Paid in Full by Ann Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

She could shovel a load of bs, but she also had dirt on a lot of people. “Well?” Ari said impatiently, “are you going to tell me?”
    Jane raised an eyebrow. “Did you know Russ is family?” Ari’s jaw dropped. “What? How do you know this?”
    “He hangs out at Smiley’s all the time, at the bar. He’s a regular.”
    “A lot of straight people go to Smiley’s,” Ari remarked. While it was one of the few gay owned restaurants in Phoenix, straight people appreciated the decor and the great food.
    “True, but since I’ve watched him put his hand in another man’s back pocket, I think I can make the assumption.”
    Ari digested this fact. She knew Russ as an acquaintance, merely as a link to Bob. They saw each other at parties sometimes, but Ari knew very little about the man except what Bob had told her: he was an exceptional businessman, very shrewd with money and could make things happen, even in the most unlikely of situations.
    “Thanks for the tip,” Ari said, rising to leave. She snapped up her briefcase and headed out the door, leaving Jane standing there with her hands on her hips.
    “Please be careful,” she warned. “You know, we’re really not Charlie’s Angels and they never got hurt because there had to be a show the next week.”
    Ari waved good-bye and took off. Her stomach churned, a result of hunger and stress. She pulled into a hamburger drive-in, ordered and scribbled notes while she ate. Assuming Bob was innocent, why did the killer want to frame him? How did the killer lure Michael Thorndike to Bob’s parents’ house, especially on a Saturday night? And most importantly, why had Michael Thorndike dragged himself out from behind the bar and into the living room? She pictured the floor plan in her mind and saw the area behind the bar. There was something about that wall . . .
    It would come eventually, at least that’s what her dad always said. She had thought more about her father in the last twenty- four hours than in months. He’d retired two years before and moved to Oregon. “Fishing country,” he called it. Here she was replaying scenes from her life that up until yesterday, she had successfully blocked out of her memory. Now, pieces of her childhood were coming back, fragments she assumed were lost forever.
    When her father was working a case, he would pace on the porch endlessly, sometimes talking to himself and gesturing. She would watch from her window, trying to read his lips and praying he would look up and motion for her to come down—something that never happened.
    She brushed the memories away and caught Highway 51 downtown. Her father had given her one good piece of advice— he’d told her if she stayed out of trouble and on the high road, there was a ninety-five percent chance that she wouldn’t be murdered by someone she knew. Not bad advice from a homicide detective.
    Michael Thorndike’s life was anywhere but the high road. From what Ari knew of him, he had countless enemies and few people would mourn his death, including his widow. But then again, her name hadn’t been written in blood ten feet from his dead body.
     
    A few taps on the library computer yielded more than a hundred references to his name, many of them in the last twenty- four hours since the announcement of his murder. Every power broker in Phoenix was watching and commenting. Even the governor was assuring the public that justice would be served. The pressure on Molly would be enormous and she couldn’t imagine where Bob could be hiding, unseen and unnoticed. Bob’s picture was plastered all over the Internet and on the front page of the Arizona Republic . How could he stay hidden for long?
    Ari spent three more hours scrolling through newspaper articles that detailed Michael Thorndike’s career. He was a multimillionaire, most of his fortune made from his land developments. For as often as he’d been investigated, he should have had his own parking space down at the courts