Cold Winter Rain Read Online Free Page B

unannounced to see my client.  I knew much less at this point than he did about Kris’s disappearance, and neither of us seemed to know much about her whereabouts.  I had more documents to review.
    I closed the heavy book and returned it to the John Lennon wannabe at the desk and walked out of the library and across the street to the hotel.  Back in the room I called room service and ordered a turkey sandwich and two cups of coffee.  After they arrived, I settled in to read.
    At seven I took a break to turn on the room’s flat-screen TV monitor and find a cable news channel.  Kramer had told me the case had attracted media interest, and I knew that after the media frenzy surrounding the young woman from Mountain Brook who’d disappeared in Aruba in 2005, another missing young blonde woman from Birmingham would be irresistible to the piranhas of sensationalism who pass for today’s journalists.
    I was not disappointed.  One network featured a wolfish graying man who called himself a psychiatrist and specialized in diagnoses of crime victims and perpetrators he’d never met and never would meet.  Another cable news platform offered a fat bleached blonde who alternated between gushing sentimentality and a practiced sneer at every comment offered by her guests, all of whom seemed to be either lawyers or psychologists.  Disgusted and a little ashamed, I hit the Power button and went back to the documents.
     
     
     
    It was still raining when I finished the last folder a few minutes before midnight.  I closed the file, threw my zabuton on the floor, and sat for ten minutes.  Then I undressed, took a quick shower, and lay down to a sleep without dreams.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
    Monday January 23
     
    When I woke up at four-thirty and pulled apart the curtains at the window, I could see light rain streaking past the streetlights in front of the hotel.
    By five I was in the hotel’s small exercise room.  I warmed up on a Schwinn Airdyne and then did a hundred sit-ups and three sets of reps on eight stations on the Universal machine.  By six I was showered, shaved, and dressed, and I went down to the hotel dining room and ordered two scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee.  I ate in ten minutes and went back upstairs to finish preparing for the day.
    I called Kramer around seven.  He answered his cell before I heard a ringtone.  “Slate.  Come on out now.  You know where we are?”  He recited the address.  “FBI is due here any minute.  You may as well say hello to them.  I’m sure they’ll be happy to meet you.”  The sarcasm dripped from his voice.
     
     
     
    Kramer lived in Mountain Brook, a wealthy enclave of hills and suburban forest a few minutes southeast of the city.  The exterior of the house was stucco and brick, with timbered eaves, in what might be called English Arts & Crafts in a real estate brochure. 
    Across the street from the Kramer home, a CNN satellite truck and a truck from the local NBC TV station were illegally parked.  I left the rental car in the driveway behind a black Ford sedan that could have worn a vanity tag with the initials FBI.  I walked up the wet brick path and rang the front doorbell.  My arrival did not launch any investigative journalists from their dry seats in the satellite trucks.  I didn’t blame them.  I wouldn’t get out in the weather for me either.
    A thin boy about fifteen with acne and black hair in bangs so long they covered his eyes answered.  I introduced myself, and he asked me to step inside the foyer.  He closed the door.
    “ I’m Paul Kramer,” the boy said.  “My father told me you would be here this morning.  I’ll go and tell him you’re here.”
    I waited less than a minute.  Kramer bounded through the archway leading from a hall that appeared to provide access to the other rooms of the main floor.  “Slate,” he said.  “Glad you’re here early.  FBI wants to talk to my son Paul right now, so