Heart of Ice by April Henry, Lis Wiehl Read Free Book Online Page A

secrets.
    “Yeah, like that made him some big man.” Elizabeth snorted.
    “I sprayed bathroom cleaner in his eyes.”
    “Good for you!” Elizabeth made a mental note. Maybe this one wasn’t as weak as she looked.
    Cassidy looked around, leaned closer. “I don’t tell too many people the details.”
    The first part of The Game was to win the other person’s trust. But you didn’t really win until he or she was willing to give you whatever you needed.
    Elizabeth continued to exchange stories with Cassidy, only hers were just that: stories. She didn’t tell her new friend about Ian. Let her think they had loneliness in common.
    As she wove her web, Elizabeth thought that Cassidy offered so many possibilities. Her clothes were expensive, so she probably had money. And she seemed to know everyone, name-dropping like crazy. My old boyfriend, the radio host. My pal, the mayor. My good friend, the federal prosecutor. My other good friend, the FBI agent .
    Elizabeth didn’t like the sound of those last two. She’d seen prosecutors and even FBI agents up close. They were the enemy. They only existed to entrap people. They didn’t understand that sometimes you were forced to do something distasteful. That it was a matter of self-defense. She filed their names away. Allison Pierce and Nicole Hedges.
    She couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow them to get in the way of her playing The Game.

CHAPTER 10

    Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse

    C olton Foley had been arrested six days ago. Two days later he had gone before a judge. Declaring Foley both a flight risk and a possible risk to the community, the judge had denied bail. Now Allison had only a little more than three weeks to give a grand jury cause to indict him for the crimes attributed to the man the media had dubbed “The Want Ad Killer.”
    The judge had signed Foley’s arrest warrant after Allison showed him several pieces of evidence. The first were surveillance videos taken in hotels where the three women had been found murdered. Each showed a dark-haired man wearing a baseball cap and a navy-blue Columbia jacket walking down a hotel corridor or through a hotel lobby. The second came from an Internet service provider that had tracked an e-mail sent to one victim back to Foley’s seven-story condo building. And the third was a videotape the FBI had secretly made, beginning at dawn the day before, of every man who entered or exited that building. The videotape showed a man with the same color hair, the same physique, the same gait, and even what appeared to be the same Columbia jacket, walking out of the building and then getting into a car registered to Foley. Of course, Colton Foley wasn’t the only five-foot-eleven guy with brown hair who lived in the condominiums. The clincher was an e-mail the victim had sent to a friend shortly before she died. In it, she had said her next client was a med student.
    But Colton Foley was no dummy, and neither was his lawyer, Michael Stone. So Allison had to move carefully and make sure the case was airtight.
    Mike Stone was Portland’s premier lawyer—if you were in deep, deep trouble. He took on clients other lawyers avoided—swim team coaches accused of child molestation, surgeons who had operated while three sheets to the wind, bank presidents caught embezzling millions.
    When you were in the fight of your life or your career, Stone was the guy you wanted sitting at the defense table. If you could pay his steep fees, you got the slickest lawyer in town, one who always had an ace—or two or three—up his hand-tailored sleeve.
    Foley’s parents certainly didn’t have the money. His mother was a cashier, his father a TriMet bus driver. But the med student did have a great-aunt who had plenty of money and who was sure that “dear Colton could never have done these terrible things.”
    Just being defended by Stone was a sure sign that you were involved in something embarrassing or off-putting. But if you were one of the