In Seconds by Brenda Novak Read Free Book Online Page B

jumped down them two at a time.
    “Have fun!” Vivian said, but she almost couldn’t leave it at that. Wanting to warn Vera about all the dangers of the lake—and to make sure she’d heard about Pat Stueben’s murder so that she’d be extra cautious—she nearly followed him out of the house. But that was precisely the sort of thing that upset Jake.
    Vera was careful with the kids. She’d take good care of him.
    “I can’t wait till it’s my turn.” Mia’s wistful comment broke the silence that had rolled over them like a fog in the wake of Jake’s rushed departure.
    Vivian smoothed her daughter’s hair off her forehead. “Your turn will come soon enough, sweetheart,” she promised. If they were able to stick around…
    Where would they go if they had to leave? And how would she manage another relocation? She’d been on a rent-to-own plan and had recently signed the contract to purchase her house. She no longer had the government’s help and, expecting the coming fall to be her best year yet, she’d invested what money she hadn’t put into the house in her business.
    Just when she’d stopped looking behind her…
    Eager to send her brother an email, to get some reassurance that he, Peyton and Rex were okay in upstate New York and to keep him apprised of what was happening in Montana, she quickly prepared Mia’s breakfast. Then, sitting at the desk in one corner of the livingroom, she went online—and that was when her throat closed as if someone had tightened a noose around it.
    It was Tuesday, not Sunday. This wasn’t the day she and Virgil usually communicated. But there was a message from him. And it was marked Urgent.

4
    M yles went straight to the vacation rental where the murder had taken place. Now that the initial shock was over, and the forensic techs and the coroner were gone, he wanted to examine the scene by himself. He planned to look at it from all angles to see if he could get some impression of the events that’d led up to Pat’s death. He also wanted to see if he could figure out a possible motive.
    But, early though it was, he wasn’t the first person at the cabin. An old dented Porsche 911 sat parked off the narrow road on a thick layer of pine needles. Myles recognized it as belonging to Jared Davis, the investigator he’d put in charge of this case.
    “Who’d want Pat dead?” Jared called out as soon as Myles stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape. But he was nowhere to be seen. He must’ve heard the cruiser and glanced out the open door before Myles came up the walk.
    “No one I know,” Myles replied to the disembodied voice.
    “There’s his wife.”
    “Gertie? She wouldn’t have the upper-body strength.” He found Jared in the dining room, crouching not far from the blood on the kitchen tiles, notepad in hand. Itwas cool outside, about sixty degrees, but the temperature would soon climb to eighty. Why Jared would be wearing a trench coat and wing-tipped shoes, Myles had no idea, but the investigator reminded him of the character on the TV show Columbo, which his mother used to watch. He even acted like him—a little disheveled and disorganized, often absorbed and seemingly inattentive, although he rarely missed a thing.
    “She could’ve hired someone to do it.”
    Myles was just as skeptical of that, but Jared continued before he could respond.
    “She stands to collect half a million in life insurance. I checked.”
    Because most murders were committed by family or friends, Jared had classified her as a “person of interest.” That was standard procedure, to look close to heart and home. But Myles didn’t believe Pat’s killer could be Gertie. “You’ve got to eliminate every possibility, right?”
    Jared stood but at five foot eight he barely came to Myles’s shoulder. “You don’t think it’s her.”
    Myles had made that clear yesterday. “Not a chance. I saw her after she found her husband. She was destroyed. Grief like that can’t be faked.