Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart Read Free Book Online

religious prejudice as his senior project, and he recently shot one about the Underground Railroad stops in the area. His teacher thinks he has a lot of promise.”
    Mallory sat back against the hard wood of the kitchen chair and absentmindedly began to chew on the end of the straw. These were all bright kids, focused kids, kids who had plans for their lives. Who the hell would have wanted to kill them?
    Courtney and Ryan? That didn’t work for her. These didn’t seem like kids who would have hurt anyone, least of all two of their closest friends. For what? A thousand dollars?
    While Mallory knew that people had been murdered for far less than that, she didn’t think these two college-bound kids with great futures were so shortsighted that they’d kill for one thousand dollars.
    She got up and began to pace. It had to have been a robbery. Random. Some thugs coming across the kids in the playground and robbing them, killing them because they could. But the two missing kids? What were the chances that Ryan and Courtney could have been taken by the killers and killed somewhere else? Or maybe Ryan had been killed and Courtney kept alive to be abused by the abductors? Or had one of them been the shooter, forcing the other to leave the park at gunpoint only to shoot him—or her—somewhere else? Her mind raced through every conceivable possibility, but none felt right.
    She tried, but she just couldn’t see Courtney or Ryan as the shooter.
    Then again, she’d been around long enough to know that sometimes there was just no rhyme or reason to murder. As unlikely as she thought it that either of the two missing kids could have pulled the trigger, she knew it couldn’t be ruled out. She couldn’t blame the police for taking a long hard look at these two—especially since they’d gone missing. But at the same time, it just didn’t ring true to her.
    It didn’t ring true to Joe Drabyak, either, she realized, or he wouldn’t have asked her to take the job.
    She reached for the phone to call Father Burch to let him know he’d found his investigator, but turned the phone off after dialing the first five numbers. There was one more thing she needed to do before she committed. She stuck the straw back into the can and tossed them both into the trash on her way out the door.
             
    Mallory kicked aside the remnants of the yellow crime scene tape that had marked off the entrance to the park not so very long ago. A path led from the gate to the playground equipment near a chain-link fence that trapped empty potato chip bags, candy wrappers, and soda cans tossed by passing cars or kids on their way home from school. She followed the path slowly, taking in her surroundings, very much aware that she was the only person in the park. Odd, she thought, for seven o’clock on a warm spring night. Could be that recent events accounted for the fact that the playground was deserted. She couldn’t blame the neighborhood mothers if they were keeping their children safely inside, even in the daylight. If she had kids, she probably wouldn’t permit them to play here, either, at least until the killer or killers were arrested.
    The grass along the path hadn’t seen a lawn mower in weeks, and the long green leaves spilled onto the concrete sidewalk in several places. The overhead lights had yet to switch on, and her left foot turned on a couple of chunks of mulch that had been kicked up from the playground area just ahead. As she drew closer, she was surprised to find the equipment somewhat antiquated, the slide, swing set, and old-fashioned merry-go-round all made of heavy dark gray metal and rusted in spots.
    Thirty years old if it’s a day,
she thought as she ran her hand along the rough side of the slide.
    The climbing apparatus made in the shape of a fire truck appeared to be of more recent design, and the sandbox looked newly constructed—it couldn’t be more than a month or so old. The sand looked clean and new. Plastic