Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m not even Ms Spelling.’ Hope drew a long breath. ‘Whoever that is. I’m … Uh.’
    Steve waited.
    ‘Look, would you like to come aboard?’ Hope gestured to the yacht. ‘Come on board and I’ll show you the paperwork and we can sort all this out.’
    ‘Sure thing.’ Steve smiled. He turned and stepped across the small gangway to the deck.
    Hope followed, sliding her hand into the darkness of her handbag and around the polished handle of the hammer.

CHAPTER 24
    DESPITE THE EVENING gym session, I couldn’t sleep. I desperately needed to. I called my brother and blasted him with complaints about Tox as soon as he picked up.
    ‘What actually
is
the story with this guy?’ he said. ‘How can he possibly be a cop if you’re saying he’s killed two people?’
    ‘No idea,’ I grunted. ‘People are saying he was seven years old. If I had to guess, I’d say that because of his age at the time of the crime, he’d have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, if he was charged with anything at all. Apparently it was a group of boys, not just him. So his lawyers would have said he was influenced by the group, and far too young to know what he was doing.’
    ‘But you don’t actually know any details about it?’
    ‘No, the records are sealed. I tried to have a look before I left work this afternoon.’
    Sam scoffed. ‘So it’s all just rumour, really?’
    ‘What are you getting at?’
    ‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’
    ‘If he didn’t do it, he’d have set everyone straight, right?’ I said. ‘The bosses would have set everyone straight. He must have done it.’
    We fell silent.
    ‘I’d like to think he didn’t do it,’ I admitted. ‘But when I look in his eyes, I’m not so sure.’

CHAPTER 25
    I SAT IN bed all night on the computer after speaking to Sam, clicking around, looking for Claudia Burrows. She’d recently scrubbed her social media presence clean. There were suggestions that she’d once had a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but these were empty now, the links broken. I saw a couple of pictures of her on sites that must have belonged to her friends. She was a very different girl to the one whom I’d seen washed up on the shores of the Georges River. Her hair, which had been short and dark when she died, was long and bleach-blonde, the roots dark and the ends scraggly. I learned that she sometimes went under the name Claudia Dee. Did multiple names mean multiple identities? Was it Claudia Dee who’d worn the skimpy clothes that filled most of her wardrobe, and Claudia Burrows who’d bought the more formal attire?
    I didn’t like the idea that Claudia had been pretending to be someone else, and that she’d recently told her creditors that she was coming into money. Had she been conducting a scam? If so, who was the victim? Had she been planning a robbery? I put the laptop away, discouraged by all the dead ends, and tried to sleep. Ten minutes later I had it open again, doing different searches.
    At midnight I called Chris Murray, the detective from the Surry Hills station.
    ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’
    ‘Murray,’ I said, ‘you’ve got connections in the records department, don’t you? I want you to help me out. I’m wandering aimlessly around the Internet looking for anything I can get on Tox Barnes. Maybe they changed his name after the crime? Is that why I can’t find any newspaper articles about him?’
    ‘The fact that you’re carrying on working with that monster without looking for an out is exactly the reason I won’t help you,’ he said. ‘You should be trying to get away from him, not trying to understand him. I’m hanging up, Harry.’
    ‘Murray, don’t go! I need help here, man.’
    ‘He
murdered
a woman and her kid,’ Murray said. ‘He and a bunch of other kids stabbed them to death.’
    ‘I thought they beat them to death.’
    ‘Is how they did it very important?’
    ‘I guess not. What exactly am I supposed to do, Murray?