The Angel of Knowlton Park (51 page)
Read The Angel of Knowlton Park Online
Authors: Kate Flora
The two boys on the curb shot out into the street so abruptly Burgess had to stand on the brakes to avoid hitting them. It was seven a.m. Saturday. Columbus Day weekend. The weather was perfect. The city was quiet. And even as he rocked to a stop, shoved the truck into park, and rolled down the window, he knew from the wild look on the taller boy's face and the single gasped word, "body," that his day, and probably his weekend, was lost.
In the rearview, he watched Nina and Neddy cease their happy chatter about school and the upcoming picnic and go quiet, their bright heads still, their faces wary. Body was a word they knew too well.
It was no prank. The taller of the two, a gangly kid with a lamb's pelt of curly dark hair, freckles standing out against his pale, drained skin, was wide-eyed with alarm. "Excuse me, sir," he gasped, his fingers tightening around the window frame to steady himself, "There's a... Do you have a cell phone? We need to call the police. There's a body in the water."
"I am the police," Burgess said. "I'll park and you can show me."
He pulled to the curb and turned to the kids in the back seat. "Stay in the car. I'll just be a minute." He'd hoped they hadn't heard, but Neddy's coxcomb of red hair was pressed up tight against his sister, his eyes squeezed shut, and Nina wore the stricken look he kept hoping time would erase.
Cursing quietly, he followed the boys out onto the wharf, wishing he could have just made a phone call passing this to someone else. But he was a cop, a homicide detective here in Portland, Maine, and the boy had said body. A few minutes earlier or later, the boys would have stopped another car and he could have gone on with his day. He might have made it out of cell phone range before word went up the food chain and came back down to him, making it someone else's problem.
Neddy and Nina didn't need this. They'd already been through more trauma than a combat vet. This was what they got, Burgess feared, for hanging around with him. He tried to keep his personal and professional lives separate, but trouble had a way of rising up and smacking him in the face. This was a perfect example.
His girlfriend, Chris, wanted to adopt these two foster kids, rescue them from the crap that life that thrown at them. After what they'd seen and had done to them, it was no simple task. Endearing as they were, Nina and Neddy were damaged. First, from having witnessed their father killing their mother. Later by being the targets of a disturbed and violent pedophile. He wasn't sure he was on board for another thing in his life that was this demanding. His day job—hell, his day, night, weekend, whole life job—was demanding enough.
The boys, moving with herky-jerky eagerness, led him out the wharf to a spot where two fish poles and some gear were propped against a railing, and pointed down into the water. "Down there," the tall boy said. "Do you see? Floating on bottom, there in the seaweed?"
"Is it really a body?" the smaller boy asked. He was blond, pink-cheeked and blocky, and tended to stay behind the other boy.
Burgess followed the boy's pointing finger, peering down through foam and flotsam into the choppy green water. Lot of times, you looked into the water, you couldn't be sure what you saw, but this one was pretty clear. A man's body—at least, it looked like a man—face-down, fully dressed, and shifting with the currents down there on the murky bottom.
Redemption
A Joe Burgess Mystery
Book Three
by
Kate Flora
~
To purchase
Redemption
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Kate Flora's eBook Discovery Author Page
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Kate Flora first developed her fascination with people's criminal tendencies as a lawyer in the Maine attorney general's office. Deadbeat dads, people who beat and neglected their kids, and employers hateful acts of discrimination led to a deep curiosity about human psychology that's led to twelve books including seven "strong woman" Thea Kozak mysteries and three gritty police procedurals in her star-reviewed Joe Burgess series. Her first true crime, Finding Amy, has been optioned for a movie. Her second, Death Dealer, will be published in September 2014.
When she's not writing, or teaching writing at Grub Street in Boston, she's usually found in her garden, where she wages a constant battle against critters, pests, and her husband's lawnmower. She's been married for 35 years to a man who can still make her laugh. She has two wonderful sons, a movie editor and a scientist, two lovely daughters-in-law, and four rescue "granddogs," Frances, Otis, Harvey, and Daisy.
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