A Bitch Called Hope Read Online Free Page B

glanced over at Lennox, his eyelid fluttered in a ghost of a wink.
    They followed Tommy through the dining room into the kitchen and sat opposite him at a small table in the breakfast nook.
    Tommy paged back in his notebook to a sketch of the master bedroom. He pointed to the sketch and asked Aurora where she’d been standing at the moment she first discovered Bill’s body. He asked her if she had touched the body. She had not. What time was it when she found him? She didn’t know. Tommy glanced at her hands clenched together on the table, a designer watch encircling her wrist.
    “I didn’t think to look at the time.” Aurora’s voice came out in a squeak.
    “You’d had a shock.” Tommy soothed. “We see that all the time. Don’t we, Lennox?”
    Aurora swung around to Lennox. “You know him?”
    “She saved my life,” Tommy said. He had no idea what a colossally bad idea it was swap stories with Aurora. He probably thought Aurora would love hearing about Lennox’s heroics. How they would all bond over this memory. And once they’d bonded, he’d be that much closer to getting Lennox in bed. He didn’t know her mother.
    “You’re the man my daughter pulled to safety?” Aurora said. There was an edge to her voice that you could shave your legs with. Tommy hadn’t noticed; he was that sure of his ability to charm the socks off any female.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “She was very brave,” Aurora said.
    “A hero,” he said.
    “You should’ve stopped the police board from firing her. You should’ve raised holy hell, threatened to quit yourself.”
    He was so not expecting this little old lady to challenge him. He stood and yanked up his shirt. “I was in the hospital!” he said. An eight-inch purple scar keloided from below his rib cage to just above where his slacks hung from his skinny hips. “The hospital had me sedated until I didn’t know if I was coming or going. By the time I got out, it was all over and Lennox had moved on.”
    There was probably enough truth there to sell it, just like his story about his wife and how she happened to find out about them after Lennox had been fired. But Lennox wasn’t going for it. And from the way Aurora had her jaw set, she wasn’t going for it either.

Chapter 4
    It was nine a.m., two days after Bill Pike’s death. The crows outside Lennox’s office window were shrieking at each other. Lennox sipped her first cup of coffee of the day, looked at the morning Oregonian and saw Bill’s name in the headline. The paper was calling it murder.
    Lennox had half expected it. Something felt off beyond the girl with the packet of money. The murder made front page of the Metro section the same day his funeral notice ran in the back of the paper.
    Lennox clipped both the headline story and the obit and called her poker buddy, Sarge. Sarge ran the police evidence room. He could tell you how many open cases a cop had on his desk and whose arrests made it to conviction. And he could recite a bad guy’s rap sheet the way a sportscaster rattles off baseball statistics.
    “Can’t talk to you now,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll call you back.”
    Lennox had to wait until he took his coffee break. She could hear traffic noise, the splash of a car driving through a puddle.
    “Where are you?” she said.
    “I’m standing under a tree in South Park,” Sarge said.
    She imagined rain beading on his bald head. “You’ll catch a cold,” she said.
    “Don’t worry about it.” He lowered his voice. “You know what will happen to me if it leaks out I’ve been talking to you.”
    Lennox swore on her mother’s head that she would not so much as hint about anything she learned.
    He told her the autopsy report had come in the night before. Cause of death: insulin poisoning.
    “That’s a new one,” Lennox said. “How could that happen?”
    A car alarm went off down the street. Sarge said, “They don’t know how it was administered yet, but I’ll tell you what,