Treacherous Intent by Camy Tang Read Free Book Online

friends with Joslyn and had seen her several times in the past few months.
    Joslyn’s own social media had been pretty sparse in the months before she came to Sonoma. She was tagged on some older photos online, but not a lot of recent ones. Which wasn’t surprising for a woman in an abusive relationship—many times, the abuser isolated the victim from her old friends. Or she stopped going out because of the bruises.
    But Esther had a set of candid photos of Joslyn at a chain electronics store, Perkins Electronics, dressed in an employee’s uniform. The photos were artistic shots, as if Esther were practicing taking wedding candid photos. She was taking pictures not only of Joslyn but also of other customers and employees, yet—perhaps because Esther knew Joslyn—the missing woman featured in a larger percentage of the photos.
    Esther had caught her at several angles, with several different people who looked like customers. She was smiling in a few of the photos, with a shy tilt to her head and lift of one shoulder.
    One photo was a candid of Joslyn speaking to a tall, handsome Filipino man dressed in an expensive gray suit. He was slightly turned away from the camera, but from his partial profile, it seemed he was smiling. Joslyn was clearly smiling up at him.
    In the second photo, the two were posing for Esther’s camera and the man had his arm around Joslyn a little tighter than a casual acquaintance would hold her.
    Elisabeth sucked in a sharp breath. It was the same man in the gray suit from this morning.
    Joslyn looked happy. The date was a few months ago, so the photo might have been taken early in their relationship, before Joslyn had discovered what a monster he was.
    The two comments below the photo seemed to be from Esther’s friends. User BillMP46U seemed to be a photographer because he said, “Cute couple, Esther! Nice way to work around those terrible lights in the store, too!”
    The next comment was posted by user Fairydust9437. “Nice photo, Joslyn! Is that Tomas? Wow, he’s a cutie.”
    Elisabeth hovered her pointer over his face to see if he’d been tagged in the photo. He had, but only his first name popped up: Tomas.
    “Liam, I think I found him.” She swiveled her laptop around so he could see. She couldn’t have him standing so close to her again, looking over her shoulder. It did strange things to her breathing.
    “Tomas.” The name came out from Liam’s throat like gravel.
    “His clothes are pretty stylish here, too. I think he’s higher up in the hierarchy of the gang, a captain or something.”
    Liam frowned. “Well, I think I found the murder she was talking about.” He slid his laptop across the table to her so she could read the website he’d pulled up. “It was buried at the bottom of the fourth or fifth page of search results.”
    It was a newspaper article from a few weeks ago about a man found brutally beaten and then stabbed to death in his apartment off Silas Avenue. The victim’s name was given as Felix Dimalanta, a longtime widower. Police were looking for his missing daughter, Joslyn, who was wanted for questioning.
    Her stomach twisted sharply. The murder victim was Joslyn’s own father?
    The article was brief, barely two paragraphs, and there were no pictures. The report mentioned that the police welcomed any information on the case and that they had talked to Joslyn’s coworkers at Perkins Electronics and also to her classmates at Twin Springs College, where she was working to get her computer software engineering degree.
    “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “It never even occurred to me that she might be wanted by the police. All I saw were her bruises.”
    “When did she arrive at the shelter? How was she, emotionally, when you first saw her?”
    “She arrived only a few days after this homicide. There was this...deep grief and horror in her eyes. You could tell she’d recently suffered a terrible blow. I had assumed it was from her last beating, but