The Off Season by Colleen Thompson Read Free Book Online

to the car—and slobber over that fine Nazi engineering , as he put it—Zarzycki led Harris to the rear corner of the house, where a cable rose from the ground to connect with a metal utility box. Shining her flashlight just beneath it, she steadied the beam, giving Harris a few moments to study the partly stripped, corroded wiring.
    “Before we found the car,” she told him, “I would’ve said it had been rusting for a long time before it finally gave up the ghost. But considering the c-word, I’ve gotta go with Option B. Some bastard yanked out the loose wire because he meant to scare her.”
    “Except there must be some kind of system backup that automatically triggers a call from the monitoring company when it detects a cut line,” Harris said, thinking that Christina’s frantic activation of the panic alarm might have been beside the point. “And I’m not sure you’re right about this being some frustrated lover. She tells me there was a voice over the baby monitor. A female’s.”
    “A woman, hmm?” Zarzycki frowned. “Somebody not liking the attention the pretty new doc’s getting from her man?”
    Harris murmured in agreement, thinking that could be right, whether or not Christina had welcomed any of it. Or Fiorelli, who knew this town and its inhabitants as well as anybody, could have a point, too. Maybe their vandalism-prone burglars had switched up their MO a little, but they could still be getting off on sticking it to randomly selected rich folks.
    “So, this dead husband of hers,” Zarzycki continued. “We know anything about him?”
    “Older surgeon. Part of a thriving practice in Dallas when he went out for a swim with a bum ticker.” Or at least that was what Renee had told him.
    “Back when I was in Iraq, I had this uncle die,” Zarzycki told him. “He’d been married to my aunt forever.”
    “And this is relevant because . . . ?” Harris prompted, impatient to get back inside, partly for the coffee. But mostly because he had a boatload of new questions for Christina.
    “Turns out he had another kid. Some kid from an affair that nobody in the family knew of. Thing is, he’d put this kid’s name on his insurance papers. Made him a beneficiary right alongside of his own wife and my cousins.”
    “That must’ve come as a shock.”
    “Oh, yeah, and not a happy one, even though that little policy was hardly worth the squabble. Or the legal fees and the bad feelings. But my point is, when someone dies, their secrets ooze up to the surface. And a lot of ’em create hard feelings. Especially when there’s money on the line.”
    Harris nodded, wondering what the hell a bright young woman like this was doing wasting her time in a backwater department so small it had only one dedicated detective—currently out, recovering from back surgery—and no room for advancement. And wondering whether she could be right about something from Christina’s past coming back to haunt her. Something that had followed her all the way from Texas.
    Before heading back into the house, Harris tapped at the oversize front door, painted to match the house’s trim in a shade he suspected had one of those fancy, historically inspired names that women and antique nuts went for but that he would just call blue. When Christina didn’t answer, he stepped inside, closing off the chatter of the surf behind him.
    He called her name, thinking that as nervous as she’d been, she’d probably run back upstairs to check on the kid or something.
    Instead, he found her at the kitchen table, exactly where he’d left her. Except she’d slumped forward in her chair, her head resting on the arm partly wrapped around her half-full mug. With her eyes closed and her breathing heavy, she looked so damned peaceful.
    Hard to believe she’d conked out like that, but sometimes stress hit people that way. Unable to cope with a situation, they simply shut down. Especially at—his glance touched on the microwave