Run Away by Laura Salters Read Free Book Online Page B

any more silly responses from spilling out, then realized it made her look slightly insane and quickly slackened them again.
    “It looks like the Thais have done a fairly good job of covering all the bases, but let’s start from the beginning, shall we?” He looked up at her for the first time. There was no intensity behind his eyes.
    “Okay,” said Kayla meekly. Stop looking so bloody guilty, Finch . You didn’t do it . Stop acting like you did .
    A strange silence. Kayla waited for him to ask a question. He seemed off, like half his brain was in another room, another police station. Another country.
    “So,” he said, coughing into the back of his hand. “Talk me through the events of the afternoon of June seventeenth.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as though trying to rub some life back into them.
    It seemed like a decade ago. Kayla strained to remember how the day had started. “Well, we woke up at around eleven-­thirty A . M . We’d had a lot to drink the night before—­”
    Shepherd started gesturing vaguely. Kayla thought he might flag up the fact they’d been drinking—­could that mean anything?—­but instead he said, “We can skip the morning. Mr. Kingfisher was reported missing at, uh, just before seven in the evening? Let’s start at six.”
    She frowned. Wouldn’t he want to know about their exact movements that day? Wouldn’t it help them to retrace Sam’s footsteps? “Okay . . . if you like. So at around six, I was with Sam down by the lake. We had a lake near our villa,” she added.
    “So you were the last person to see Sam alive?” Shepherd asked.
    “Uh, yeah. I was.” Kayla paused, waiting for him to comment on the way that looked: bad. He didn’t. “So we were by the lake. We were talking about . . .” She gulped. She couldn’t tell the truth, but she certainly couldn’t lie. Not to a police officer. “ . . . about the last few months,” she finished vaguely.
    He nodded. No further questions. He gestured to continue.
    Wouldn’t he want to know if Sam seemed on edge? If he had mentioned the drugs? If there was a sense of fear?
    Kayla cleared her throat. “Sam went inside at around twenty past six, and my friend Russia—­I mean, Minya—­came out to join me by the lake.”
    “And that’s your alibi.”
    “Yes,” Kayla replied, caught off guard by his bluntness. “That’s my alibi. I was with Minya when Sam went missing.”
    He nodded again. “Ms. Pavlova corroborated this statement. Okay. Carry on.”
    “We smoked and chatted for a while. Mainly about how strange Sam had been acting . . .” She paused, but Shepherd didn’t visibly react. “ . . . until I headed inside to find him. That’s when I discovered all the blood.”
    “So you were the last person to see him alive, and the person who realized he was missing?”
    “Right.” Jeez, when you say it like that . . . it’s a wonder I’m not locked up .
    Shepherd stared at another page in his file. A file all about Sam . Kayla wondered what it’d be like to read it. To see all the cold, hard facts laid out before her. Images of blood splatters, DNA, footprints. Timelines. Evidence. The thought made her stomach turn, but a small part of her wanted to see it.
    “Were you aware that Mr. Kingfisher was in debt?”
    Kayla flinched, not anticipating the change of conversational pace. “No. But like I mentioned, he had been acting strangely.”
    “Strangely in the way that a person in a lot of drug debt would?” He seemed to emphasize the word drug.
    Kayla shrugged. “It’s hard to identify what kind of strange until you look back in hindsight.”
    “You have hindsight now. Would you say that’s what it was?” he pressed.
    Uneasiness crept over her. Was he trying to put words in her mouth? “Maybe . . .”
    “Right, right.” Something about Shepherd’s tone didn’t sit right with her. Was it boredom? Apathy?
    She pushed on. “It was more like . . . anger. Like he