Chapter 75

Lunch over, we arrived back at the office with plenty of time to get ready for the news conference.

I called Mike and gave him a heads-up about the conference. “I’ll be watching,” he said. “Will you be home at a decent hour this evening?”

“I don’t know why not. See you then.”

The press conference went off with no major problems. The chief and I met briefly after it was over, and we agreed that it had gone well. I had asked my guys to meet with me briefly at four to make up for the staff meeting that we hadn’t held. They laid out their plans for handling the ongoing investigation in concert with the local FBI, and I went home satisfied that everything was under control.

Mike insisted that we go out to eat, so we decided to have lasagna at the Pizza Italian. We’d just placed our orders when Carl and Jim walked through the door, so we waved them over to our booth.

“Hi, guys,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yeah,” Jim said, “imagine that.”

“How’s business, Jim?” I said.