Free Now You See Her by James Patterson Page A

even a Creole band playing for the mourners from the flatbed of a parked pickup.
    They were there for the store clerk who had been killed, a fifty-three-year-old Haitian immigrant by the name of Paul Phillip Baptiste, who was being waked tonight as well. It seemed like the entire island had turned out.
    Peter nodded with solemn concern as the gathered mourners embraced him and gave him their condolences.
    “I couldn’t get through this without you at my side, Mermaid,” Peter whispered to me as we finally entered the funeral home.
    I gave his hand a squeeze. “Where else would I be, Peter?” I said as we waited in line to sign the viewing room book.
    Yesterday had actually been wonderful. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent so much unbroken time together. We ate in, and when we weren’t in bed, we were watching the sunset. A couple of times it seemed as if he wanted to tell me what was going on, but then he changed his mind and the subject. I didn’t press him. I don’t think I wanted to know. I just wanted us to be together. The world be damned.
    Besides, I knew he would tell me everything eventually. We were best friends.
    There
was
one odd moment this morning. As I returned to the kitchen after drinking my morning coffee in the yard, Peter was standing with his back to me, speaking softly on the phone. I stopped, frozen in the doorway, when he suddenly raised his voice.
    “Fuck your plans, Morley,” Peter barked in a tone that managed to be fierce and cold at the same time. I’d heard Peter speak that way only once before. The night he’d arrested me.
    “You just be there,” I heard him say very distinctly as I went back outside. “I won’t tell you twice.”
    It seemed odd that Peter would speak that way to his boss. I remembered Morley watching the house. It was hard to understand.
    When it was our turn to pray, Peter and I walked together over to Elena’s closed, flower-covered casket and knelt down. There was a hush in the room behind us as people realized what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Peter remove his hat. After a moment, his face crumpled as if buckling under an unbearable interior torment, and I took his hat from him.
    Peter and I became separated as he stayed and spoke with Michael Cardenas, Elena’s husband.
    I shook hands with the priest beside him and some more people I didn’t know.
    “Jeanine, there you are,” Gary, the chef from work, said as he scooped me up in a painful hug. “Can you believe any of this?”
    “No, Gary. It’s just horrible,” I said looking around. “I don’t see Teo. Is he taking this very hard?”
    “He’s gone,” Gary said, shaking his head. “It’s the craziest thing. Teo called me the night after the shooting. He said that he got a hotel job in the Dominican Republic and that he was leaving immediately. Elena’s death must have been too much for him to take. You had to hear him on the phone. I felt so bad for the guy. I went by his apartment with his check thenext day, but the landlord said he was already gone. Left his clothes and everything.”
    Peter’s hat dropped from my hand as I remembered the last time I’d seen Teo. It was the night I had tailed Peter. Teo had been behind the wheel of the Mazda with Elena.
    Elena was dead, and now Teo was just gone?
    As Gary greeted someone else, I turned toward the front of the room by the casket. Morley had arrived, and Peter was standing with him. They were speaking quietly but intensely.
    “Mrs. Fournier?” someone said.
    I turned around. For a moment, I panicked. Standing very close beside me was a handsome man with long, dirty blond hair and a Jesus beard. It was the Björn Borg look-alike who’d scared me outside the Hemingway Home when I was catering. That now seemed like a thousand years ago.
    “Do I know you?” I said, taking a quick step back.
    “No,” the man said in a voice deeper than I expected. “But I know you. Sort of.”
    What the hell was