Shadow Fall (Tracers Series Book 9) by Laura Griffin Read Free Book Online

had to carry or drag her to his vehicle, a good half mile from the trail through thick woods. On the other hand, he could have forced her at gunpoint.
    But Tara didn’t buy that scenario.
    A smart, educated woman—particularly one who’d been trained in self-defense by the likes of Liam Wolfe—would know better than to go willingly with an assailant, even one wielding a gun. Her chances were much better if she ran.
    So maybe she hadn’t been forced. Maybe she hadn’t been murdered at all but simply walked away from her Lexus and her life. She could have run away with a secret lover. She could be running from tax problems or a bad marriage or anything at all. Until the ID came back on the victim in the woods, all Tara knew for sure was that Catalina Reyes was missing, and there were plenty of ways to be missing, not all of them bad.
    But Tara knew what her instincts told her.
    It was the same thing Liam Wolfe seemed to know, too.
    Tara fully expected the victim in the woods to be identified as Catalina Reyes. Tara had glimpsed the body—under adverse conditions, yes, but she’d seen it. Liam hadn’t, presumably, so what made him so sure? The answer was simple. Either he’d killed Catalina or he knew details about her death.
    Assuming for a minute that he hadn’t killed her, that meant he was getting info somewhere, possibly from one of those sheriff’s deputies who’d been talking about him the night the body was discovered.
    So . . . a murder suspect who had an in with the sheriff’s office, an in that could easily be exploited. The prospect didn’t sit well with Tara, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. She was the outsider in this investigation—a fact everyone she’d met had made abundantly clear.
    Tara spied the turnoff for the Delphi Center crime lab. She pulled onto the private drive and stopped at the gatehouse. As she showed her ID to the guard, Tara’s phone chimed from the console. It was M.J.
    “I talked to the husband,” M.J. informed her. “He doesn’t think it’s her.”
    “He talked to you?”
    “He had a lawyer present, but he agreed to the interview. I think he was worried about how it would look if he stonewalled us.”
    The guard handed back Tara’s ID and waved her through.
    “And he doesn’t think it’s her?” Tara asked.
    “Says he’s sure it isn’t. Fact, he doesn’t even think it was Catalina who drove the Lexus to the park.”
    “Who, then?”
    “I don’t know. But this guy’s adamant. Says she never left work before seven. And she wasn’t a jogger. She didn’t take care of her health, according to him. He said she rarely exercised, and if she did, it was in the comfort of the air-conditioned gym at their country club.”
    Tara thought of the eyewitness account about a woman on the trail. But eyewitness accounts were notoriously unreliable. People saw what they expected to see. Or what they wanted to see. Or what they believed they should see. More and more, lawyers were managing to debunk eyewitness testimony in court.
    “Well, how does he explain her Lexus?” Tara asked, curving up the road.
    “He doesn’t. He just insists she didn’t drive it there. At least not to go jogging—and those are his words, not mine.”
    “And what’s that mean?”
    “I don’t know, but we’re looking into it,” M.J. said. “I’m wondering if she had a boyfriend, maybe someone she was meeting at the park. Because—get this—the husband admits they were separated.”
    “Okay, hubs just catapulted to the top of my suspect list,” Tara said. Ahead of Liam Wolfe.
    “David Reyes says he moved out six weeks ago, says they’d been in counseling for months, but it wasn’t working out. And I know your next question. Yes, we got his alibi, and no, we have not yet confirmed it.”
    The Delphi Center came into view, an imposing white building at the top of a hill. Tara had seen pictures but never visited in person. With its tall white columns and wide marble