Jennifer, his boss at the accounting firm of Garst, Bauer & Hartmann, was out until the birth of her third child.
Carla Wong-Baldacci, his coworker, and Harry, also a coworker, were out with pregnancy complications. Not that Harry was pregnant but Carla was, and she was his wife.
So he was naturally concerned about his boss and coworkers. He was..
But that didn't mean that he, Gabriel Bergeron, would meekly do the work of four! It was outrageous and criminal! Probably? Weren't there labor laws that forbade working from dawn to dusk and on Saturdays?
There should be.
In any case, he had no time to be searching an old house in West Philly with one Steven Bradley. He had last seen young Bradley five months earlier kneeling beside Sieta Dijkstra's corpse. Bradley was a crime scene tech with the FBI. Sieta had been a Frisian art thief.
He hadn't thought that they would ever meet again, but here they were searching the house of a guy named Lars "Duke" Thorvaldsen with Bradley leading the charge from the rear.
"As they climbed the steps, the smell transitioned into a stench. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rouse themselves in an atavistic response.
He looked at Bradley. "Is that the bathroom?"
Bradley nodded; black eyes enormous.
He didn't know why he had to go first. He might be ten years older than Bradley. Or a bit more. But he was just as squeamish as the next guy. There were those who would say more squeamish; Bradley was one of them.
But he hadn't loved Duke who had been a father figure to Bradley.
He pulled out a handkerchief and covered his mouth and nose.
He turned the knob and peered around the door when the gap was six inches. The bathroom was dark; a glimmer of light was coming through one tiny, stain-glass window.
He cracked the door. A thick, gag-inducing stench of corruption and bodily effluents was oozing out and coiling around them. This never boded well.
Bradley had shut his eyes. "The switch is on the right."
"This may be a case where more light is not a plus."
But he flicked the switch anyway."
