Ricochet by Sandra Brown Read Free Book Online

district of downtown, only blocks from the police station — the venerable redbrick building known to everyone in Savannah as “the Barracks.”
    At this hour, the narrow, tree-shrouded streets were deserted. He eased through a couple of red lights on his way out Abercorn Street. DeeDee lived on a side street off that main thoroughfare in a neat duplex with a tidy patch of yard. She was pacing it when he pulled up to the curb.
    She got in quickly and buckled her seat belt. Then she cupped her armpits in turn. “I’m already sweating like a hoss. How can it be this hot and sticky at this time of night?”
    “Lots of things are hot and sticky at this time of night.”
    “You’ve been hanging around with Worley too much.”
    He grinned. “Where to?”
    “Get back on Abercorn.”
    “What’s on the menu tonight?”
    “A shooting.”
    “Convenience store?”
    “Brace yourself.” She took a deep breath and expelled it. “The home of Judge Cato Laird.”
    Duncan whipped his head toward her, and only then remembered to brake. The car came to an abrupt halt, pitching them both forward before their seat belts restrained them.
    “That’s the sum total of what I know,” she said in response to his incredulity. “I swear. Somebody at the Laird house was shot and killed.”
    “Did they say—”
    “No. I don’t know who.”
    Facing forward again, he dragged his hand down his face, then took his foot off the brake and applied it heavily to the accelerator. Tires screeched, rubber burned as he sped along the empty streets.
    It had been two weeks since the awards dinner, but in quiet moments, and sometimes even during hectic ones, he would experience a flashback to his encounter with Elise Laird. Brief as it had been, tipsy as he’d been, he recalled it vividly: the features of her face, the scent of her perfume, the catch in her throat when he’d said what he had. What a jerk. She was a beautiful woman who had done nothing to deserve the insult. To think she might be dead…
    He cleared his throat. “I don’t know where I’m going.”
    “Ardsley Park. Washington Street.” DeeDee gave him the address. “Very ritzy.”
    He nodded.
    “You okay, Duncan?”
    “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “I mean, do you feel funny about this?”
    “Funny?”
    “Come on,” she said with asperity. “The judge isn’t one of your favorite people.”
    “Doesn’t mean I hope he’s dead.”
    “I know that. I’m just saying.”
    He shot her a hard look. “Saying
what
?”
    “See? That’s what I’m talking about. You overreact every time his name comes up. He’s a raw nerve with you.”
    “He gave Savich a free pass and put me in jail.”
    “And you made an ass of yourself with his wife,” she said, matching his tone. “You still haven’t told me what you said to her. Was it that bad?”
    “What makes you think I said something bad?”
    “Because otherwise you would have told me.”
    He took a corner too fast, ran a stop sign.
    “Look, Duncan, if you can’t treat this like any other investigation, I need to know.”
    “It
is
any other investigation.”
    But when he turned onto Washington and saw in the next block the emergency vehicles, his mouth went dry. The street was divided by a wide median of sprawling oak trees and camellia and azalea bushes. On both sides were stately homes built decades earlier by old money.
    He honked his way through the pajama-clad neighbors clustered in the street, and leaned on the horn to move a video cameraman and a reporter who were setting up their shot of the immaculately maintained lawn and the impressive Colonial house with the four fluted columns supporting the second-story balcony. People out for a Sunday drive might slow down to admire the home. Now it was the scene of a fatal shooting.
    “How’d the television vans get here so fast? They always beat us,” DeeDee complained.
    Duncan brought his car to a stop beside the ambulance and got out. Immediately he was assailed with