Killer Summer, Lynda Curnyn [books suggested by bill gates .txt] 📗

windows that opened on to the ocean view. “Very nice.”

I decided not to bring up the fact that he could have had a share in this nice place and got to the more pressing question. “What are you doing here?”

That golden brown gaze finally focused on me. “I made a phone call yesterday. To my friend Paul, over at the Suffolk County P.D.”

My insides felt warm. “Myles, thank you, I—”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.” He looked around. “Are we alone?”

“Yeah, everyone is down at the beach—Tom, Nick, Sage— didn’t you see them?”

“I walked along the streets to get here.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing he was wearing shoes. A pair of brown leather boat shoes that looked kind of new. “So where is your house, anyway?”

“On Pine Walk. Daydream Believer,” he said, giving me the house name. “Ever seen it?” I shook my head. “It’s nice. But not as nice as this.” He gazed around. “Is that Tom?” he asked, pointing to a photograph of Tom holding a large fish on the end of a hook.

“Yep, that’s him,” I said, studying Myles’s face for a reaction.

“He seems like an okay guy.”

“Yeah, so did Ted Bundy,” I replied. “Come in. Sit down. Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’m good. Look, Zoe, I can’t stay long…”

I absorbed this information, wondering where he might be going in that nice little outfit he had on. And with whom. But I held my tongue, leading him into the living room.

Janis followed, lying down at the foot of the love seat Myles plopped down on. I sat on the sofa opposite him, watching as his gaze moved to the windows once more. “How much did you say he paid for this place?” Myles asked.

“I don’t know for sure. But it’s probably worth at least a million by now,” I replied, wondering at his interest. Myles had never seemed to care about material things. But then, I’d never seen him in an Izod shirt either, I thought, noticing, for the first time, the little alligator on his blue polo. “So tell me what you found out.”

He turned his gaze from the ocean view. “Why aren’t you down at the beach?”

I shrugged. “Too hot,” I said. “C’mon, Myles, tell me what you learned.”

“Well, before you get too excited, Zoe, I didn’t find out much. Yeah, it was Erickson who conducted the investigation, but from what Paul told me, there was very little suggestion of foul play. No hard evidence anyway. No signs of a struggle.”

I frowned, staring at his hands as he fiddled with a coaster that had been left on the coffee table. “That’s what Jeff said, too.”

He stopped fiddling. “Who’s Jeff?”

I looked up at him and saw something stir in his eyes.Jealousy. Myles was jealous! At least I hoped he was jealous. Maybe that was a good enough reason to go on this date. Still, I refrained from throwing it up in his face. Especially since he looked positively miffed. There was enough satisfaction in that, after all. “I’m sorry—Officer Barnes. He’s with the Marine Bureau. He came to the house that night. We’ve been talking, you know. Since the incident.”

Myles leaned back on the couch. “So why didn’t you just ask him to order up your report?”

“He’s with the Marine Bureau, not Homicide.”

“But if he was first officer on the scene, then he would have access.”

I shrugged. “Nah,Jeff’s too much of a goody-goody.” Then I remembered the proud thrust of his chin and the way he’d practically spoken in police codes for the first five minutes of our conversation. Maybe I was wasting my time by going on this date. “He’d never bypass the proper channels.”

“Is that right?” Myles said, glaring at me now.

Oops. “Look, maybe he would have. But he’s not as familiar with these types of cases as you are,” I said, hoping to ameliorate the dig by some ego-soothing. “What does he do, really, except give out beer tickets and noise-disturbance warnings? Now you were in the D.A’s. office—”

“ Were being the operative word,” he said.

“Myles—”

“Never mind,” he said, waving a hand in the air dismissively, that glint of anger—or confusion, I couldn’t tell—in his eyes once more.“The only other thing of interest was the toxicology results.”

I looked at him.

“It was pretty standard stuff,” he began.“Her blood alcohol level was high—nothing crazy, though. But Paul told me they took a few extra days to make the determination because they also discovered she had some Valium in her system.”

“Valium? Isn’t that dangerous—to take Valium and drink?”

He shrugged. “People do it all the time.”

“But you’re not supposed to, right?”

His golden gaze met mine. “People do things they’re not supposed to all the time.”

I knew by the sorrow rimming his eyes that he was thinking of his father, how he had gone into that abandoned house without calling for support like he should have. How he had been shot when a wild-eyed kid with a gun startled him from behind. I wanted to touch Myles’s hand, do something—anything—to douse the sadness I saw in him.

I didn’t, of course. I couldn’t. And that made me even sadder.

“Look, Zoe, the Valium in her system could mean nothing— they followed up and found out she had a prescription.”

“But?”

“Well, there was some concern about it, apparently, seeing as she had a lot of it in her system.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Well, it could mean a lot of things. But in the final analysis, they ruled ‘accidental.’”

I frowned. “Why would they do that?”

He ran a hand through his hair, as if he was just as uncomfortable with the conclusion as I was. “The thing is, it’s hard to tell a lot with the toxicology results. Yeah, she had a lot in her system, but whether it was enough to put her out—well that’s debatable.”

“You mean she might have been unconscious before she even hit the water?”

“Anything’s possible, Zoe.” His gaze met mine.“I also did a little Internet search on Tom. It seems he was a big contributor