Inherit the Dead

what?”
    “So it means you were in your mother’s apartment. Recently. Very recently.”
    “No.” Angel shook her head, ran a hand through her blond hair. “I haven’t been there but, but . . . My mother told me about it.”
    “But you said you hadn’t spoken to your mother for a year, and she said the same thing.”
    “Then I, I must have read about her buying it. That’s it.”
    “Where?”
    “The Times, I think. I can’t remember.” Angel waved a hand. “What does it matter?”
    “The buyer’s name was withheld, Angel.”
    “So?” Her face softened, and she took a step closer to him, her voice that seductive purr Perry remembered when he’d held her trembling body against his in front of her nanny’s home. “It’s just a painting, Perry. Not important. What’s important is us.”
    “Us?” Perry looked into those wide blue eyes, no tears now, just a deep void.
    “You and me,” said Angel. “Why not? There’s plenty of money—or there will be. You don’t want to scratch out a pathetic living as a private eye for the rest of your life, do you, Perry?” She eased the back of her hand across his cheek, fingernails flicking against his skin, and he felt a chill. “We can go anywhere. We can—”
    Perry grabbed her hand. “ We are not going anywhere, Angel. And neither are you. I think the police will be interested to know that you were in your mother’s apartment.”
    Angel tugged her hand away, her face going hard. “Try to prove it,” she said, her purr now a rasp. “Oh, I can just see it. A disgraced cop trying to hang a murder on the casual mention of a painting.” She laughed. “That’s rich.”
    Perry knew she was right. It wasn’t enough.
    Angel’s lips curled into a smile. “And gee, all the witnesses are dead, aren’t they?” She looked down at her half brother and her father and shrugged. “You know, Perry, I don’t think you’re going to say anything.”
    There were sirens in the distance.
    Perry returned her cold stare. “You made a mistake, Angel, and my guess, you’ve made others. I’m going to start by having your mother’s building canvassed, every apartment, every doorman, everymaid, and every maintenance man. Someone will have seen you come in or out or passed you in the stairwell. We’ll get you, Angel.”
    “The cops will never do that, Perry. They won’t listen to you. Why should they?”
    “Who said anything about the cops? I’ll do the canvass myself.”
    “And I’ll be long gone.”
    The sirens were louder now, just outside.
    Angel mussed her hair and rubbed at her eyes, looked at Perry briefly, then dropped to her knees beside her father, turned on the tears, and cried, “Daddy, Daddy,” as the front door opened and East Hampton’s Sergeant Gawain burst in, two deputies beside him, a half-dozen uniforms and a couple of medics just behind.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Gawain, taking in the scene.
    “Yeah,” said Perry.
    “You okay?” Gawain asked.
    Perry nodded.
    Gawain looked at Angel, cradling her father’s head and rocking slightly. “She okay?”
    “Angel? Oh, she’s just fine.”
    Angel looked up, her eyes locked on Perry’s, a smile behind the tears just for him.
    “This the half brother?” Gawain asked.
    “He’s not my brother,” Angel said. “He made it all up. He’s just some lunatic.”
    “She shot him,” Perry said.
    “I had to! He shot my father and probably killed my mother!”
    A medic tore open the man’s shirt, stethoscope to his chest. “There’s a pulse, weak, but it’s there.” He nodded to the EMTs who strapped an oxygen mask over the guy’s face and got him onto a gurney.
    Angel watched, that secret smile of hers gone.
    “I hope he makes it,” said Gawain.
    “It’s a shoulder wound, mostly blood loss,” said Perry. “I think he’ll be talking.”
    The medic was leaning over Norman Loki now. “He’s gone,” he said.
    Perry took the cell phone from his pocket and handed it to Gawain. “You heard most of what went down here, didn’t you?”
    “Enough,” said Gawain. “But a lot was garbled.”
    “I’ll help you ungarble it,” Perry said. “And there are computer programs that will help, too.” He looked at Angel kneeling beside the medics who were strapping her father’s body onto a stretcher. She was crying, her hands fluttering around her beautiful face, but her brows were knit as she strained to hear what Perry was saying.
    “I’d better cuff her before she runs away