Read Hard Case Crime: Deadly Beloved for Free Online Page A

like ‘spotless’ can’t be applied to certain of the illustrious firm’s clients.”
    “Don’t be coy, Rafe. Drop a name.”
    “Okay.” He grinned at me and there was something ruthless in it. “How about I drop this one? Muerta Enterprises International?”
    As cold as the morgue had been, the chill up my spine was colder.
    “Muerta,” I said, the word sounding half prayer, half curse. “They’re supposed to’ve gone entirely legit, since—”
    One eyebrow hiked itself into a sort of question mark. “Since your husband put the family patriarch away? Since Mike Tree brought Dominic Muerta down?”
    I said nothing.
    “You really buy that, Michael?”
    And for a while there, as Rafe stood glowering at me, I wasn’t any more talkative than the other residents of the morgue.
    But finally I found words and my voice and put them together.
    “Let’s see what Captain Steele thinks.”
    Rafe didn’t argue.
    “Captain Steele,” the doctor said. “He was your husband’s partner.”
    “Yes. He heads up the Organized Crime Unit now.”
    “They were quite a team, I understand.”
    I nodded. “Put Dominic Muerta away—last of the Capone gang godfathers.”
    “It was a close friendship, Mike and Captain Steele?”
    I whipped a frown his way. “You know how close it was!...Sorry.”
    I shouldn’t have snapped at him. The doctor was, after all, merely trying to maintain a professional decorum. He had been my husband’s psychiatrist long before I’d come here for therapy—Mike had been involved in several shootings during his time on the force, making counseling mandatory, and Dr. Cassel was one of the approved shrinks the department used.
    “Captain Steele,” he was saying, “was your husband’s best man, at the wedding?”
    “Yes. But, Doctor, there’s something...something I haven’t told you that colors all of this.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “If you don’t mind...I’ll get to it, but...in my own way.”
    “Fine. Please. Go on.”
    Captain Charles “Chic” Steele was a well-tanned blue-eyed blond, with an endless smile and a cute cleft chin, and had he been twenty, not thirty-five, and in California, not Chicago, you might have taken him for a surfer dude. Not that his attire was in the least bit gnarly: he looked sharp in a tan herringbone sportcoat with a light blue button-down shirt and a gold tie, his slacks a darker tan.
    Right now he was on stage at police headquarters, in a big meeting room that bordered on an auditorium, which was filled with police officers, men and women under thirty, a mix of uniformed and plainclothes officers, with a few in “street undercover” attire stirred in.
    Behind him, on a huge screen, a succession of images was being projected—images of criminals of various ethnicities. This was a slide show, and a young redheaded policewoman (I knew her a little—Sharon Davis) was running it from a computer at the rear.
    “The pitfall,” Chic was saying, “is thinking of these elements as gangbangers—they are not. They are sophisticated criminal organizations. Take the Russian group, for instance—the R.O.C.—which is tied to Miami Colombian groups.”
    Russian gangsters, on the screen, were followed by Colombians.
    “Now each of you is assigned to one faction,” he told his rapt audience, “but watch for contact between R.O.C. and this new Salvadoran group, spun off from M-13 in California, and these Asian gangs, the Hip Sing and On Leong especially....”
    As he continued, Sharon kept the faces coming, Russian, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes mug shots, mostly surveillance photos.
    Rafe and I were taking this in at the rear, not far from where Sharon perched at her computer post. The lecture continued for another ten minutes or so, but then the lights came up and the attendees started filing out. Lt. Valer and I moved against the tide to catch Chic, still up on the stage, chatting with a couple of lingerers.
    Chic grinned when he saw us and came down the four