A Deadly Game by Catherine Crier Read Free Book Online

Laci wouldn't have been able to move the bucket, yet he left it some distance from where she was cleaning? For that matter, the mops would have been very difficult for her to use in her condition, as they required someone to bend over and wring out excess water by hand before moving around the house.
    "Did you move the bucket back when you came home? How did it get outside?" "Yeah, yeah." "So you put it out there?"
    Scott mumbled his agreement. "The dog and the cat ran in. Yeah, she wasn't about to lift anything heavy."
    Brocchini shifted to another subject. "When you left, do you remember what she was wearing?" Scott described black pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt without any printing on it. She had not been wearing a jacket or shoes at the time. "No shoes?" Detective Brocchini asked.
    "Uh-huh." Later, Scott said that she usually wore white tennis shoes on her walks with the dog. As for her jacket, he commented, "She usually steals my stuff." "She uses your stuff?"
    "Yeah, because you know. . . . Instead of maternity stuff, so I don't really know."
    "You don't know?" Brocchini pressed.
    "She could have had hers or mine or nothing, I don't know," Scott continued. Brocchini never asked if these items were missing; he later learned that Scott hadn't bothered to check.
    Detective Brocchini touched upon several more topics before turning to Scott's fishing trip. "Okay, then you hooked your boat up?"
    Scott muttered in the affirmative.
    "About what time did you leave Modesto?"
    "Ah, gosh, I don't know. Extrapolate what time I got the-you know, noon, is that right?"
    "Yeah ... no, one."
    "Which one is it, then?" Scott demanded, referring to the marina receipt he had provided earlier.
    "Shit, I don't know," Detective Brocchini admitted. "Tuesday, time twelve fifty-four on December twenty-fourth. Okay, so you got there at one o'clock."
    "I got there at one?" Scott repeated. "Ah, that should take at least an hour and a half."
    "Yeah, okay, it would be eleven-thirty or about," Brocchini calculated.
    "Probably longer than that 'cause you can't go over fifty-five with that trailer," Scott explained.
    "Did you drive straight there?"
    "I did."
    "You stop for lunch?" Detective Brocchini asked.
    "No."
    "Did you buy bait?"
    "Nope, I'm not a bait fisherman," Scott declared.
    "You didn't buy no lunch, didn't eat nothing?" the investigator persisted.
    "Nothin'," Scott insisted. "I was damn hungry with that pizza when I got home."
    Having established that Scott had arrived at the marina at about five minutes to one, Brocchini asked how long he had stayed on the water.
    Scott could only estimate. "About an hour and a half."
    Did he take a chart of the area with him? Scott said no.
    "What, you just winged it?" Brocchini asked.
    Scott nodded.
    "Did you go very far?"
    "No-I mean, probably a couple miles. I went north, found a, like, a little island kinda deal there."
    "Uh-huh," the detective nodded.
    "An island that had a bunch of trash on it. I remember a big sign that said NO LANDING. Looked like some broken piers around it. I just assumed it would be a decent, you know, shallow area."
    "Did you troll?"
    "Little bit. I mean a lot of, lot of the reason I went was just to get that boat in the water to see, you know." Scott had told the police earlier that he was fishing for sturgeon, but they would soon learn that his experience with sturgeon fishing was limited at best. If that was truly what he'd been doing, he'd chosen the wrong season and the wrong equipment. Furthermore, it was actually illegal to troll for that fish.
    Scott's cell phone rang. It was Laci's younger half sister, Amy, calling to say that she and several other family members were back at his house.
    "Amy?" Brocchini inquired.
    "Yeah," Scott replied without elaboration.
    "Is it Laci's sister?"
    "Uh-huh. Different mothers, same father," he said dryly.
    Brocchini was struck that Scott did not ask his sister-in-law a single question about the search for his wife. Reading the