Family Murders: A Thriller by Henry Carver Read Free Book Online

bark and all that."
    "What was missing?"
    "A locket," Cooper said.
    "My locket."
    "Yes."
    Angela thought about it. She sat on the edge of the bed, cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear, picked Julie up and sat her on her lap.
    "But it's not my locket, Frank. Something like that, the ownership speaks for itself. Can't you figure out who's in those pictures inside?"
    "We know who they are. They're brother and sister. The boy is the one who went on trial."
    "And the girl?"
    Cooper hesitated. "The girl?"
    "The little girl, what about her?"
    "It's a terrible thing, Angela. The little girl is the one who was murdered."

Thursday, October 11th, 1990

7
    Thursday, downtown in the big city. It was the lazy late afternoon time when the streets are deserted—after all the lunch-goers have finished up, but before office workers start ducking out early trying to beat the rush hour. For about ninety minutes, the world seems abandoned.
    Angela paused at the base of the worn stone steps, pulled her coat closer around her neck, and turned in a full three hundred and sixty degree circle. She did it slowly, reaching out not only with her eyes but with her instincts, probing each alleyway, searching and hunting for the barest hint of pink.
    Nothing. No one. There was no place to hide, no crowd to blend into. Angela decided she was, at least for the moment, alone. Being alone meant being safe. She turned and ascended the steps to the library.
    Inside it was warm. She wandered left, then right, looking for the right desk and the right librarian, mentally checking all her steps along the way.
    Julie had been invited to a sleepover with a new friend. It was good news, and unexpected. As bubbly as she was in the Gray house, outside of it Julie was quiet, even shy. She didn't make friends easily, so a new friend was always welcome. More importantly, she had never been to this friends house before—it wasn't part of any routine. Angela had driven Julie over herself, and had seen almost no other cars on the trip. The ones she did see were all headed in the other direction.
    All in all, she was fairly certain that, as of this moment, no one could know exactly where Julie was. The difficulty had come in persuading herself to accept a simple truth that she'd internalized long ago as a very young and very scared little girl: sometimes kids are safer far, far away from their parents.
    With Julie safe, she'd headed for the nearest big city. It only took a few hours of research for her to realize that local journalism wasn't reliable. Even worse, it wasn't archived. At their local library, ten year old copies of the local paper existed only in hard copy, box after box of them stored in a damp basement. The boxes were only loosely chronological, stacked in order until space ran out, and then stacked again somewhere else. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no index or cross-referencing, and no way to find articles by subject or byline.
    She had quickly given up. Seeing the look of defeat on Angela's face as she came out of the basement, the local librarian had offered a piece of advice and an explanation involving the press wire and the idea that the same stories are printed in bigger papers, papers with a more progressive attitude toward archiving yesterday's news.
    All of which had lead her here, to the nearest city anyone would venture to call big. The story she was looking for had itself been big on a local level; it hadn't been big enough to get any kind of national coverage, but it had been big enough to draw in reporters on assignment from the surrounding area. Angela was sure she would find what she was looking for. She could feel it.
    Detective Cooper had ended their phone call soon after realizing he had said too much. Angela thought he really did care about her, that he was only looking our for her best interests. He thought the idea of a little girl, so close to Julie's age, murdered, would terrify her.
    And he was right—she was