Isaacs Bad, Bad Seymour Brown

Main
ISBN: 978-1-80471-014-2
Verlag: Grove Press UK
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

'Both witty and gripping, this is ultra-sleek storytelling, with two delightful investigators' Daily Mail When Corie Geller asked her parents to move from their apartment into the suburban McMansion she shares with her husband and teenage daughter, she assumed they'd fit right in with the placid life she'd opted for when she left the FBI. But then her retired NYPD detective father gets a call from academic April Brown - one of the victims of a case he was never able to solve. When April was five, she emerged unscathed from the arson that killed her parents. Now, two decades later, someone has made an attempt on her life. It takes only a nanosecond for Corie and her dad to launch a full-fledged investigation. If they don't move fast, whoever attacked April is sure to strike again. But while her late father, Seymour Brown, was the go-to money launderer for the Russian mob, April Brown has no enemies. Well-liked by her students, admired by her colleagues, who would want her dead now? And who set that horrific fire, all those years ago? The stakes have never been higher. Yet as Corie and her dad are realizing, they still live for the chase. Savvy and surprising, witty and gripping, Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is another standout hit from the beloved Susan Isaacs.

Susan Isaacs is the author of thirteen novels, including Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs serves as chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and is a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into 30 languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Isaacs, Susan

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO

My parents were still in the kitchen when Josh and I came in hauling the dinner leftovers and plates. Dad was at the kitchen table with Lulu on his lap. He was mindlessly scratching her chest while she gazed up at him with poignant devotion that dissipated the instant Eliza emerged with her leash, ready for their evening walk. My mom was putting food away, at that moment swaddling three individual spears of asparagus, each in its own blanket of Saran Wrap. She was usually aware of environmental impact, at least for a Boomer, but she had always seemed possessed by some Leftovers Incubus that compelled her to seal up all food in an impenetrable vault, then throw it out two days later anyway since she was sure it had gone bad.

Josh had his own kitchen demons. His system of dishwasher loading had rigorous rules apparent only to him. I sometimes found him correcting my loading after I’d done it, though the dishes seemed to come out no cleaner.

In the first few months of our marriage, it didn’t hit me that he was mildly nuts. Mostly what I did was gaze at him, whatever he was doing, in an awestruck way. How did such a wonder of a man choose me? Or why? It wasn’t a low opinion of myself as much as an exaltation of him. He had the academic distinctions, the decency, the devotion to his daughter. And who could ignore his OMG looks? Golden skin, dark brown hair, and green eyes—not emerald, which would have been too showy, but a subtler jade.

Fifteen minutes earlier, while we were the only two left outside cleaning up, Josh had pressed up against me and whispered what he’d like to do to me, and I’d run my hand down his side and replied huskily, “Soon,” even though we’d done an extended director’s cut version the night before. Now I turned away before any spark of lust could be extinguished by watching him scrape off dishes with his beloved wide yellow spatula—discolored from years of marinara sauce and curry—that he’d dedicated solely to his preloading sacrament.

My dad and I were more alike: methodical when it came to investigatory work, but looser when it came to the rest of life. “Looser” meant anything from indifferent to chaotic. Each of us was content to defer to a spouse who had intense feelings about how to clean sink drain covers.

I sat down next to my dad. “Was it a total shock to you, hearing from April after all these years?” I asked.

He tilted his head and gave it a couple of seconds of thought. “Yes. And no,” he finally said. “Like I said, we weren’t completely out of touch.”

“They found some relatives who took her in?” I rested my chin on the backs of my hands and leaned in, the way I sometimes did when I conducted FBI interviews and the moment came when there was a chance I’d finally hear the whole story. I just had to pause long enough so the witness would want to fill the empty space. And sometimes they did, a terabyte of random observations spilling out. (Although a hardened few just let the silence expand until part of me wanted to cover my ears to deny how overpowering it was.) My dad would have been a tough interviewee. He had no problem letting awkward silences grow.

“So April had relatives . . .” I prodded.

“She did. It took two or three months, but they were able to find Kim Brown’s family—Kim was April’s mother—in Fort Mitchell, a part of Northern Kentucky that’s basically suburban Cincinnati. Never found anyone, not even a fourth cousin, for Seymour. But these people were shocked to see how Kim turned out. She’d run away from home when she was seventeen.”

“Troubled kid?”

His head moved down to his left shoulder, then to his right—repeat, and add a shrug, a Jewish New York cop’s way of saying . “No arrests. Mostly a loner, so no gang, bad crowd. She liked older guys with a few bucks who could show her a good time.”

“Any signs of any abuse at home?”

“No. We checked. She was just a kid who was a little on the wild side. Sounded like she was born into the wrong family—they were Massevery-day Irish Catholics, straightlaced. Nice enough people. Lucky we found them. Otherwise they’d have had to put April up for adoption or into foster care.”

I decided to pitch in with the cleanup, but all that was left was the trash. I got up, and as I started to tie the bag handles, I heard my mom telling Josh, “. . . , and Helen Mirren played Prospera with such authority,” and he responded with “She was great in .”

I called out to my dad, “Are you going to reply to her text?”

He walked through the garage with me to the bins outside and lifted the lid. “I did. I mean, how could I not? I’m hoping we can set something up for tomorrow.” Back inside, he leaned against the pantry door and looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to jog his memory. “I just wish I had the case files with me so I could look at them before talking to her.”

My mom, of course, overheard him. “Could that young detective—” she began.

“Gabriel Salazar,” he interrupted.

“Right, Gabriel Salazar. Could he get you the files tomorrow?”

“Possibly,” he answered, then paused to look at his phone, which had just made its loud text noise. “But it looks like I’m talking to her tomorrow. Eleven a.m. Won’t have time to get them from Gabriel.” Josh shot my dad a sympathetic look before turning back to the dishes. My dad added cautiously, “I do have copies of some stuff from cold case files back in the apartment.”

“Really? You’re allowed to bring that stuff home?” I asked.

“Sure!” he answered a bit too buoyantly.

My own training and the skeptical look that passed over Josh’s face—Josh, a federal judge and former prosecutor, could easily spot an iffy law enforcement move from across a kitchen—told me otherwise, but I decided not to push it. My dad seemed to be hinting for a ride to his apartment to pick up the files. Though he had never said it directly, he’d clearly been reluctant to drive at night for a while now. I couldn’t even remember the last time he wanted to do something after dinner other than fall asleep watching TV.

“I could take you over to your place tonight, if you want. That way, you could tell me what you do remember about the case.”

My dad lit up.

I gave Josh a sheepish glance at the implicit cancellation of our evening plans. He pushed off from the center island with a vague air of regret. However, by the time he passed the microwave, I could see his shoulders square, his spirits start to soar—probably he recalled that the treatise on public utility regulation he’d ordered from the Harvard Coop Law School Bookstore had finally arrived.

My mom tilted her head with a small smile, taking the measure of my dad and me. I could tell she was glad to see him excited about something again. Then it hit me that she was also gratified to see excited about something again, and I wondered just how apparent my PTSD was to everyone around me. With that glance of hers, relieved and benevolent, I understood: very apparent.

Well, we all had lived a three-day nightmare. I’d been terrorized. My family at the time knew something terrible had happened to me, but not what it was. To them, I was just gone.

When I first joined that weekly lunch group of people who worked from home, I told myself, , and while I was at it, I could get to know some of my fellow suburbanites. They were all freelancers, like me: garden planner, political speechwriter, product designer, photo retoucher. We were all looking for professional—and social—connection. But after many tedious salades Niçoises at the local French bistro, La Cuisine Délicieuse, one of the members piqued my curiosity. Something wasn’t right about him. I’d knock back any antidote to boredom. So I investigated him. He found me out and kidnapped me, tying me to a post in a blackened space. He was my captor, and I had to listen to him tell me in harrowing detail about my upcoming death and decomposition. I managed to escape. He wound up behind bars, I wound up with PTSD and a flashlight necklace.

“Corie, if you have an extra moment while you’re there, could you please bring back some books? There are some I’ve been aching to read.”

I waited impatiently as my mom wrote the titles down as if she were doing the calligraphy for a royal wedding invitation.

When we got into the car, my dad turned on the radio. I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping he would be focused on the Mets for the next twenty-five minutes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. He had never been great at being a passenger. He pointed out tractor trailers and offered advice on my route until we finally merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, which took us close to his apartment. Only then did he sit back and let me drive.

“So, yeah,” he said suddenly after five solid minutes of silence, as we drove past the border from Nassau County into Queens. “Burnt to a crisp.” Homicide cops weren’t famed for their delicacy of expression. “Even the springs in...