A Bookmarked Death by Judi Culbertson Read Free Book Online Page A

coincidence.”
    “You must have been devastated. I would have wanted to kill them.”
    Did she think that would make me confess? “What I wanted was to see them punished. Disgraced, and sent to jail. It was a little complicated because it happened in England and American authorities didn’t want to jump in. But no, I didn’t want to see them dead. I wanted them to pay .” I sighed. “The thing was, Elisa didn’t agree.”
    “She’s the one in Boston?” Agent Olson rejoined the conversation.
    How did he know anything about her? “Yes. We’re going up for her graduation Friday.”
    Detective Carew shifted on the striped couch, pushed up a sleeve, then looked at her watch. “Let’s go back to Saturday night: Was your husband here with you? Did he leave the house at all?”
    The uneasiness in my stomach, which I had assumed to be hunger, flared into four-alarm flames. Why were they so focused on Colin? My first instinct was to lie, to assure them we had been here together all night. After what we had been through at the hands of the Crosleys, we deserved a pass. Except that I couldn’t lie about that. Oh, sometimes I pretended to be someone other than I was in the interest of getting at the truth. But this was different.
    “Colin has his own place,” I said. “His own condo where he lives most of the time. I don’t know where he was Saturday night.”
    They jumped to attention like recruits faced with their commanding officer. “He doesn’t live here?” Agent Olson demanded. “This is the address the university gave us.”
    “He’s been subletting a condo for the past year.”
    “So who was here with you Saturday night?” Detective Carew broke in.
    “Just me. But I was home all night. I wasn’t out in the Hamptons setting fires, if that’s what you’re asking. I told you, I wanted to see them arrested and made to pay. I wanted people to know that no matter how much money you have, you can’t go around stealing other people’s children!”
    I stopped, aware that I was losing control.
    “Did your husband feel like killing the Crosleys when he found out?” Detective Carew was like a search dog who never lost focus. “Did he ever threaten Ethan Crosley?”
    That was a dangerous question. I thought back to the night I told Colin that it had been Ethan and Sheila who took Caitlin. I had come back from Boston after confronting Sheila and met him in a Port Lewis seafood bar, the Whaler’s Arms. At first he had refused to consider that someone who had been a close friend could have stolen his child. I’d seen his face gradually harden into stone as he realized it was true.
    “What should we do?” I’d asked.
    “You mean besides tracking him down and killing him?”
    I supposed you could call that a threat. But it had been said in the heat of angry disbelief, and to me, not Ethan. So I told them, “No. He wants to move past it too. I don’t know why you’re connecting us with the fire.”
    “Your daughter corroborated your kidnapping story to the Boston police.” Carew’s glance flickered to Olson, who seemed surprised that she had not shared this with him. “She showed them a letter Dr. Crosley had sent her, mailed express mail Saturday, that she got this morning. He sent her a check for a graduation present. He also warned her in case anything happened to him.” She flipped back several pages in her small notebook, then read aloud, “ ‘If anything happens to me, blame Colin Fitzhugh.’ ”
    I nearly jerked out of the chair. “What? He said that? He wrote that to Elisa? That’s crazy!” If she had pulled out her service revolver and pointed it, I could not have been more shocked. “How could he even know that something was going to happen to him?”
    “He could if he had had threats before.”
    “But anyone could have threatened him; he had enemies all over the world. He antagonized a lot of people in his profession, archeology, and he stole artifacts from other countries.”