Free To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery by Joanne Pence Page B

feltbad about upsetting them, and stopped calling. For the moment, at least.
    So far, her Ferrari had received more notice and interest from the neighbors than either her or her questions.
    Now, walking around the ugly bloodstain inside the apartment, she rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. Something despicable was going on here. She wanted to scream, “Stop! Leave us alone!” and to explain that there was nothing that she or Paavo or Aulis owned that anyone might want. But what good would it do to shout at the walls?
    She’d brought in the mail and flipped through the bills and advertisements before placing them on the coffee table with other mail accumulated since the attack. Paavo would need to take care of the bills, plus any others unpaid. She should try to find them while they were on her mind.
    Suddenly, outside the apartment, car wheels screeched, followed by a loud thud. She ran out to find a man lying on the street near her car. His head was bathed in blood.
    Neighbors poured onto the street. “A dark blue car hit him!” a little boy informed anyone who would listen. “I saw it!”
    A man dropped on his knees to the hit-and-run victim. Angie understood when he used the word muerta . The man was dead.

Chapter 11
    Since 1974, FBI headquarters has been housed in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, a two-and-a-half-million-square-foot monstrosity located on Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets in Washington, D.C. It stands seven stories tall in the front, but the rear rises to eleven stories. Of the more than seven thousand employees in the building, fewer than a thousand are special agents. Most employees work on maintaining files, running the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, indexing and confirming fingerprints, and handling freedom-of-information requests.
    Special Agent Nelson Bradley stood at the third-floor window by his cubicle and watched a turbaned Sikh and a woman in a bright-hued sari emerge from a cab. His thoughts weren’t on the couple, who meant nothing to him, but on the message slip in his pudgy fingers. He didn’t like the way his fingers had gotten fat, or the way the rest of him had as well, or the way his hair had thinned, and the years wore heavy on his face.
    Simply reading Paavo Smith’s name on the message slip had made his hip begin to throb, adding tothe generally aging and decrepit sentiment he had about himself. He hadn’t heard from Smith in years, not since San Francisco happened. That was how he thought of it— San Francisco happened .
    He went back into his cubicle. The blue burlap-covered partitions that divided the agents’ desks made him feel like a rat in a maze. A Northern Telecom multibuttoned telephone set, filled with features he didn’t understand or care to use, waited silently for him. He hated his desk-bound job, but it was all he could handle ever since going out to Frisco on a special assignment with a gang task force. Several Vietnamese families working in computer hardware manufacturing had been victims of home invasions. The FBI found an informant within the Vietnamese community and set up a sting operation. Bradley was a part of it, and when the sting went south, he was nearly killed. A couple of homicide cops, Smith and his partner, Kowalski, happened to be in the neighborhood investigating the latest home-invasion murders when bullets started to fly. Kowalski had called for reinforcements as Smith went into the house with the agents to see if he could help. Smith found Bradley with his leg and hip torn up and bleeding badly. He pulled Bradley out of the back door and toward an ambulance that answered Kowalski’s call. Seconds after Bradley was clear of it, the house went up in a firebomb. The two other agents had been killed.
    Bradley had heard that Kowalski, too, had been killed a while back. It was too bad. He’d been one of the good guys.
    Bradley owed his life to Smith. He didn’t like being in debt to anyone. He liked it even less than he