Dead Aim by Thomas Perry Page A

don’t mind if I give the Santa Barbara police your phone number and address. They’ll need to talk to you, and there will have to be arrangements made.”
    Sarah looked at the floor. “I know. I’ll call them right away. I’ll have her brought back here so she can be buried near my parents.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself. Mallon knew she was going tobe talking to herself often in the next few days, reminding herself of things that needed to be done, people who needed to be called. Death wasn’t just an event that happened by itself. It was a lot of work.
    Lydia stood and said, “We’ll be back in California tomorrow. If there’s anything we can do to help, here’s my business card. It has my number on it.” Sarah accepted it, but placed it on a bookshelf without looking at it.
    She said, “Thank you. And, Mr. Mallon, I thank you for trying so hard to help my sister. I don’t think acts of kindness are wasted or lost. You made my sister’s last memory of people warmer and brighter.”
    All the time she was speaking, they were advancing on the door, and then they were outside. Mallon looked for a last time at the yellow house. It was outdated now, the cheerful paint job and the neat interior all part of a phase of Sarah Carlson’s life that had stopped existing at the moment when he and Lydia had stepped onto her porch.
    He stood on her front walk, gripped by the impulse to go back up the steps and tell her the rest of the story. He asked himself what he was longing for. Could he possibly want sympathy from her for the sense of loss that he felt? No, it was something else. He had momentarily imagined that telling Sarah something so private—so damning, now that Catherine had proved that her consent could not have been the free choice of a person in control of her will—would make Sarah reciprocate and tell him things that were equally private: intimate details and secrets that would make him finally understand what Catherine had been thinking. He recognized that the urge was insane. If he told Sarah that he’d had sex with her sister a couple of hours before she’d killed herself, she could only loathe him. He had already heard everything she would ever tell him.
    “Bobby?” Lydia’s voice startled him. “Forget something?”
    “No,” he said, turning toward the car, and took a step. “Just for a minute, I thought I had.”
    “You’re right,” Lydia said softly. “We told her enough.”

CHAPTER 8

    A s Mallon drove the Town Car around the corner and pulled over on the next block, Lydia took out her cell phone and dialed a long-distance number. “Detective Fowler, please.” She turned to Mallon. “You know we’ve got to do it.”
    Mallon nodded, then listened with undisguised curiosity.
    “This is Lydia Marks. Robert Mallon and I are in Pittsburgh.” She repeated, “Pittsburgh. We’ve managed to locate the sister of Catherine Broward. Yeah, the one who killed herself. The sister’s name is Sarah Carlson and she’ll be calling you shortly. Want her number and address anyway?” She recited them, spelling the street name. “You’re welcome. Nothing you haven’t heard before. There was a boyfriend, he died, and she never got over it. The only odd thing was that he got murdered.” She rolled her eyes at Mallon. “Mark Romano. It was in L.A., about a year ago.” She paused for only a second. “I doubt it, but I’m going to look more closely when I get back. Of course I’ll let you know anything I find.” There was another pause. “Oh? That’s quick. I’d better let you take her call.”
    She avoided Mallon’s eyes as she put the telephone away. “There,” she said. “Now he’s got nothing to bitch about, and if he finds outsomething we don’t know, he might very well save us from wasting our time trying to get it too. In any case, he hasn’t got the unpleasant suspicion that I’m a problem.”
    Mallon gave a single nod and a perfunctory half smile of