The Wicked Wife (Murder in Marin Book 2) by Martin Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

kind of money he could buy the Standard !”
    “I’m guessing it would take a lot less than twenty-four billion—how about twenty-four bucks?”
    “Holly, every deal is negotiable. Let’s just say the number is north of twenty-four dollars, and south of twenty-four billion.”
    For both Rob and Holly, each week was a never-ending treadmill of putting out multiple editions of community newspapers that contained the same twelve center pages, with a four or eight-page wrap that varied, depending on weekly content and advertising. The front page of each local edition headlined and contained news of that particular community. Additional taxes, library expansions, school bond measures, road closures and infrastructure improvements made up the bulk of their stories. This was news that residents could find nowhere else.  
    The war between two nations on the other side of the globe might be dominating the twenty-four hour news cycle, but a proposal to increase school taxes, or close a beloved neighborhood park was the news most people were truly concerned about.
    Holly had worked as Rob’s editor and production manager for a little more than six years, having taken over for Karin when she and Rob decided to start a family. Together, they worked between fifty and sixty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, taking off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and one week between the final days of July and the first days of August. Other than that, they were always busy. As Rob often said, “The news must go on.”  
    While his group of community stringers was essential to the paper’s continued success, Rob’s close relationship with the county’s top police investigator, Eddie Austin, often proved invaluable to the paper’s real ongoing success.  
    Like Rob, Eddie was a Sausalito native. The two men, who had known each other since kindergarten, became inseparable from the time they were teammates on Tam High’s basketball team. Both served as each other’s best man: Eddie, when Rob married Karin, also a Sausalito native; and Rob, when Eddie married his sweetheart, Sharon, who grew up in Tiburon. The age of Eddie and Sharon’s only child, Aaron, landed right in the middle of the ages of Rob and Karin’s six-year-old boy, Micah, and their four-year-old daughter, Alice.
    At thirty-seven, Eddie and Rob even had a somewhat similar physical appearance. Both were of Portuguese/Irish descent, with dark hair and light colored eyes, and stood six-foot tall. Their most noticeable difference was Rob was thinner and Eddie somewhat broader and stronger. The other difference being their choice of professions: Rob choosing to pursue a degree in journalism at San Francisco State, while Eddie pursued a major in criminal justice at the same school.  
    It was Eddie’s brilliant investigative work that cracked the Bradley homicide and gave Rob the inside track in providing the kind of in-depth coverage that the community craved regarding this mysterious murder. Without Eddie’s inside tips on the case, Rob’s reporting efforts would have been overwhelmed by the San Francisco Bay Area’s better-staffed and financed radio, television, and daily news outlets.  
    Best of all, Rob’s coverage of the Bradley murder—one of the most bizarre events in Sausalito’s checkered history—landed Rob a feature story in the New Yorker that helped make him one of the best known journalists in the county.
    When Rob originally purchased The Sausalito Standard nearly a decade earlier, he quickly realized that the weekly paper’s only real chance at achieving an even modest level of financial success was to put out three additional community editions in Mill Valley, Belvedere and Tiburon, called the Peninsula, and Ross, Kentfield and San Anselmo, collectively known as Ross Valley.
    On the inside back page of all editions, Rob included a community column that included such local society news as marital engagements, weddings, births, graduations, and