Free The Silent Bride by Leslie Glass Page A

on the street. For the second time April was glad she hadn't been there to see Tovah's body, as Mike described it. She didn't need any more nightmares, but neither did he. She tried to divert him.
"He must have used a light rifle, something that can easily be broken down," she suggested.
"Yeah. Maybe a nine-shot with a short barrel," Mike agreed.
"Not so easy to hide in a space like that. Anybody could have seen him at any moment."
"Maybe somebody did see him but doesn't know
it."
April nodded. Sometimes you don't see what you're not expecting to see.
"If this had happened at a church, right now I'd be thinking the shooter might have been somebody wearing a liturgical robe, maybe disguised as a nun, a priest, an altar boy. That would play. But I saw only two people wearing robes, the rabbi and the cantor," Mike went on.
April remembered them. One big and fat, one small and thin.
"Or it could have been a woman. There were a lot of women in long gowns," he added.
April considered the idea of a female sniper in an evening gown shooting a bride down in a synagogue full of people. "Gee, I don't know about that." It wasn't exactly a female kind of crime.
"It could have been a man dressed as a woman. Lot of wigs there, too."
She nodded, liking that better. "There you go."
She put her face out the car window into the wind and breathed the spring air. It wasn't good that both of them were so spooked by this homicide. Maybe Mike was troubled because it occurred near his old home, a section of the Bronx that crime-wise had always been quiet. In his day it had been staunchly middle- and upper-middle-class. Now a lot of newcomers to the city lived there. The neighborhood had changed from white-collar to blue-collar. Even Mike's mother, Maria Sanchez, who'd been a newcomer herself thirty years ago, complained about the immigrants who flocked to the buildings on Broadway. But still, the Five-oh was one of the safest precincts in the city. Crime-wise, it was sleepy.
The Deegan cut through the Bronx to Westchester. Apartment buildings were rooted in the hills on the east and west sides of the highway. The older ones were ten stories high, square, unrelieved red brick, one after another laddered in the hills. The newer ones were twenty, thirty stories high, towering on the bluffs.
April turned her thoughts to the funeral. They'd go. They'd see who was there saying good-bye.
Killers frequently went to the funerals of their victims. If the funeral was at one, they'd go over to the house and talk with Tovah's family in the late afternoon, around five. She didn't relish the prospect of interviewing the family. This was going to be a long day, but what day wasn't? Mike interrupted her timing calculations.
"I think we should get married. What do you say, cjuerida ? How about we finally set a date?" he asked suddenly.
"Let's not compete with Ching's wedding." Or a homicide, she thought.
"How is that competing?" He put his foot on the gas, reacting to the evasion.
"There's just a lot going on right now, that's all." April shook her head; he'd driven right out of her comfort zone. And now he was speeding.
"There's always a lot going on," he countered.
"What's the sudden hurry, chicol" she said softly. Don't push me at a bad time.
"The hurry is, I have a bad feeling."
"About what?" Her heart spiked as he changed lanes too fast. He was definitely pissed at her. She hated that, too.
"About this bride shooting. About being together but not married. Not being married feels wrong now, like bad luck. That's it. It feels like bad luck." He turned to look at her as he said it, and his expression was fierce, showing that he really meant it.
Bad luck! April felt the kick of those two highly charged words. Right in the gut where she was most vulnerable. Only yesterday he'd been content being together on any basis. Now he was thinking it was bad luck. That hurt, because April's constant nagging worry was that worse luck would result from their marrying. So far she'd