Tax Assassin by Claudia Hall Christian Read Free Book Online

what and where?”
    “ Good idea,” Ava said.
“Present it like a project: where you want to go; why you want to
go there; and what you think you’ll learn.”
    “ I know a few people who
work at the Sorbonne,” Seth said. “You could go in
January.”
    “ How would I pay you
back?”
    “ I like that you want to,”
Seth said. “But you don’t have to.”
    “ Figure it out in your
project,” Ava said. “Let us know.”
    “ Why would you do that,
when I didn’t even . . .?”
    “ Because we can,” Seth
said. “Because we’re family.”
    Ava glanced at him. He smiled to assure
her.
    “ We all need help
sometimes,” Seth said.
    “ I hope to get Mom settled
somewhere,” Ava turned to her sister and smiled. “Looks like it
might be Rapid City. Didn’t she seem . . .?”
    “ Do you think they . . .?”
Bella giggled.
    “ I don’t want to know,” Ava
laughed.
    Seth turned around to play the piano again.
After a while, Bella got up to take a bath, and sometime later she
leaned in the door to say she was off to bed. When she was gone, he
closed the door to the piano room.
    He joined Ava in the nest of blankets and
pillows by the fire. She rolled over to him when he touched her
back, but didn’t wake. He kissed the top of her head and fell
asleep.
    When he woke, she and the puppy were gone
again. He took a shower and wandered upstairs to see who had
survived the previous night’s party. He found Ava sitting in the
kitchen drinking coffee and looking at the case files. He watched
the puppy, Clara, chase a ball in the backyard.
    “ Hey,” he leaned over to
kiss her.
    “ Hey.”
    “ I hope you don’t mind,”
Ava gestured toward the files. “I had to look.”
    “ Of course you did,” Seth
smirked at her.
    “ You know I trained in
forensics at the FBI, right?”
    “ I remember.”
    “ Right,” Ava said. “When I
came back to Denver, I did a couple of weeks at the CBI before
going to Denver PD.”
    “ Okay.” Not sure what she
was talking about, he poured and drank a cup of coffee.
    “ There’s a case just like
what you’re working on,” Ava said. “Brady, Bosley, Bradley
something like that. Male; twenty-nine years old.”
    “ In Timbuktu?” He poured
the last cup of coffee and made another pot of coffee.
    “ Southeastern Colorado,”
Ava said. “Small town outside of Trinidad.”
    “ Really?” Seth shrugged.
“Why didn’t the PD come to the party last night? I
feel . . . slighted.”
    He held his heart, and Ava smiled at his
antics.
    “ It happened in 1913,” Ava
said. “Tax agent gunned down while making the rounds. Never
solved.”
    “ Sounds fascinating,” Seth
raised his eyebrows.
    “ Sounds crazy,” Ava said.
“We got that grant from the Feds to solve old cases with new
science. I was on a team that worked the tax agent’s case. I’m sure
our report is in the system.”
    “ What’d you
find?”
    “ What you have – reloaded
round, firearm,” Ava said. “If there was brass, which is unlikely,
it didn’t survive the years in the evidence warehouse.”
    “ Basically
nothing.”
    “ Except . . .” She gave him
a coy smile.
    “ Except?”
    “ The gunpowder was
unusual,” Ava said. “Made with cottonwood charcoal. We figured the
killer made it himself because that’s what most people did in 1913.
Cottonwood charcoal gunpowder was also a favorite of the
Confederate States. The tax agent was from Massachusetts, a Union
state. We postulated that maybe the killing was about some
unresolved business from the war.”
    “ Colorado was a Union
territory,” Seth said. “So was New Mexico.”
    “ Yes, but Texas was a part
of the Confederacy,” Ava said. “Texas isn’t very far from where the
tax agent was killed, especially if you have unresolved
business.”
    He smiled at the interest and intelligence
in her face. She took his smile as encouragement to continue.
    “ It’s about a thousand
miles from Palmito Beach, where the last battle of the Civil