Murder List

Chapter Sixteen

It was Regan’s first full day back at work and Henry was driving her nuts trying to pamper her. He hovered like a doting grandmother. He wouldn’t even let her reach for a pencil. Fortunately, he had a full schedule and several errands to run that morning. As he was leaving, she asked him to stop by the parking garage and get her cell phone from her car. She was sure that’s where she had left it.

The second the door closed behind him, Regan turned back to her desk. She was determined to clear her e-mails as quickly as possible. She’d finished thirty without interruption, took a break to answer phone calls and eat lunch, and then went back to her task.

The next e-mail was from Henry. Whenever he received anything he thought Regan would be interested in, he forwarded it to her computer. The subject line was blank, and when she scrolled down, there was just an attachment, but no typed message from Henry. That was a bit peculiar. She assumed he’d been in a hurry.

She clicked on the paper clip icon and waited.

Henry walked into her office just as the picture appeared on the screen.

“Your phone wasn’t in your car. I looked under the seats, between them… hey, Regan, what’s the matter. Are you sick?”

“Oh, my God…” She was so repulsed by what she was looking at she couldn’t go on.

Henry ran around the desk. He stopped short when he saw the screen. In front of him was a picture of a dead man, hanging by a thick rope from a beam in a basement somewhere, his face grotesquely swollen. His eyes were wide open, and his flabby skin was a chalky gray.

“Gross,” Henry whispered. “What kind of pervert would send…”

“The e-mail came from you,” she said.

“No way would I send anything like this.”

She nodded. “Someone must have gotten hold of our private e-mail addresses.”

Henry pointed to the screen. “It’s not real,” he said. “Someone’s just playing a sick joke on you. Get rid of it,” he added as he reached for the delete key.

She pushed his hand away. “I know this man.”

“What?”

“I know him.”

“People can do a lot of things with a photo and a computer,” he said.

“So he might not really be dead?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “I think we ought to call the police and let them figure it out.”

She pointed to the screen. “He is the police.”