Missing Mark by Julie Kramer Read Free Book Online Page A

killers long ago— Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Bud Weiser.
    Mark didn’t fit the key element of the victim profile. When I watched the video of the rehearsal dinner, he didn’t seem the least bit drunk. The best man, maid of honor, and bride all confirmed that conclusion.
    Also, theirs was a private party. Hard for a roaming serial killer to crash. The guest list was known. And none of the invited had an obvious motive to harm the groom.
    He was also a decade older than most of the other victims. And his car remained missing. I was weighing the significance of that clue when I dozed off on the couch to the rhythmic crunch of Shep chewing his pig ear.

t was late Saturday afternoon when I raced past the emergency vehicles parked outside the northeast corner of the Mall of America. The flashing lights reminded me of the test drills held there to pre-_pare Minnesota for terrorist attacks. If terrorists were responsible for today’s news event, they’d picked a curious target: Underwater Adventures—a large walk-through aquarium, popular with tourists and school groups.
    “I expected media. I just didn’t expect you.” Nick Garnett stood in a shallow puddle, a small sunfish flopping clumsily around his ankles.
    I felt a brief flash of awkwardness. Garnett was head of corporate security at the Mall of America. A former cop, a former source, and I hoped, not a former friend.
    “I was on call,” I answered, “so I’m who you got.” Channel 3 rotates reporters through a weekend on-call list so if news breaks and the scheduled staff are already committed to other stories or too far away to respond, the list is activated.
    Garnett and I hadn’t seen each other much since last fall when he almost bled out in my front yard protecting me from a pit bull after being wrongfully accused of murder because of my serial-killer investigation into dead Susans.
    “Over here, Riley.” He waved me in ahead of a bunch of other reporters, so I clearly had read too much into his silence.
    After all, Garnett was a busy man. He’d successfully recuperated from his injuries, but failed at a reconciliation with an ex-wife. Both tasks required a certain amount of privacy, so he evidently accepted that we each needed time and space to heal.
    Physically, he had healed nicely and looked in prime shape. He wore a more elegant cut of suit than when he lived on a homicide detective’s salary. With a hint of gray in his hair, he looked hunky in an older-man sort of way.
    Emotionally, I couldn’t tell where he was in the healing department, but I knew I wasn’t finished. Journeying back from the abyss can be complicated.
    He and I shared an intimacy that came from trust, not sex—trading news scoops during our careers and never once burning each other. Surviving last fall’s bedlam should have brought us even closer; instead it left our relationship feeling undefined.
    Many of life’s lessons I learn from fictional characters in books and films, but I often grasp their significance too late to implement them.
    Like the end of the 1994 bus/extortion movie Speed , when Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, locked in each other’s arms, open their eyes to discover they’ve survived Dennis Hopper’s madness. Reeves reminds Bullock of her theory that relationships based on intense experiences never work. Looking back, I realized my liaison with Garnett echoed that movie moment. I wished I’d had the guts to blurt out the heroine’s line and say, “Okay, we’ll have to base it on sex then.”
    But clever dialogue eluded me, and so did passion. I wasn’t ready then. And I wasn’t sure I was any more ready now. As a practical matter, television sweeps have no room for amour.
    So I kept the conversation work-related, asking, “What happened, Nick?”
    “You wouldn’t believe it,” he answered.
    As he turned his head to look at me, his shirt collar fell short of covering the still-pink scars on his neck from the dog bites. On the skin of