Scars (Nevada James #2) (Nevada James Mysteries) by Matthew Storm Read Free Book Online Page B

famine, poverty, war…” She smiled wistfully. “He
used to get so excited about it. I know he was probably naïve, but that’s who
he was. And he never made an enemy in his life.”
    “What
about you? You’ve got a lot of money. Money usually comes with problems.”
    “It’s my
family’s money, and if my great-grandfather screwed anyone over to get it, it
happened generations ago. We’ve been out of the business for decades. I hardly even
know what a car engine looks like.”
    “Any
affairs?”
    She
smirked. “I won’t take offense that you asked. No. Not on my part, anyway, and
I’d be shocked if Adam had.”
    “So you
don’t have a single suspect?”
    “No.”
    I
scratched my head. “Okay, what about who gained financially? Artificial
intelligence has to be profitable.”
    “And
someday it might have been, but I’ve had Adam’s work reviewed by people who are
much smarter on the subject than I am. Adam was a visionary, but nothing he was
building actually worked . Some of it might have, someday, but the field
was still in its infancy. There was nothing in what he had done to steal.
Nobody ran off and started a company with anything he did.”
    “Well,
shit,” I said.
    “I
know,” Anita said. “I’ve been at this for a while, Nevada.”
    I’d have
had to admit I was intrigued. And I had very little else to do with my time. It
wouldn’t kill me to look at the old case files. At the most all I was going to
lose was a day or two I’d just have spent watching bad television in my motel
room.
    I stood
up. “I’m going to go,” I said. “I’ll call you in a few hours. I want to think
about a few things before I make a decision. Will you be reachable after your brunch,
or whatever the hell you’re doing?”
    “Call
whenever you like, Nevada. I’ll drop everything for you.” She stood up and
shook my hand. “Regardless of your decision, I’d like to thank you. It’s been a
while since I could be myself in front of other people.” She scrunched up her
face around the eyes and a set of wrinkles appeared, adding ten years to her
appearance. The grandmother was back. “I do hope you’ll be discreet,
dear,” she said, using the singsong voice again.
    “You’ll have
to teach me how to do that someday,” I said. “My mask has never been as good as
yours.”
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 6
     
     
    I was
already pretty sure I was going to take the case, but I was hesitant to just
jump into it without talking to someone I trusted first. My list of trusted
people was fairly small. You could count them on one hand, and you only needed
two fingers. Three, if you counted Sarah Winters, and I wasn’t sure I did. I
liked her, and I had no reason to think she’d ever betray me, but I was also a paranoid
and possibly delusional alcoholic. Trust wasn’t something that came easily to
me.
    The gate
leading back to the main street had a motion sensor that made it open
automatically for anyone who was leaving, but I stopped at the guard booth
anyway. The same guy I’d talked to before was still in there. “What do you
think of Anita?” I asked him.
    “She’s
the sweetest lady,” he said. “We all just love her.”
    “Oh,
yeah?”
    “She
brings cookies and lemonade out here on the hot days,” he nodded. “Always asks
about the kids. Not like some of them in there, who drive by like they don’t
even see us. She’s good people.”
    “Thanks,”
I said, putting the car into gear. He may have made a good security guard, but
he’d never have been a good detective.
    I stopped
at a fast food drive-through on the way back to San Diego and ate in the car. I
really wanted to talk to someone, but I wasn’t sure who to call. Dan Evans was
probably still in Santa Fe, and the first thing he was going to say to me was
“come back to work.” As if that were really an option. Even if I was willing to
go back to a life of rules and regulations, being a police officer required