Read SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) Online
Authors: Lawrence De Maria
SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) (17 page)
Panetta opened the door. He looked past the man standing on his porch.
“Damn it! Wouldn’t you know? It never fails. I just finished shoveling.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the killer said.
***
“Hey, Howie! Take a look at this.”
Howard Caduceus put down the prescription pill bottles in the dead man’s medicine cabinet.
“Nothing special in the bathroom,” he said, walking into the bedroom. His partner, another homicide detective named Charles Palermo, was standing by an old chest of drawers with his back to the door. The only other furniture in the room was a metal-framed bed. “Aspirin, Cipro and Crestor, the same statin I’m on for my cholesterol. I’ll check with his pharmacy and doctor to see if anything is missing, but my guess is whoever killed him never came up here. Probably panicked. Not that I think this guy had much to steal.”
Caduceus was an experienced homicide cop who always kept an open mind. But he was fairly certain that the murder they were investigating was straightforward. A break-in gone horribly wrong. The victim’s wallet had been rifled and his pockets turned inside out. From markings on his wrist it looked like his watch was also gone. The forensic boys downstairs were dusting for prints and bagging and tagging whatever they could find on the body and the room in which it was found. They’d come upstairs later. After the post, the M.E. would announce the official cause of death, but Caduceus knew strangulation when he saw it.
Palermo turned around. In his gloved hands was what looked like a black felt jewelry case.
“What’s that?” Caduceus said.
“This what I think it is?” Palermo said, handing the open case to Caduceus. “It was in there under his socks.”
Inside the case was a medal on a thick pale-blue ribbon. The medal itself was a five-pointed gold star surrounded by a green laurel wreath. It was suspended from a gold bar inscribed VALOR, on which stood an eagle.
Caduceus turned the medal over and saw another bar on which there was an engraving:
THE CONGRESS TO JOHN PANETTA, U.S. ARMY.
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Better tell the boys downstairs to be extra careful, Charlie.”
Caduceus knew that Panetta’s murder might still be straightforward, but it was also going to create a shit storm.
***
In Dallas, where he now lived, the hit man had been checking the Internet for any news related to the killing.
There was nothing the first day. Or the second. Apparently nobody missed the poor old guy.
Finally, on the third day, Panetta’s death was reported. Except it wasn’t on the Internet.
The killer was in his kitchen having his regular breakfast of black coffee, two poached eggs and rye toast while he watched
CBS This Morning
with Charlie Rose, the only news he could stand; all the others, in his opinion, having turned into entertainment shows. The broadcast started off with a 90-second recap of the day’s top headlines. The fourth item concerned “the brutal murder of a Medal of Honor winner in New York City.”
The killer stared at the screen. There was a clip of Panetta’s house, easily recognizable, now surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. Squad cars and media trucks were parked out front and officers could be seen walking in and out. Uniformed cops kept small clusters of the curious across the street.
A somber voice-over explained how Vietnam War vet John Panetta “winner of the nation’s highest award for valor” had saved his entire company during a North Vietnamese attack outside Saigon by sticking to his machine gun even after being severely wounded “only to be strangled during an apparent robbery in his own home.”
“Those cocksuckers,” the hit man said aloud. “Those rotten cocksuckers.”
***
If you would like to read all of GUNNER, here is a link:
Lawrence De Maria’s thrillers and mysteries:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer
The New York Times
, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the
Times
, De Maria became an Executive Director at
Forbes.
Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the
Naples Sun Times
, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where he writes book reviews, features and a regular blog column: