Closer Than Blood by Gregg Olsen Read Free Book Online

Let’s get this thing going good.”
    Kendall moved across the wet grass. “Isn’t there a burn ban?” she said, half kidding.
    â€œYou going to arrest us?” Steven said, winking at his son.
    Cody remained mute, but the flicker in his eyes indicated he’d understood the irony of his dad’s comment.
    â€œI might have to,” she said.
    Steven poked the fire and put out his hand to push Cody back a step. “Full plate today?”
    â€œBarring a catastrophe with the committee at lunch, it won’t be a long day,” Kendall said. The reunion was a week from Saturday at the Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton.
    As far as Kendall was concerned, the next nine days couldn’t pass quickly enough.
    â€œWe’ve got it handled, babe,” Steven said, giving her a short kiss.
    â€œYou smell like smoke,” she said.
    Steven grinned. “You smell beautiful.”
    Cody set a nest of grapevines at the edge of the fire pit.
    â€œBe careful, Cody.” The boy nodded and Kendall kissed him.
    Steven patted their son on the shoulder. “He’s good.”
    Cody’s autism was fickle, cruelly so. Sometimes he’d speak plainly, even spontaneously. Not that day.
    Kendall climbed into her white SUV and started to back down the driveway, Cody and Steven looking smaller and smaller as she pulled away.
    She hadn’t mentioned to Steven what she’d read about Tori and she knew the reason why. Tori was connected to a part of her past that she’d just as soon never revisit. She knew she’d have to say something eventually. Once it broke that their old high school friend was the wife of the murder victim, Tori’s name would surely find its way to the pages of the Lighthouse , the local paper.
    She could feel her heart rate quicken and willed herself to relax. This was a stressor she didn’t need. She thought of a note on the back of a card that had come through the mail when the save-the-date and early head count cards went out six months prior. It too had bothered her. It made her a little paranoid. She hated even admitting to that kind of feeling. It was only eleven words.

    I KNOW EVERYTHING. SEE YOU THERE. IT’LL BE LIKE OLD TIMES.

    Just what did the sender mean? And to which committee member had it been directed?
    Kendall wasn’t sure if the card was a threat or just someone’s idea of a joke. She didn’t tell anyone—not Sheriff McCray, not Josh, not even Steven—that she’d taken the card to the crime lab and processed it herself. No fingerprints but her own. No postmark. No identifier whatsoever. Later, she pored through the stack of cards to see if it had come in an envelope that she’d misplaced somehow, but she came up empty handed.
    She wondered how that card got to her if it hadn’t been mailed. She also wondered if it was related to the Kinko’s e-mail.

    THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

    Earlier that same morning, a very tired Lainie O’Neal stared at the void of her computer screen. French roast coffee perfumed the confines of her home office, the second bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment she’d rented for five years on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. She watched her Siamese fighting fish, Rusty, blow bubbles on the surface of the brandy snifter that was his home. It was just before 7:00 A.M., and she had time to polish a chapter of a book that she’d been working on—with renewed vigor—since the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” She’d dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a “content provider” for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer