Read Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) for Free Online Page A

went for a glass of water while Lupo kept
an eye on her lest she faint.
    Fuck, I really hate this
job today .
    They waited for her to regain her composure and stayed a
half hour, but it was obvious Laura didn’t know anything. She had seen her
lover off to work and that was the end of it. Laura said Tanya liked her job,
rarely complained about coworkers or bosses, enjoyed dealing cards, and only
occasionally had to shrug off a potential suitor. And no, as far as she knew,
Tanya had no connections to the Russian mob. “She hated her heritage!” Laura
said.
         All
this came out in a rush whenever they asked a question, as if she could fill
the void just opened in her life with more words about Tanya. Lupo thought
Laura would collapse after they left.
    “Do you think we can look around, see if there might be an
indication of some motive for what happened?” he said. There was no reason to
think so, but it was worth a try. A bagful of cash, some kind of illicit
information, a drug stash. A stash of any kind.
    Laura looked at him, wide-eyed. “Like if I had something to
do with it? I would n-never—” She began to sniffle again.
    “No, no,” DiSanto jumped in. “In case she knew her killer,
maybe had gotten some questionable correspondence from him, like a threat, or…
just something – anything – out of the ordinary.”
    “Informally,” Lupo added, “so there’s no need for a warrant.
If she lived alone, we’d be searching through her things.”
    “For clues?”
    DiSanto said, “Right.”
    “You don’t know of any threats?”
    Laura fixed Lupo with her puffy eyes, wiping moisture there.
“No, never. Tanya was very quiet.”
    Lupo didn’t bother to point out that a threat didn’t have to
be solicited. "So we’ll take a quick, informal look through her things, if
you don’t mind."
    She nodded, and led them to a home office squeezed into a
tiny den, then pointed at the connecting bedroom. She stood nearby as they
gently flipped through papers and bills and credit card statements. They
repeated the procedure in the bedroom, but there were no hidden caches of
stacked bills or packets of drugs, or anything that pointed at anything out of
the ordinary about Tanya Rosskov. No weird floorboards, or likely hiding
places. DiSanto even checked for dummy outlets by plugging in a small lamp at
random.  
    Lupo pointed at a row of photographs framed over the desk.
“This her family?”
         “Yes,
back home. None of them are here. She was lonely… until we got together.”
    “She hated her heritage?” Lupo prodded. “You said hated ?”
    “Yeah, the whole melodramatic Russian thing. But she loved
her family, as far as I could tell. They talked on Skype all the time.”
    “I didn’t see a computer,” said DiSanto.
         “She
used my laptop. Want to see it?”
    Lupo shrugged. DiSanto nodded. “Sure.”
    Laura retrieved it from a closet, fired it up. A three year
old Dell, bare bones student model. They let her take them through some
correspondence, both her own email account and even Tanya’s, and they just
glanced at some random emails. Nothing jumped out at them.
    “We can always come back.” Lupo figured she’d been
forthcoming enough that she didn’t know anything, and if there was any further
reason they could always get the techies to check the laptop for hidden or
deleted files. Since she’d worked at the casino, there was always the chance of
theft, extortion, blackmail, embezzlement…
    “Anything else you can tell us?”
    They’d been together two years, almost three, she said.
    “In that time, Tanya ever get into some kind of trouble?”
Lupo already knew she had no record, because they had run her ID. But you never
knew. Trouble comes in different packages.
    She barely thought about it. “No. She’s – was just a
lonely immigrant, no friends other than me, no drama…” Then her voice hitched,
and she started bawling.
    “We’re very sorry for your loss,” Lupo