An Act Of Murder by Linda Rosencrance Read Free Book Online Page A

room. And then she asked me if I wanted a drink. I don’t remember if I took a drink or not. And when I walked in—it was cold. Something felt wrong when I walked in that room.”
    As he stood in the room, Mike flashed back to something that had happened several hours earlier. While Mike was washing dishes at home, he picked up a sharp knife and had a weird feeling that somebody was hurt, or somebody had been stabbed with a knife, and all he wanted to do was put the knife down.
    â€œIt was just a weird feeling,” he remembered. “And then to have this happen.”
    When Mike went into the room where Kim was staying, he noticed that she was lying on her side, her back toward him, on the bed farthest away from the door. Mike walked over to Kim and she sort of got up and looked at him.
    â€œOh, thanks for coming,” she said as she started toward him.
    Mike was struck by Kimberly’s utter lack of emotion. Sure, people grieve differently and maybe she was in shock, but it didn’t seem like that was the case—she was totally unemotional.
    â€œYou would have thought, knowing how long we’d known each other, there would have been more there,” Mike said. “She didn’t even give me a hug when I hugged her, she just stood there. She was just cold. She was void of any emotion. It didn’t feel right, something was wrong. Something weird or evil.”
    Mike sat with Kim for a bit, but she didn’t say anything to him and he didn’t know what to say to her. Soon she went back and lay down on the bed and eventually fell asleep—which Mike also thought was weird. Mike then went downstairs to talk to the people from Harbourtowne to find out what was going on and whether or not Steve was alive. Mike soon learned that his best friend since junior high was dead.
    â€œSomewhere along the way someone said something about Kim saying Steve had been smoking cigars and I said that’s impossible because he doesn’t smoke,” Mike explained. “And so I started hearing these things that she was feeding to these other people. But to me it just wasn’t clicking—something wasn’t right—what she was trying to say was Steve was just not Steve and that he had been smoking cigars and he had been drinking. I said there’s just no way.”
    The more Mike heard about what Kim was saying regarding the events preceding Steve’s death, the more he knew something just wasn’t right—and the more he began to think Kim had something to do with Steve’s death. In fact, Mike had a gut feeling the moment he walked into her room that she was somehow involved with the death of his best friend.
    â€œWhen I told Elzey [that] Steve didn’t smoke cigars, he said, ‘Really?’ And I said, ‘No, he didn’t.’”
    Elzey told Mike that during the investigation of the Hrickos’ room, officers found a package of cigars, an empty bottle of champagne, and some empty beer cans. But Mike again told him that Steve just didn’t smoke. And, he said, there was no way he would have been drinking heavily that weekend.
    â€œSteve told me on the phone before they went to Harbourtowne that he wanted to do this for Kim—it would be something special to rekindle the relationship,” Mike recalled. “Steve viewed it as their first date and he wanted it to be special and he wanted to take her down there and show her a nice time, and he told me, ‘I’m a red-blooded male and Kim and I haven’t been together sexually for a long time, and it is in the back of my mind that that’s what I want to do, but it’s probably one of the farthest things from my mind as well. It’s just a chance for us to get away and kind of rekindle our relationship.’”
    Steve told Mike if sex with Kimberly happened, it happened, but that really wasn’t the reason he planned the weekend. And, according to Mike,