Cold Truth by Mariah Stewart Page B

crusty whole-wheat roll—in the heavy white butcher’s paper Andre’s Deli used for some of its best work. He put Andre’s latest masterpiece back into the bag it had been delivered in, then opened the bottom drawer of his desk. Not that anyone in his office would walk off with someone else’s sandwich, of course.
    Yeah, right.
    “Bunch of sharks around here,” Mitch muttered, and dropped the sandwich into the open drawer, then took a long drink from the bottle of water that sat open on his desk before setting out for the elevator.
     
    “He’s expecting you. Try not to let him go on for more than eight to ten minutes. He has a meeting with the director at noon,” Eileen Gibson, longtime secretary to John Mancini, said without looking up from her computer when Mitch entered her office. “The coffee’s fresh. I just made it.”
    “Thanks, Eileen.” Biting back the urge to refer to her by the name the field agents called her behind her back—the Little General—Mitch paused long enough to pour a cup. He ignored what he knew coffee would do to his near-empty stomach.
    He rapped his knuckles on the inner door, then let himself in.
    “Be right with you. Have a seat.” With one hand, John motioned vaguely in the direction of the chairs that stood on the opposite side of the desk from where he sat, and with the other, he finished scribbling whatever note he’d been in the midst of making.
    Mitch folded his long legs as he sat on the chair closest to the window and sipped at his coffee.
    “Nice job you did, wrapping up the Kingsley case, Mitch.”
    “Thanks. I had a lot of help on that one.”
    “True. Everyone on that team is to be commended. And will be commended, officially. I’ll be seeing to that in about forty minutes. But I do believe it was your investigative—and computer—skills that put the pieces together. Very impressive.”
    “Thanks, John.”
    “Actually, you did such a good job, and I’m so impressed, I’m going to ask you to look into something else for me.” John Mancini leaned back in his chair. With his shirtsleeves rolled up and his glasses hanging from his shirt pocket, no one would suspect him to be the head of a special investigative unit that operated within the FBI. “You know who Joshua Landry was?”
    “Sure. He’s that true crime writer who was killed last year by one of the three murderers who had hooked up in Pennsylvania and switched hit lists. Sort of a
Strangers on a Train
meets Ted Bundy and friends, if I recall.”
    John nodded. “Close enough. The three met by accident in a holding room in the courthouse and had a little too much unsupervised time alone. They seemed to have made some type of deal to kill for one another—each would knock off three people who had at some point in time pissed off one of the others. None of them ever admitted to it, but it was pretty apparent that an agreement had been reached among them. Anyway, Landry crossed paths with one of them some years ago and had apparently made one hell of an impression. Enough so that he was gunned down in his barn one morning last fall. Shame, really. He was not only a good writer, but a smart investigator. He’d have made a hell of an agent, I always thought.”
    Mitch sat quietly, waiting to find out what all this had to do with him.
    “One of the things that Landry did that set him apart from other writers in the genre was he’d look into open cases, usually older ones, cold ones. If he solved them, he’d write a book about it. More than once, he’d turned over information or evidence to us or to the local law enforcement agency, which helped lead to an arrest and conviction. He was a pretty sharp guy.”
    “Sounds like.” Mitch was still wondering.
    “I was there the day he was murdered. Spent some time with his daughter—did I mention he had a daughter?” John looked across the desk.
    “No, but I know you’re working up to it.”
    John laughed. “We’ve worked together too long, Mitch.