shared it with the cat. The cat had died for no apparent reason three months after Rebecca. The vet had shrugged and implied it might have been due to a broken heart.
He envied the cat; its mourning had ended.
"And in city news, violence connected with orga?nized crime hit a new high last night with death tolls up into double digits."
Fork full of scrambled eggs halfway to his mouth, Celluci stared at the radio.
"Eleven men, including crime boss David Eng, were found dead in a Richmond floor-covering warehouse when employees of the warehouse arrived for work this morning. Some had been shot, but some appeared to have been savaged by an animal. As a number of the men are known to belong to the organization run by Adan Dyshino, police are assuming that negotia?tions of some sort erupted into violence. They are not yet certain that the death of Sebastien Carl in East Vancouver is connected and are now attempting to find his wife. Anyone with information about these or other crimes is invited to contact Crime Stoppers or your local police."
"Yeah. Right." He snorted and continued eating. No one ever came forward with information about gang violence; the thing about organized crime was that it was organized. Witnesses were efficiently dealt with.
So Vicki was safe.
And then it hit him. Eleven men. Maybe twelve.
Maybe more; unreported, made to look like accidents or like natural causes.
All at once, he wasn't hungry. He stared down at the eggs, searching for answers in the pattern the salsa made against the yellow. Eleven men. Maybe twelve. All members of a criminal organization and, the odds were good, probably all killers. All men the world was a lot better off without.
But still...
The law had to apply to everyone, or it applied to no one. Whoever killed these men, no matter how much removing them might have improved things, had broken the law. Probably several laws. If it was Vicki ...
"You're jumping to conclusions," he snarled, shov?ing his chair away from the table. "Henry was out there, too. It wasn't necessarily Vicki."
If it was Henry, did that make it any better?
It didn't have to be either of them. "Two gangs together in an enclosed space, that sort of stuff hap?pens. Probably had dogs with them." Opening and closing the kitchen cupboards, trying not to slam them lest he smash the etched glass set into the doors, he found three complete sets of dishes but no garbage bags. Vague memories of a laundry room sent him down the hall. It was behind the second door he opened and had obviously been used that morning.
The washing machine was a European model. It loaded from the front like some of the big commercial machines and was supposed to use half the water. They were still incredibly expensive in North America and Celluci, who'd had to listen to one of his aunts extolling their virtues, wondered what happened in five years when the seal went and they flooded the laundry room. Vicki's clothes-jeans, shirt, sweater, underwear, sock, high tops; everything she'd worn the night before-were lying in a damp heap, cradled in the bottom curve.
Eleven men. Maybe twelve.
Maybe mud. Maybe a hundred other things.
He put the clothes in the dryer, grabbed a garbage bag from the utility closet in the corner and was on his way back to the kitchen when he heard a quiet tap at the apartment door.
The woman standing in the hall looked as if she were about to cry. "I'm sorry," she declared, waving one hand in the general direction of the open door as she dug in her purse for a tissue with the other. "It's just coming here has brought it all back."
"Mrs. Munro?" Celluci hazarded.
Mrs. Munro blew her nose and nodded. "That's right. I'm sorry to be such a watering pot, but it just sort of hit me looking in the door like this, that Miss Evans is really gone."
Celluci knew he should move out of the way. That there wasn't any good reason now for her not to come in. I've got a vampire asleep in here, so could you come back after sunset just didn't cut it.
"I've just come by for a few things I forgot to take with me the night Miss Evans passed on." She looked up at him expectantly. "I won't take long, my daugh?ter's waiting in the car."
There didn't seem to be anything else he could do so he stepped aside.
"So you're a friend of Mr. Fitzroy's." Sighing