Kansas City Cover-Up by Julie Miller Read Free Book Online

“It’s more important than ever that you don’t draw any attention to yourself. Go home to your family. Clean yourself up. Get back to your work and leave everything to me. I’ve got it all under control—”
    “
I
want to be in control.” Angry tears dotted his cheeks as the young man pounded his fist on top of the desk. “I’m not in control of my own life, anymore.”
    The host inhaled a deep breath and exhaled the irritation this visitor was causing. “That will come in time. I promise you. We can’t solve all your problems in one day.”
    “I’m trying to do the right thing.”
    “I know. But until you learn to make the best choices for yourself, you need to listen to me. Do what I tell you and everything will be fine. Do you understand that?”
    The young man’s head jerked with a nod.
    “Good.”
    * * *
    O LIVIA TILTED HER EYES to the rearview mirror and drummed her fingers on the Explorer’s steering wheel. It was still there.
    The low-slung muscle car with the tinted windows sat two vehicles behind her, waiting at the same stoplight. Normally, she would have dismissed several sightings of the same car on the way to work as a comrade in arms, battling rush-hour traffic en route to his or her job in downtown Kansas City.
    But she didn’t like not being able to get some description of the driver—gender, age, ethnicity. She didn’t like having her vision so obscured by traffic that she couldn’t get a license plate number. She especially didn’t like spotting the same car cruising past her father’s house long before she’d pulled onto the Interstate to merge with the thousands of other cars swarming into the city this morning. And seeing the same black car pull off on the same exit to enter the heart of downtown raised every hackle at the nape of her neck.
    Someone was following her.
    At least, that’s what every instinct that had been on hyperalert since yesterday afternoon was trying to tell her.
    Yesterday, she’d made a mental note of the silver SUV Gabe Knight drove when she dropped him off. Although her goodbye and
Don’t call me, I’ll call you
had been firm and to the point, she wouldn’t put it past him to tail her, in hopes of finding out information on his fiancée’s murder. But why switch vehicles? She knew he had an obsessive interest in the case. But other than not sharing the connection he had to her father, he’d seemed like a straightforward kind of guy. This had to be something else, right?
    But she’d been wrong about Ron Kober’s murder being a wasted errand for her and Jim. She’d been wrong about the man in the stairwell intending no harm. She might even have been wrong about Gabriel Knight being the coldhearted villain the rest of the department believed him to be.
    Maybe yesterday hadn’t been a fluke, and her people-reading radar was on the fritz. She could be wrong about Mr. Muscle Car back there, too. But just to test a theory...
    As soon as the light changed, Olivia nosed her Explorer into the turn lane and made a sharp left without signaling. She raised an apologetic hand at the honks of protest and cruised on through the intersection. Good. The driver in the black car wasn’t laying on the horn or making any sudden moves to turn the corner after her.
    Huffing out the breath she must have been holding, Olivia relaxed her grip around the steering wheel and merged into traffic to double back to her original route. So maybe the car wasn’t following her. If it showed up again between here and the KCPD parking garage, she could always stick the siren on her roof and swing around to make a traffic stop and get her questions answered. But for now, she could drop her guard.
    Olivia drove the last six blocks without another sighting of the black car. Not Gabe Knight. Not a threat. Her suspicion eased enough to chalk up the notion she was being followed to coincidence. Either a car dealer had made a fortune selling more than one customized car, or the driver was