Without Warning by David Rosenfelt

thought nothing about buying her nice gifts. It was seductive, and she enjoyed and appreciated the finer things.
    She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she began to tell him things, things about the department. She was a source, she eventually came to realize, and that continued after they split up. She would give him tips about department business, nothing that she believed could cause any damage, and he would use that information to get stories for the paper.
    He was good at it, doing it in such a way that it could never get back to her. But with their romantic relationship long over, there was no pretense anymore. She had become a paid source, and she came to rely on that money. It let her live just a little more nicely than she otherwise would have been able to, and she didn’t want to give that up.
    And she didn’t. It had been almost three years, during which she and Matt had almost no public contact. It wasn’t likely that anyone in town even remembered that they had once dated. Wilton was a small town, so the information she gave him was never earth-shattering, and his stories that followed did not attract significant attention.
    But the capsule story was different, and Matt called to make that clear to her. It frightened her, and she was stunned when the attempt was made on his life. She felt she owed him whatever information she could provide, not just because he was paying her, but because it might help him protect himself.
    Pretty much everything the department handled came through her at one stage or another, and though she would never tell him anything that she felt might damage the department, there was plenty that she could share.
    So she knew the call from Matt was coming, and she had made her judgments about what she would tell him, and what she wouldn’t. Her goal would be to say only what could be learned through his own investigation, even if he hadn’t yet done so.
    “Hello, Mary.”
    “Matt…”
    “We need to talk.”
    “When?”
    “Now would be a good time.”
    So they talked. Or rather, Mary talked, and Matt listened.

 
     
    “Police Investigating Charlie Price Death in Connection to Capsule Murders.” That was the headline to Matt’s story the next morning, and my guess is that every citizen of Wilton had read it by eight o’clock. I know I had.
    The story went on to relate the facts about Charlie’s history, my arresting him for murder, and the dropping of the charges. It also said that Charlie had filed suit against me for breaking his ribs, but that the evidence wasn’t there to substantiate his claims. Then it accurately reported that he was a victim in the 23rd Street Fire, which connected him to the capsule killings.
    The fact that Charlie Price was therefore thrust into the consciousness of the public, at least as it related to the current investigation, was not in itself damaging. Price was not a focal point for us, at least not yet, and I didn’t see how making his connection public caused any harm. It might even have been helpful, in the unlikely event it sparked any tips.
    But I certainly found it annoying, because of what it might portend. If Matt, or any other media person, had a way of knowing what we were doing inside the investigation, then in the future something important could be compromised.
    It was hard to know where the leak was. I had a reasonable trust in every member of our small department. That’s not to say that I was certain they were above sharing information with Matt or someone else, it’s just that there were no obvious suspects in my mind.
    And it wasn’t even a certainty that the information had leaked from within. Tony Brus, or members of his department, could have been the culprit. I doubted it, but it was certainly possible.
    There was also a chance that Matt was just doing good work. It was public knowledge who was killed in that fire, and Matt could have gone back over the media stories at the time, and noticed Price’s name. Maybe he