”
    Ryan’s anger ebbed. Was this a friend of Ana’s? “Yes. I’m investigating the case.” He deliberately left out why. The woman might not talk to the guy trying to void her pal’s life insurance policy. “Did you know her?”
    “No.” She tilted her head to the side. “But I met her once. And I know what happened from the news. I know she died strangely.”
    Her word choice heightened Ryan’s attention. Most people would have said that they’d heard she’d suffered a terrible accident.
    “I thought you should know that she and Michael didn’t part on good terms.”
    “He’d mentioned. He claims he more or less fired her because she left work early often—”
    “No.” Her face screwed with disgust. “I asked around about her when I first started. You know, see what she’d done wrong so I could avoid getting on Michael’s bad side. People didn’t have one negative thing to say. But there was something up between her and Michael. She showed up at work, I’m guessing several weeks after she’d already left, and barged into his office. He shut the door when they were talking, so I didn’t hear what about, but I could see them through the walls. Michael was angry and she looked really shaken, like she was about to—”
    The elevator stopped. As the door opened, the secretary faced front and pressed her lips together, a clear sign that she would not talk where others could overhear. Two suits entered. They chatted to each other as the elevator continued its journey to the lobby.
    The secretary waited to resume the conversation until they all had exited the lift and the men were several steps ahead of them. “I talked to HR after she left and they’d had no idea that she’d quit. They’d still been paying her. Our HR head had thought Michael had hired another admin because he’d wanted to transition Ana to a better role or something.”
    She walked as she talked, high heels clacking on the lobby’s marble floor. Ryan struggled to drag his bum leg to the beat of her determined New York stride. “Something was going on between them,” she said.
    “You think they were having an affair?” Infidelity between coworkers wasn’t commonplace, but it wasn’t rare. Somewhere between 15 and 41 percent of men cheated, according to studies. About 36 percent of the