Mojo by Tim Tharp Read Free Book Online Page A

putting something in the trunk of her car in the parking lot. At least the witness saw
someone
. Maybe it wasn’t Ashton at all. Maybe Mr. Browning hired a look-alike to pretend to be Ashton.
    That theory sounded pretty good. I’d seen something close to it on my favorite detective show,
Andromeda Man
. In case you haven’t seen it,
Andromeda Man
is about a Minneapolis, Minnesota, homicide detective who is actually a space alien. He’s semi-telepathic. He couldn’t be all the way telepathic or he’d solve the cases too easily, but he can really read people. It’s pretty awesome.
    Anyway, on one episode, this woman, who is like a local theater diva, gets murdered via a curling-iron attack backstage before the opening-night performance, and everyone thinks the understudy did it. Or the director. Or the leading man. Or the playwright. Everyone except Magnusson, who is actually the Andromeda Man. He has another suspect in mind. It’s weird because his cranky boss and his own partner, the super-hot Detective Carin Svendsen, keep arguing with him about it, even though he solves every case week after week. Turns out he’s right, of course. It was the diva’s own daughter who killedher. And here’s the thing—the daughter had disguised herself as her mother so people
thought
they saw the diva walking around backstage while she was actually already dead.
    So, yes, I decided it was pretty likely that Mr. Browning paid someone to dress up as his daughter while he disposed of Ashton’s body, not backstage at a play or anything, but maybe in the basement of one of the properties his bank foreclosed on. I didn’t have any proof, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least run my theory by one of the cops in our search party. I didn’t get the chance, though.
    I had just broken ranks and started to walk down the line to where the first cop was when I stepped on something in the deep grass. It made my ankle do that thing where it turns sideways real fast and hurts like you’ve just been shot by a crossbow. I’m like, “Arrrrgh!” and buckled to the ground. That’s when I found it. What I’d stepped on was a shoe. A blue running shoe.

CHAPTER 10
    They never told us what to shout if we found a clue. Probably it should’ve been something official-sounding, but all I could get out was, “Holy crap, I found her shoe! I found her shoe!”
    Immediately, the cops rushed over. I was holding the shoe up by the loose shoestring, and the first cop goes, “Weren’t you listening? You weren’t supposed to touch anything!”
    So I dropped it back into the grass, which pissed him off all over again. The second cop was already on his walkie-talkie. He’s like, “Captain,
I
found a blue running shoe in sector four.”
    For real. That’s what he said: “I found a blue running shoe.” Completely stealing the credit. I mean, this was a big discovery. If this really was Ashton’s shoe, it didn’t look good for her. Unless, of course, someone else came out here disguised as her.
    Everybody had to stay perfectly still—like we were playing freeze tag—until the captain and his entourage showed up. He wanted to know exactly where the shoe was found, so the uniformed cop had to give it up that I was really the one who found it. Then I got reamed all over again for moving it from its original place. You’d think they’d be grateful.
    I showed the captain the exact spot where I stepped on theshoe, and he’s like, “It was probably transported to this location by an animal”—not to me but to his flunkies. Still, this seemed like a pretty good time to offer up my theory, so I’m like, “Captain, it might be good to test that shoe for DNA in case someone else might have come out here disguised as Ashton Browning as a trick.”
    “What are you talking about?” He looked at me kind of like a teacher will when you say the exact wrong answer in class, only more so. Then he looked at the uniformed cop next to him. “What’s this