Blood Wine (35 page)

“Good to see you.” He nodded.

“Yeah, Detective Morgan. And Detective Quin? You two see anything funny going on up here?” He looked past them through the dust-laden air to the hole in the wall and the marble slab lying aslant on the floor.

On the street where the body of Mr. Savage lay splayed like a dropped sack of blood, a crowd had gathered behind a cordon. The body had been covered, but Ellen Ravenscroft was holding the sheet away for a better view.

She looked up when Miranda and Morgan moved around Spivak and Stritch, who were interviewing the building manager by the front door. The man's nose twitched and his beady eyes brightened when he saw them.

“How are you two?” said Ellen. “You know anything about this guy?”

“No,” said Miranda.

“Not much,” said Morgan.

“Has he got a name?”

“I don't know,” said Morgan, looking at Miranda.

“Not really,” said Miranda.

“Strange,” said Ellen, crouching down and removing a crumpled surgical glove clutched in his grip. She glanced up at Miranda's hands.

“You must have dropped this,” said Ellen. “I heard your hands got burned pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” said Miranda, taking the glove. It was flecked with blood. “We'll talk. I'll call you. I'm going home now. I've had enough for one day.”

She leaned gently against Morgan. No one but Ellen from her crouching position would have noticed.

“Come on,” said Morgan. “Talk to you soon, Ellen.”

“Please,” said the medical examiner. “I wait by the phone every night.”

They walked off down Avenue Road. When they got to Bloor Street, Isabella was to the east and the Annex to the west.

“You want a shower?” said Miranda.

“Your place or mine?”

Back in front of the condo, Ellen Ravenscroft rose to her feet above the smashed body on the pavement and let the cover drop over what was left of the face. She looked south and saw Morgan and Miranda, turning west. She glanced down again. She knew exactly who the dead man was, even if he had no name.

M
iranda
and Morgan and I are fellow travellers; I'd like to thank them for being such challenging company along the way. Writing novels is a paradoxical endeavour. It is a solitary pursuit, populated with engaging characters doing interesting things, and a sedentary pursuit, writing for hours that merge into months with a computer on my lap, living and reliving forays through Toronto streets, Muskoka haunts, and favourite destinations around the world. It is a wonderfully rewarding pursuit, where reviewers seem friends, whether hostile or enthusiastic — I have friends who are both — and where other writers and readers are co-conspirators and publishers are actual people, working on the same side of the fence. After a full career doing other things, I am grateful to have found myself here, doing this. I share my passions with my wife, Beverley Haun, who is a writer herself, and I owe her so much, words can't begin to convey. I'd like to express my deep gratitude to my daughters, Julia Zarb, Laura Moss, and Beatrice Winny, for their unstinting critical and editorial generosity. Once again, I'd like to thank my friend Jack Morgan for his indefatigable patience and keen critical intelligence.

Reluctant Dead

Murder casts a long shadow, reaching from fabled Easter Island in the South Pacific to the desolate shores of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Detective Miranda Quin of the Toronto Police Service takes time off to write a mystery in the tropics and gets trapped in a sinister plot with global implications. Her partner in homicide, David Morgan, is left alone to resolve the case of a beautiful corpse on a Toronto Island yacht and ends up precariously compromised in the mysterious North. Their stories converge when they both return to Toronto. They discover themselves trapped in a labyrinth of deadly complexity, and the only way out is together. Much more than their own survival depends on it. Islands, they learn, are an illusion. Everything connects, especially when murder is involved.

Still Waters

This psychological mystery introduces David Morgan and Miranda Quin, two maverick and culturally sophisticated Toronto police detectives. When a man is found dead in a garden pond in the wealthy heart of Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood, Morgan is led to speculations about Japanese ornamental koi fish and Quin into a chilling sequence of revelations that could destroy her. But the real mystery begins not with the deceased but with a woman who walks onto the crime scene and without emotion declares herself to be the victim's mistress. From that point on everything changes, even the past.

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Copyright © John Moss, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Project Editor: Shannon Whibbs

Editor: Allister Thompson

Design: Courtney Horner

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moss, John, 1940-, author

Blood wine / John Moss.

(A Quin and Morgan mystery ; 4)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4597-0814-3

I. Title. II. Series: Moss, John, 1940- . Quin and Morgan

mystery ; 4.

PS8576.O7863B56 2013 C813'.6 C2013-905477-4

C2013-905478-2

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Canada Book Fund
and
Livres Canada Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit
and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation
.

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