The Good Guy

She smiled. “And you’re always a detective.”

Shy Zoey stayed close to Linda all the way to the front door.

From various points in the night yard, a hidden choir of toads harmonized.

Linda rubbed the dog gently behind the ears, kissed it on the head, and walked across the lawn to the Explorer in the driveway.

“She doesn’t like me,” Pete said.

“She likes you. She just doesn’t like cops.”

“If you marry her, do I have to change jobs?”

“I’m not going to marry her.”

“I think she’s the kind, you don’t get a thing without a ring.”

“I don’t want a thing. There’s nothing between us.”

“There will be,” Pete predicted. “She’s got something.”

“Something what?”

“I don’t know. But it sure is something.”

Tim watched Linda get into the Explorer. As she pulled the door shut behind her, he said, “She makes good coffee.”

“I’ll bet she does.”

Although the secreted toads had continued singing when Linda had walked among them, they fell silent when Tim set foot on the grass.

“Class,” Pete said. “That’s part of the something.” And when Tim had taken two further steps, Pete added, “Sangfroid.”

Tim stopped, looked back at the detective. “Sang what?”

“Sangfroid. It’s French. Self-possession, poise, steadiness.”

“Since when do you know French?”

“This college professor, taught French literature, killed a girl with a chisel. Dismembered her with a stone-cutter.”

“Stone-cutter?”

“He was also a sculptor. He almost got away with it ’cause he had such sangfroid. But I nailed him.”

“I’m pretty sure Linda hasn’t dismembered anyone.”

“I’m just saying she’s self-possessed. But if she ever wants to dismember me, I’m okay with that.”

“Compadre, you disappoint me.”

Pete grinned. “I knew there was something between you.”

“There’s nothing,” Tim assured him, and went to the Explorer in a silence of toads.

Nine (#u65e7b131-c2e7-55e0-bb92-b6c31e1b1967)

As Tim reversed out of the driveway, Linda said, “He seems all right for a cop. He has a sweet pooch.”

“He’s also got a dead fish named for his ex-wife.”

“Well, maybe she was a cold fish.”

“He says he won’t mind if you want to dismember him.”

“What does that mean?”

Shifting into drive, Tim said, “It’s sand-dog humor.”

“Sand dog?”

Surprised that he had opened this door, he at once closed it. “Never mind.”

“What’s a sand dog?”

His cell phone rang, sparing him the need to respond to her. Thinking this might be Rooney with some additional news, Tim had it on the third ring. The screen didn’t reveal the caller’s ID.

“Hello?”

“Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“Is she there with you?”

Tim said nothing.

“Tell her she makes an excellent egg-custard pie.”

Conjured by the voice, into memory rose those impossibly dilated eyes, greedy for light.

“Her coffee isn’t bad, either,” said Richard Lee Kravet. “And I liked the mug with the parrot handle so much that I took it with me.”

This residential neighborhood had little traffic; at the moment, none. Tim came to a stop in the middle of the street, half a block from Pete Santo’s house.

The killer had gotten Tim’s name from someone other than Rooney. How he had obtained the unlisted cell-phone number was a mystery.

Although she couldn’t hear the killer, Linda clearly knew who had called.