The Deceived by Brett Battles Read Free Book Online Page A

Of course, this was Texas, not L.A. Everything was cheaper here. And, as many were fond of saying, bigger. Few of the houses looked like they were less than two thousand square feet, while many looked to be more than three. Many were multilevel, with BMWs, Mercedeses, and large SUVs in the driveways.
    These were people on the rise. Future company presidents and board members who would one day be trading up to even bigger homes with larger lots and more square footage and maybe even a guesthouse in back. Some would suffer heart attacks before they reached sixty, while others would become strangers to their own families as they spent more and more time at the office, if they hadn’t fallen into that trap already.
    Quinn found the address he was looking for tucked back in an area where all the roads sounded like names of old blues songs: Lazy River Lane, Old Bayou Drive, Sweet Jasmine Street. The house was a sprawling one-story on White Magnolia Lane. Like many of the homes in the neighborhood, it was made of brick, with white wooden doors and window frames.
    An asphalt driveway curved up to the house, then back to the street again seventy feet farther up the road. There were no sidewalks, so Quinn pulled the Lexus onto the grass shoulder and parked. As he got out he heard the buzz of what sounded like an army of insects. He expected to be attacked at any second, but for the moment the bugs seemed content to keep their distance.
    As he started walking up the driveway, he realized that if this had been Jenny’s place, she wasn’t here any longer. There were bikes on the grass. Kids’ bikes, preteen size. A portable basketball hoop and backboard were set up in a wide spot of the drive near the garage. Though he hadn’t seen Jenny in at least eight months, she had been childless then. And if the toys weren’t enough to convince him a family now lived here, there was the car that was parked in the driveway. A minivan, dark green and well maintained. A soccer mom car. It had the look of a vehicle that got a lot of use.
    He continued walking toward the front door. As he did he saw a young girl standing at the living room window, looking out at him. He put her age at around eight. She had blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and was dressed in jeans and a lavender T-shirt with a cartoon squirrel on the front. She stared at him for a moment, then turned and ran away.
    By the time Quinn reached the doorstep, the front door was already open. A woman stood just inside beyond the threshold, a utilitarian smile on her face. She couldn’t have been more than forty, and had the same blond hair as the girl in the window. No ponytail for Mom, though. Her hair was down, stopping an inch above her shoulders.
    “Can I help you?” she said, a trace of suspicion in her voice.
    “Probably not,” Quinn said. He smiled as if embarrassed, in an attempt to set her at ease. “I was actually looking for the woman I thought lived here. Apparently either I got my addresses mixed up or she moved.”
    The woman looked at him for a second, impassive, then her face relaxed. “Must be a mix-up. We’ve been here over ten years.”
    Wrong answer .
    Steiner had said the address might be old, but not that old.
    Quinn nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said.
    “What’s her name?” she asked. “Maybe she’s one of my neighbors.”
    “Tracy,” he said, heeding the warning that flashed in his mind, and making up a name on the spot. “Tracy Jennings. Do you know her?”
    The woman’s eyes widened just enough for Quinn to notice. The name was not the one she’d been expecting. But she recovered quickly. “Sorry. I don’t know who that is.”
    “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have bothered you. Thanks for your time.”
    “No problem,” the woman said.
    Quinn turned and headed back to his car. As he walked down the driveway, he glanced at the house one final time. The girl was in the window again, waving at him, and in the shadows