Free Angel Condemned by Mary Stanton Page B

restaurant across from the town house? B. Mitchell’s.”
    Antonia grinned at Bree. “Let’s go for the crab cakes at Huey’s instead, Mamma. You drive safe, now.”
    After further good-byes and assurances of love and affection, Francesca rang off.
    Bree, who had settled into the corner of the couch, got up and shrugged on her coat.
    “Where are you off to?” Antonia demanded. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”
    “I’m not mad at you, either. I’m just taking Sasha out for a walk.”
    “I already took him out for a walk when I got back from the restaurant.” She scratched Sasha under the chin. “Besides, that dog’s so smart he can take himself for a walk.”
    “Well, I’m taking him out again.”
    “Fine.”
    “Fine. Antonia? Don’t wait up.”
    Sasha at her side, Bree went out the front door and let it click shut behind her. She tested the latch: locked. She stood, looked around the concrete landing, and checked out the cobblestone street that ran past the building.
    Sasha bumped his head against her hip. Nothing there .
    “Something’s wrong, though,” she said. The night was chilly but mild for February. A fingernail moon rode a palmful of clouds. The daytime familiarity of the wrought iron fencing, the low walls of rough brick, and the hum of traffic on Bay was gone. She felt as if the air was pent up, waiting to explode. Some huge, anonymous pressure hemmed her in.
    She hesitated. She could go to the Angelus Street office, and past the iron oak with its gaping grave. Or back to the Bay Street office and down to the basement to confront Beazley and Caldecott and tell them to leave her family alone.
    And there was always Oglethorpe Square and the office of the Company’s sixth member, Gabriel. She hadn’t seen him for a month or more. Of all the Company, he was the one who stood between herself and physical attack from the Opposition.
    But would Gabriel protect her family?
    Just to her left, on Bay, a dark-blue sedan slowed down and stopped. A man got halfway out of the driver’s side. Bree tensed. Sasha growled low in his throat. Then his tail began to wag.
    “Is that you, Bree?”
    “Hunter?”
    He jogged easily up to her. Bree’s sense of unease increased. She’d met Sam Hunter in the course of her first case for the Angelus Street office, when she’d been feeling her way, half convinced that she was in the grip of some persistent delusion. She’d had to solve a temporal murder before she could enter a plea for an overturn of her client’s conviction, and Lieutenant Sam Hunter had been the Chatham County homicide detective assigned to the case. She’d liked him from the beginning; he was tall, broad shouldered, perhaps six or seven years older than she was, with an easy smile and a hard, keen intellect. She was halfway convinced it’d been more than liking when the car that came barreling down Bay Street a month ago had knocked her into the hospital.
    He stopped and made a move to take her in his arms, then seemed to think the better of it. “You’re looking kind of washed out, Bree. Everything okay?”
    “Everything’s fine.”
    He stooped to pat Sasha on the head. “I just called the house. Antonia said you’d gone out for a walk. I’m glad I caught you.”
    Bree didn’t say anything. Her sense of unease was more urgent now. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    Hunter’s eyes were gray. They glinted silver in the light from the street lamps. “We’ve got a homicide. A dishwasher headed toward a late shift found a body in the parking lot next to your office building. I’d like you to come and identify it.”

Six
    Bree didn’t ask which office building had a body behind it. No temporal ever found the way to the Angelus Street office. It had to be Bay Street.
    “Who is it?”
    “We’re not sure who he is. We need you for an ID.”
    Bree hadn’t realized her hands were clenched. He. Not Cissy, then. Not EB. And Antonia was safe inside the house, wasn’t she? Sam had just