Left To Die by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

gambling woman by nature, Detective Regan Pescoli wasn’t ready to bet on it.
    Not yet.
     
    Jillian parked in her assigned spot under the carport, then made a mad dash to the front porch as raindrops assailed her from a nearly dark sky. Most of the row houses were decorated, their sparkling, colored lights tiny bright beacons in the gray drizzle that was Seattle in winter. Battling with her small umbrella at the curb where the bevy of mailboxes for her group of units was located, Jillian unlocked her box and found a large manila envelope wedged in, her name and address written in black marker and block letters that began to run in the rain.
    “Great,” she muttered, a gust of wind catching in her umbrella and turning it inside out as thick raindrops pelted her face. Ducking her head and sidestepping puddles, she dashed past the front lawns of two other row houses, then hurried up her front walk. The rain, blowing sideways off Lake Washington, pummeled her as she finally unlocked her front door and scurried inside. “Honey, I’m home,” she called as she entered, pulling the door shut behind her. It was her private joke, but every once in a while, as if on cue, Marilyn would come trotting from the kitchen at the back of the house, meow and greet her expectantly. Today, she wasn’t lucky, and after tossing her keys and purse on the side table, she set about opening the mail, starting with the envelope with the postmark of Missoula, Montana.
    Where Mason, her ex-husband, lived.
    So what was this? Some post-divorce court order?
    God, Mason could be such a bastard.
    But, then, why no return address? No printer-generated label from his law firm?
    Water from the hem of her coat dripping onto the hardwood floor, she tore the wet packet open without the aid of a letter opener. Several grainy photographs, the kind that looked as if they’d been taken by an amateur photographer using a cell phone and printed off a computer, slid onto the side table.
    Three images.
    All of the same man.
    All fuzzy and a little out of focus, as if the subject were moving, walking away, his head turned away.
    Jillian’s heart nearly stopped beating.
    Oh God, it couldn’t be!
    She switched on the lamp. Golden light poured over the pictures that she flattened so that they lay side by side, as if they were stills from a movie.
    The man was profiled in the first two shots but in the third shot, he looked back over his shoulder and faced the lens so that she could make out his features beneath his beard and aviator shades.
    “Aaron?” she said aloud, and her first husband’s name seemed to reverberate off the walls. “Dear God, Aaron?”
    Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She’d loved this man. Loved him. Lived with him. Married him. Lost him. And grieved for him. Oh Lord, how she’d grieved for him.
    And now he was alive ?
    She let out a slow breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The envelope, the one from which the pictures had tumbled, was clenched hard in her left hand.
    He was alive?
    Aaron Caruso, her college sweetheart, the man she’d married so naively, hadn’t died in a forest in Suriname? Had lied to her? Had wanted her to think him dead? Had heartlessly left her while absconding with investors’ funds? Hadn’t cared that she would be a suspect, too? That the police would believe she knew what had happened to him? Would he have been so cruel?
    Her knees threatened to give way and she braced herself against the table. No. This man in the hastily snapped photo wasn’t Aaron, just someone who looked like him. The beard hid his jaw. Aaron’s had been square and strong. And the sunglasses disguised the color and shape of his eyes. Aaron’s had been a deep brown and wide-set, his nose broken from an old basketball injury…She studied the pictures again and thought she saw the slight bump on his nose.
    Of course it had been over ten years since she’d seen her first husband. He, if he had lived, would have