Identity Crisis by Eliza Daly Read Free Book Online Page A

tan Honda left idle while her partner vacationed. Olivia also shut off her cell phone, so Mike and Ethan couldn’t track her down via the built-in GPS.
    Even if this guy was lurking in the shadows, people were everywhere, getting kids off to school and heading to work. Doubtful he’d try anything stupid. She started in the master bedroom. The contents of the closet and dresser drawers lay scattered across the floor. Several paintings were off the wall, their corners sliced. A photo of her and her dad at the Nutcracker ballet when she was ten sat on the dresser. She brushed a gentle finger over the frayed spine of her dad’s Bible. Like the lake painting, he’d had it as long as she could remember.
    She opened the Bible, her nail catching on an inside corner where the cover had come unglued. She peeled back the cover to find an airline e-ticket confirmation in their names to Madison, Wisconsin, dated five years ago over Christmas. A lump lodged in her throat.
    Her dad had planned to take her back to meet her family.
    Why had he changed his mind?
    She ran a nail over the unglued inside cover of the Bible. Had the intruder also found the itinerary? That meant if he hadn’t known that they had ties to Wisconsin, he did now. It gave him a starting place, if he even needed one. Somehow, she was still convinced he knew all about Five Lakes.
    She slipped the Bible and airline confirmation into her briefcase, glancing over at the bed where her dad had died. The covers had been stripped off and the mattress mutilated, stuffing everywhere. The red handmade quilt lay in a pile on the floor. He’d had it as long as she could remember. Had that been in his family also? Maybe his mother had made it. She picked up the quilt and something brushed against her arm. She scanned the quilt, spotting a syringe, its needle stuck under the material.
    Why would her dad have had a syringe? He wasn’t diabetic, and she guaranteed he didn’t do drugs.
That
she knew for sure.
    She walked into the connecting bathroom to peruse the medicine cabinet. Scanning the contents, nothing jumped out at her. No medication in the cupboards either. Since some medications were kept refrigerated, she went down to the kitchen and searched the fridge, zoning in on a plastic container at the back. It looked too large to hold leftovers for one person. She opened it to discover a box reading
Revonox
. She opened the box to find several syringes filled with a clear liquid. According to the instruction booklet, the drug was for treating multiple sclerosis.
    She stared in confused disbelief at the box.
    Her dad had suffered from multiple sclerosis?
    Guess he
had
kept more than his past from her.
    • • •
    “You’re in some serious shit, Eduardo.” Ethan stared into the dark eyes of the punk sitting across the table from him in the interrogation room. The kid’s black hair was buzzed with GB — an abbreviation for Los Guerreros de la Bahia, the Spanish translation for the Bay Warriors — shaved into the back of his head. Gang tats covered his scrawny arms. Unlike Javier, Eduardo had undoubtedly joined his cousin’s gang to keep from getting the shit kicked out of him on a daily basis. His smart mouth was the biggest part of his body.
    “Those bogus charges ain’t gonna stick. I ain’t guilty.” Eduardo rocked back in his chair, looking overly confident.
    Ethan wanted to leap across the table and smack some sense into the kid, who was just two years older than Josh Sutter. He could see Josh getting involved with a gang to have a sense of belonging. He hoped like hell this wasn’t Josh sitting across from him in six months.
    “We have two witnesses. Besides seeing your face, they saw your arm sticking out the car window. Your gang’s jaguar and snake tats are pretty distinct. With your track record, you’re going down this time.”
    A flicker of panic flashed in Eduardo’s eyes before his cocky expression returned. “My lawyer got me off on that other