02 Madoc by Paige Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

the way things were going, I could end up in jail for the rest of my life.”
    Again, she waited for the Marshal to say something, but instead, he just stared up at the ceiling.
    “Even with my family urging me to go, it wasn’t an easy decision to go on the run,” she continued. “I’ve always been really close with my family, both my parents and my younger sister. I was afraid of what becoming a fugitive would do to them. I didn’t want them hounded by the cops or the media. But what could I do? I didn’t want to go to jail for something I didn’t do. I know I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but my sister helped me get away. I’ve been on the run ever since.”
    Beside her, Madoc seemed to be considering her words. “The warrant said you were wanted for suspected murder, which means that no body was found,” he said. “What’s that about?”
    Shayna was a little surprised that the Marshal didn’t already know the story, especially since it had been all over the news. But she imagined that after awhile, all the crimes he read about just blurred together. She was just happy that he was actually finally willing to listen to her side of it.
    “It’ll probably be easier if I start at the beginning,” she said. “I worked at a big manufacturing company back in Denver. For the past several years, I worked directly for the Chief Financial Officer, Evan Mercer. My job was to oversee the employee retirement funds,” she explained. “We have a lot of employees and the funds are worth a lot of money. A couple of weeks before everything happened, some computer programs I had running brought up some red flags indicating some irregularities in the funds. It was nothing drastic, but more money than usual was going out, and though I checked and double-checked, I couldn’t figure out where it was going.”
    She reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “I started to get a really funny feeling and decided I’d better mention it to Evan,” she continued. “But that night, he called me at home and asked me to meet him at the office.
    He said he needed to talk to me about something important, and that it couldn’t wait until morning. When I asked what he wanted to talk to me about, he said he didn’t want to discuss it over the phone.”
    “So, what did he want to talk to you about?” the Marshal prompted.
    “I don’t know,” Shayna replied. “When I got to the office, he wasn’t there. I thought that maybe he was just late, so I waited for awhile, but he never showed, so I finally left and went home. I figured I’d talk to him the next morning, but he didn’t come in to work.” She paused. “Later that day, the police came by with a warrant to seize all of our records. Apparently, they’d received an anonymous tip that half-a-million dollars had been stolen from the retirement fund. Before I even knew what was going on, they came back to arrest me for embezzlement.”
    Shayna swallowed hard at the memory of how humiliating it had been to be handcuffed and led out of her office while her co-workers had watched. “I thought it was all just a big mistake, but then the police started showing me all the evidence they had against me,” she said. “They had numbers for Cayman bank accounts that I never opened, reservations for a plane flight out of the country that I never made, and emails to my boss that I never sent discussing the best way to go about moving the money I had supposedly stolen.”
    She sighed. “I thought that Evan would show up and straighten everything out, but then the nightmare got even worse. My lawyer told me that with the amount of evidence the cops had against me, they would have no problem making the embezzlement charges stick. But the cops wanted me for more than that. They started trying to get me to confess to killing Evan. It was their theory that we had embezzled the money together, but that I had gotten greedy and decided to kill him so I could have it all for