Peggy Dulle - Liza Wilcox 04 - Saddle Up by Peggy Dulle Read Free Book Online

town?”
    “Oakdale.”
    “I doubt it has anything to do with a specific rodeo,” Dad said.
    “Why?”
    “If the murders were going to happen in conjunction with the Oakdale rodeo wouldn’t the recording say so? It has to be more obscure than that.”
    “Oh great,” I said, frustration making my voice elevate in tone and pitch. “That doesn’t help at all. In fact, it makes it worse.”
    “Maybe not.” Dad put his hands out in an effort to calm me back down. “Where is the rodeo before Oakdale’s?”
    “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Justin.”
    “You’ve never gotten any update to the recording?” Jordan asked.
    “No.”
    “Who do you think sent you this message?” Jordan took a bite of her pancakes smothered in strawberry syrup.
    “I don’t know. I don’t know who sent the last three either. But this one feels different.”
    “Because it’s about an event that will happen in the future,” Jordan suggested.
    “I suppose so. The earlier dates were associated with cold cases like the ten year old kidnapping and the kindergarten teacher’s murder.”
    “And the last one?”
    “Since Dad insists that it wasn’t him, the more I mull it over, the more I think that the professional killers, Emily and Jack, sent the emails with the picture of Mom and Dad on the cruise.”
    “They wanted to draw you out so they could find the picture your mom took of them.” Dad put in, then took another bite of his omelet.
    “I think so. They thought you and Mom were dead and the last detail was that picture of them with the rest of your cruising friends.”
    “They could have just come into your house and found the picture,” Jordan said.
    “They didn’t know who had the picture, or if it even existed. The only way to draw it out was to get me involved.”
    “Could they have had something to do with the first two cases, too?” Dad asked.
    “I don’t know, but I doubt it. If something had happened to me in either of those cases where I investigated the child’s kidnapping or the teacher’s murder, they’d have never gotten the picture.”
    “Actually that might have been exactly what they hoped for,” Jordan suggested. “If you were killed then all of your personal items like pictures and jewelry would have come to me and then everything from Mom and Dad would have been in one place. They could ransack my house, my office, and if it wasn’t there, it wasn’t anywhere.”
    The thought that two professional killers might have orchestrated those events in my life was a little frightening. I had thought I was in control, but had I been?
    “Well, we don’t have to worry about them now, they’re both in jail,” Dad said.
    “That’s true.” Jordan reached over and patted my arm. “Thanks to my super detective sister.”
    “I had help,” I told her.
    “I know. Dad told me all about it, but if it hadn’t been for you, they’d still be killing people.”
    We finished our breakfast and Jordan drove us back to my house. She put Fifi into her crate and we loaded her carryon case into her car.
    She gave me a big hug. “I’ll call you when I land.”
    “It was nice to see you Jordan,” I said, and actually meant it.
    “Me, too, Sis.”
    I watched her drive away. When I went into the house, Dad sat at the kitchen table playing solitaire. He said, “Want to play Slap?”
    “You know that game gives me a heart attack,” I reminded him.
    “Come on, Bobby. Give it a try. It’s just me.”
    I sighed and sat down while Dad dealt the cards. In Slap you play regular solitaire but share the aces piles. It is always a race to get your card onto the piles first. All that slapping makes me crazy, I usually just sit back and let the other people fight it out.
    We played several hands and I even got a few cards into the top piles before Dad. When I reached my limit of slapping cards, Dad fixed us a grilled eggplant sandwich for lunch.
    “Let’s have a couch potato afternoon, Liza,” Dad said. “Got