Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

pebbled plate glass and pushed the green button on a stainless steel intercom box.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice crackled.

“I’m here to see Ms. Tassiopulos,” I said, looking up at the white security camera mounted out of reach above the door.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.” I was an ex-army cop but thought I still had a pretty authoritative cop voice. “I’m a detective. I’d like to talk to her about Dr. Simpkins.” Still looking at the camera, I heard a flustered “Oh!” before the intercom went dead. A moment later the door buzzed. I pulled it and stepped into the vestibule to face another door with pebbled glass. I stuffed my watch cap into my jacket pocket, looked up at a second camera, and waited.

Momentarily, a blue shape neared the door, fractured by the glass but belonging to a woman in a pantsuit. The door opened, and I recognized Ileana Tassiopulos from her picture on the website—olive skin, large green eyes and high cheekbones in a patrician face, and curly brown tresses with blonde highlights. But the wide smile I had seen online was missing, the tense jaw signaling an anxiety that didn’t surprise me.

“Ms. Tassiopulos,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Gideon Rimes.”

Her hand was slender, fine-boned. When she shook mine I felt tension in her fingers.

“It’s about time somebody considered this serious,” she said, stepping aside to let me enter and closing the door behind me. “Is there word of Dr. Simpkins?”

The reception area was paneled, with two women and a man, all of whom seemed to be in their mid-twenties, seated at desktop computers. The woman nearest the door, probably the person who had spoken on the intercom, was a full-figured blonde in a blue sweater. The woman at the desk perpendicular to hers was brown-skinned and bald with hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. The small man at the back of the room had thick black hair and was about the same complexion as my foster sister Mira, whose biological parents had come from India. All three of them looked at me expectantly, as if awaiting my answer.

I turned back to Tassiopulos. “Is there somewhere I can speak to you privately?”

She looked at the others. Then she looked back at me and stiffened as if bracing herself. “If you have news, you can share it with all of us.”

“I don’t have any news yet,” I said, “about Dr. Simpkins or Dr. Surowiec.” I paused to let the second name register, and it did, on all four faces. The seated women exchanged a surprised glance, and the man’s lips parted as he leaned forward. I was almost close enough to Tassiopulos to feel the pull of her sudden intake of breath. “I was hoping you could help me. Now, is there somewhere we can speak privately?”

“Of course.”

Without looking at the others, Tassiopulos turned on her heel and led me past their desks. I followed her through a narrow corridor that opened into what once must have been a ballroom but had since been subdivided into cubicles with frosted glass partitions and offices along the far wall. She gestured me into one of the offices and closed the door as I sat in a black plastic shell chair facing the desk. Tassiopulos sat behind the desk and studied me.

“Detective Rimes, is it? I’m glad the police are finally paying attention to Keisha’s disappearance.”

I leaned forward to hand her a Driftglass Investigations card, and she slipped on a pair of drugstore reading glasses with a rhinestone-studded frame. She read the card, and I could see the corners of her mouth tightening.

“I used to be a cop,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find her.”

“Probably by her parents because the real police still aren’t taking things seriously.”

I said nothing.

Clearly annoyed—whether at me or the real police I couldn’t say—she pulled off the reading glasses and set them on her desk. She studied me for a time, long enough for me to notice the flecks of gold in her green eyes, long enough for her to come up with a question that might determine whether the interview continued. “Mr. Rimes, how does Dr. Surowiec fit into your search for Keisha?”

“Call me Gideon.” I hoped informality might tip things in my favor. I took out my notebook, peeled the pink post-it from one of the pages, and held it toward her. “Did you write this note to Keisha, Ms. Tassiopulos?”

She took the post-it and glanced at it. “Yes.”

“I found it in Keisha’s apartment. My clients are desperate to know what happened to their daughter, and I need a place to start looking. I noticed the name Veronica Surowiec on the letterhead of old memos but not on your website, so I came here first.”

“Then the answer to my question is that there is no connection.”

“The answer is, I don’t know—yet. If Dr. Surowiec is the Veronica you meant, there must be a story behind how your medical liaison ends up begging outside a Tim Horton’s. If that story involves drugs, Ms. Tassiopulos, and Keisha disappeared after a drug overdose, I think you should help me figure out if there is a connection, for both their sakes.”

She was quiet for a long moment. “Call me Ileana.” She folded her hands atop her desk. “How can I help, Gideon?”

“You’re the only person from Humanitas that Mona Simpkins has in her address book.” I took out my pen and held it above a blank notebook page. “That suggests your friendship with Keisha went beyond work.”

“Goes. Don’t bury her until we find her body.” She gazed off for a moment and dragged the back of her hand across both eyes. “Yes. I have a few years on her but we were newbies together. We sat next to each other at orientation and struck up a friendship that helped us make sense of Humanitas and what was expected of us. Over lunches those first few weeks we talked a lot about the connections between physical and mental