Free 2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 by Frederick Ramsay

of killing. Do you want to know what I said?”
    Blake felt faint. This could not be happening to him. His stomach churned. The woman had ruined him once, would she do it again? Against his better instincts, he said, “What did you tell him?”
    “Oh no, Blake, it’s not that easy. If you want to know, you will have to be nice to me. Not like the last time. If you want to know, you’ll have to come to Philadelphia and ask me in person.”
    “Gloria, pray that I don’t, because if come up there it will be to strangle you.”
    “Very good, Blake. That’s what I told that nice sheriff. Goodbye.”
    Blake, hands shaking, put the receiver back in its cradle, and sat heavily on the bed. The early afternoon sun filtered through the blinds, casting vertical shadows on the carpet. They looked like bars on a jail cell.
    “God, what are you doing to me?” he shouted.

Chapter Thirteen
    Sam Ryder’s space—she never thought of it as an office. Offices have desks and chairs and maybe pictures of a spouse and kids or a boyfriend or something. Sam had none of these in her life. Not yet. She believed her six feet five inches drove away most men. On a few blind dates, when she’d answered the door, the men looked up at her with an expression usually associated with someone witnessing an autopsy. One just turned and walked away, a bouquet of flowers still wrapped in plastic, clutched in his hand. She found it the next morning in the Dumpster. Sam resigned herself to being fixed up with basketball players and geeks. The former assumed that their status as pampered athletes entitled them to her sexual favors without question or preliminaries. She’d earned, among other things, a black belt in karate. The necessary application of a move involving her instep and the groin of an Associated Press All American point guard permanently ended her association with the basketball team. The geeks, on the other hand, were so intimidated by her, she grew hoarse from having to do all the talking. Her friends called her “Stork.” But in her space, she reigned as queen.
    The coroner had sent over a complete set of prints. They were clear and sharp, the advantage with lifting prints from a corpse. They didn’t move around and blur the prints. She positioned the first fingerprint on the scanner’s glass plate and started the program. If she was lucky she’d get her hit on the first try. Billy Sutherlin leaned over her shoulder.
    “Lordy,” he said, his breath rank from a half a loaf of garlic bread, “it’s just like that CSI show.”
    “No, Billy,” she said, clicking on the next button, “this is real.”
    “Sweet!”
    Two boxes appeared on her screen. The one to the left displayed the scanned image of her print. The one on the right remained blank. Below the boxes a query menu popped up. She needed to enter the parameters she wanted to apply and the databases she wished to search.
    “Ike,” she said into the intercom, “how deep a scan do you want me to make?” She waited for an answer. Ike stepped through the door.
    “Hey,” he said, “that looks like that TV show, what’s-it-called.”
    “ CSI ,” Billy said.
    Sam rolled her eyes. Ike leaned over her other shoulder, too. Tic-Tacs.
    “Well, let’s just try a simple program first. Do an eight-point match, local, county and state and see what we get.”
    Sam lifted one eyebrow. She had a sneaking suspicion Ike was flying in the dark. Eight would not be considered a simple run. She entered the parameters and clicked “next.”
    The right hand box opened and flashed WAIT.
    “Isn’t there supposed to be a bunch of fingerprints whizzing by in that other box?” Billy said.
    “Like I said, Billy, this is real. To match whole prints and post them in sequence on the screen requires an enormous amount of computing power and a month to run. There’s no reason to rescale and project all the no matches. Who cares about them? Now, if Ike would come up with money for a big Cray, I