The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

work. Math? Why would I ever need to know that?
    I clicked to another photo. Partying hearty at Players, a restaurant and club just outside the Palm Beach Polo and Golf gated community. Like most places in Wellington, Players was overrun all winter with horse people. It was the place pretty young grooms and riders liked to go to cut loose. Not surprisingly, many wealthy gentlemen went there with eyes for those pretty young things half their age.
    â€œWho is this?” I asked.
    Lisbeth looked at the photo. “You’re kidding, right? That’s Barbaro. Juan Barbaro, the polo player.”
    â€œI don’t follow it,” I admitted.
    â€œHe’s a ten-goal player. He’s the best in the world.”
    And he was gorgeous. Thick black hair, dark eyes that seemed to stare right out of the photograph with confidence and sexual energy to burn. Adonis should have looked like this guy.
    â€œHe rides for us,” Lisbeth said. “For Star Polo.”
    I had no doubt that Juan Barbaro did a lot of riding, and not all of it on horses. This guy probably had women tossing their panties onto the polo field.
    Beside him in the next photo was Jim Brody with his arm around Irina, who was young enough to be his granddaughter.
    And on Irina’s other side was a face I hadn’t seen in years, except in very bad dreams.
    Time stopped. My body went numb. I stopped breathing but realized it only when black cobwebs began to encroach on my peripheral vision.
    Bennett Walker. Still handsome. Dark hair, blue eyes, tan. Scion to the Walker family that owned half of South Florida.
    Bennett Walker. The man I had meant to marry long ago, in a previous life, before everything about and around me changed.
    Before I dropped out of college.
    Before my father disowned me.
    Before I became a cop.
    Before I became a cynic.
    Before I stopped believing in happily ever after—twenty years ago.
    Before Bennett Walker asked me to give him an alibi for the night he raped and beat a woman nearly to death.

chapter 8
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  I WAS LIVING in a condo in the Polo Club off and on that winter season, 1987. Taking a break from my second year at Duke, my father’s alma mater.
    I was not a good student—not because I wasn’t capable but because it irritated my father, and that was important to me at the time. I had chosen Duke for that very reason, of course.
    All my life I had considered Edward Estes to be a father in name only. Even in my earliest memories he was always off to the side, disconnected, present for the sake of appearance. He probably could have said the same of me and my efforts at being his daughter, but I was a child and he was not.
    Children are uncanny little creatures. They read the subtext and see the complex subtleties in people. They adjust their own thinking, their actions and reactions, accordingly. Children are closer to, and more trusting of, their intuition, and none of the influences that block and distract us as adults have had a chance to cloud that clarity of instinct.
    Edward Estes was not my biological father. I had been adopted as an infant by him and his wife, Helen Ralston Estes. A private and costly adoption I would be reminded of on—at least—a yearly basis, and always in a moment when it could do the maximum emotional damage.
    They had been unable to have children of their own. He had been pissed off at his own lack of ability to produce a proper heir and had, through the amazing contortions of his psyche, managed to corkscrew that anger around to direct it at Helen and at me. At Helen because of her insistence to adopt. At me because I was the living example of his physical shortfall.
    Helen, a shallow, spoiled child of privilege, had found her life lacking the fashionable accessory all her friends were having at the time: a baby. So she found a baby broker, made a down payment, got her name on the list, and waited impatiently. The exercise would be