Free A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) by Matthew Iden Page A

you got them."
    I heard the slicking of computer keys. He rattled off the information I needed, then asked, "What are you going to do, you find Wheeler?"
    "Why does everybody keep asking me that? Let me find the guy first."
    "Okay, okay. But no cowboy shit from you, all right? You learn something, you share. Something happens to the girl, you share. I hear you going Lone Ranger on us and I'm going to have to drag you in."
    "Jeez, Dods," I said, impressed. "You sound like you mean it."
    I heard a clatter as the phone was dropped and then a small scuffing sound as Dods picked it up again. "That punk Henderson was walking by," he whispered. "I had to give him something. I say, if you find Wheeler--whether he's doing this stuff to the girl or not--you waste him and dump him in the Potomac."
     

Chapter Nine
    After I hung up with Dods, I thought about the call with Atwater.
    The excessive hostility was no surprise. It's probably how I would've answered the phone if she'd called me and asked for a freebie. Nothing new there. But the quality of her voice when I'd mentioned Wheeler's case…that I hadn't planned on. In a few, short, breathy words she'd sounded shocked. Angry. Frightened. It was a remarkable reaction for a case twelve years old from a lady who was normally hard as flint. And remarkable reactions in unshakable people trigger the bloodhound in me. I picked up the scrap of paper where I'd scribbled down Atwater's address, thinking. I drew a line through the office address. Then circled her home address.
    It took me twenty minutes to get there. It would've taken less than ten if I'd had a siren and a gumball on the roof. Her house was off George Mason Drive in what developers like to describe without irony as a community. No one knows anyone else's name--though the places are close enough to pass the barbeque sauce from one deck to the other--and the sidewalks end at bridge abutments or freeway entrances. The conceit extended to the thin, boxy homes that were meant to invoke the feel of Bostonian brownstones, but the faux wrought-iron railings were rusting and the finely pointed red brick was only on the front. Cheap vinyl siding--once white, now yellowing--covered the backs and the sides of the end units. All of the cookie-cutter dumps looked exactly like the others, so I slowed to a sedate ten miles an hour and crawled up and around the rows, looking for Atwater's place.
    I found it fronting Pershing Avenue in one of the nicer sections of the development, across the street from a long run of 1950's era single-family homes. The serene pastel houses with their short porches and prim, postage-stamp gardens gave the townhouses facing them a kind of borrowed class. Enough that you could forget that, around the corner, the rest of the development sat cheek-by-jowl with a convenience store, a Laundromat, and a gas station. Route 50 growled a block or two away; I could feel the rumble of traffic sitting in my car.
    I did a U-turn in front of the nice houses, where I parked, got out, and stretched. I crossed the street and walked up the row like I was out for a Sunday stroll. One townhouse had a For Sale sign in the front and a plastic dispenser full of flyers. In the unlikely event anyone was watching, I pulled one out and looked like I was interested, which couldn't have been further from the truth when I saw what they were asking for it. I sauntered down the sidewalk as if assessing the neighborhood, holding the flyer like a roadmap.
    The front of Atwater's place was as nondescript as the others, with a red brick front, one medium-size window, and a standard door with a corroded brass knocker. In lieu of grass, the lawn had some white stones, some of which had dribbled onto the sidewalk. The only landscaping consisted of two small shrubs, brown and nearly dead.
    The one standout detail was a small sign on a post jammed into the soil of the front yard. It tilted at a crazy angle, like it had been a while since it had been put