No Immunity

up, he stalked to the hallway door and wedged it open. “We’ve got both doors covered. There’s no way out. Make it easy on yourself. Step out, hands up.” He waited. “Jeez,” he muttered, and started forward.
    She didn’t move.
    He turned, surveyed the viewing room, eyeing the open cabinets, the this, the windows, the bookcase. His gaze stopped—
    Forget those fallen books, every cell of her body screamed.
    His gaze moved to the door, on around. With a satisfied shrug he headed down the hall, flinging open doors, dismissing the rooms behind them. Outside the embalming-room door, he stopped. “We know you’re in there. Open the door.”
    The viewing room was clear. She counted to five before Fox said, “Okay,” and pushed open the door.
    Light flooded the hall. The deputies followed him in. “Hey, look at this! Gloves! She must be in the freezer!”
    “Maybe we should let her sweat it out, huh, Sheriff?” a deputy cackled.
    Kiernan resisted the urge to leap to the floor and race outside. There were at least two deputies in here with the sheriff. That had to be the whole force. There couldn’t be anyone else watching the front.
    “Go ahead, Potter, open ‘er up.”
    She lowered a foot to a shelf, swung herself around, and stepped quietly to the floor. Moving as silently as she could, she crossed the room and let herself out the door into the street.

CHAPTER 26

    “Now they’re telling Dad he needs chemo. Yeah, I know. Government sets off a bomb, sprays radiation all the hell over the grasses, the streams, the cattle, so the kids downwind get cancer from drinking the milk, ferhevvin-sake, and now fifty-some years later they’re still saying it’s not their fault when Dad come up with cancer. Life east of the proving ground, eh?”
    Tchernak sighed as he leaned against the wall between the Gents and the Ladies and eyed the guy jabbering away on the phone—the only phone in this greasy spoon where conversation was the tastiest thing you could buy. He could understand why there was no phone book here, what with the pages and pages of escort services, with their full-page colored pictures of ladies you wouldn’t escort home to Mom. Probably fourteen-year-old boys ripped them off as fast as Nevada Bell sent them out. When he finished this case his first project would be to get himself a cell phone.
    He had dawdled over the miserable dinner trying to use the time to figure out what the hell was going on with Grady Hummacher. Truth was he didn’t know Hummacher at all anymore. Much less the blonde and the brunette the little girl had seen with him. The blonde would be Louisa Larson. But the other?
    “Government swore there was no danger. Where did they think the radiation was going, straight up to heaven? Dust went halfway through Utah.
    “So I says to my sister, Milly, you know her, right? The one in Connecticut that just broke with that loser of a husband?”
    Tchernak glanced at the two women behind him in line, then turned his gaze back at the man on the phone and loudly shifted his feet. The strawberry pie had been a mistake. At home he didn’t deal with chain restaurants, period, much less a joint like this. Half the hotels he wouldn’t waste his money in. Even with the best chefs he spotted, flavors too strong, sauces too thick, fish breaded and fried when it should have been poached. If salmon wasn’t flown in fresh from the Northwest, he didn’t deal with it. He had a standing order for Dungeness crab the minute the season opened in San Francisco, and organic garlic from Watsonville for his garlic-pepper marinade. And there were the Maine lobsters, and the Jersey bluefish.
    He shoved the memories away. He’d never get another chance to cook like that, with a boss who never stinted. He’d known that when he quit. But dammit, it didn’t have to be this way. If Kiernan hadn’t been so pigheaded—“I don’t like to share.” What kind of reason is that?—they could be halfway to wherever the phone number in Grady’s apartment led him. They’d be eating sun-dried-tomato focaccia with black olives, capers, and wild fennel and hashing back and forth what Grady could be up to. She’d be sitting with her knees to her chest like a teenager, bitching like a special-teams coach, egging him on to everything on the far side of the law.
    “No, the old man did not sue. He was a good citizen. Prided himself on being such a damned good citizen that now he’s near dead.
    “Come to Vegas,