Truth-Stained Lies by Terri Blackstock Read Free Book Online

producer at FOX, told him that she’d had a family emergency and couldn’t be there tonight, but pointed him to the blog she’d already written for the latest information on Sara Chesney’s case. As she hung up, she realized they probably wouldn’t invite her on again … unless it was to talk about her brother’s case.
    “You okay?” Michael asked her as she clicked the phone off.
    “Yes. I have to be.”
    “You’ll call me if you think of anything else I can check on?”
    “You know I will. I trust you a lot more than I trust them. Follow any lead you get. We can help Max out on this case whether he likes it or not.”
    She went to Jay and pulled him from Juliet and Holly. Her brother looked wrung out, as if he were the one who’d bled out on the bathroom floor. “We have to go,” she said. “Michael will take us to my house to get my car. Max and Al are meeting us at the police station.”
    Jay gave another round of tearful hugs, then he slipped into the passenger seat of Michael’s Trailblazer. Cathy climbed into the back. As Michael pulled away from the police cars, he patted Jay’s shoulder. “You okay, man?”
    Jay just shook his head. “We have to find that clown. Are they even looking? He’s probably taken off the wig by now, changed clothes … Every minute that passes, he gets farther away.”
    “I checked the woods along the road. I didn’t find anything like that, but I turned the little bit of trash I picked upover to Max.” Michael reached into his glove compartment, got out a small notebook. “Here, draw what the clown suit looked like.”
    “I can’t draw.”
    “Do the best you can. Write the colors out beside it.”
    Jay’s hands were shaking, but he started to draw.
    “While you’re drawing, tell me about the email you got from Annalee,” Michael said.
    Jay let out a long, despairing sigh. “It just came out of the blue. When it came, I felt this huge sense of relief, that maybe we could finally sit down like two people who used to love each other, and agree on something that was best for Jackson.”
    “So maybe it didn’t really come from her.”
    Jay frowned and looked up. “No, it came from her address. I checked.”
    “Did it sound like her?” Cathy asked.
    Jay looked out his window for a moment, as if trying to remember. “It looked rushed. Misspelled and abbreviated words.”
    “That’s not like her,” Cathy said. “Annalee’s a grammar freak.”
    “Well, yeah, but I just thought she was rushing to type it. You think the clown sent it from her computer?”
    “I don’t know,” Michael said. “I need to look at it. Cathy gave me a key to your place. You mind me going in and having a look at your email?”
    “No, that’s fine. I got her email at the office, but I read it online on my Gmail account. It should show up in my Inbox at home, because I didn’t delete it.” Jay leaned his head back, swallowed hard. “So it wasn’t from her. She never had a change of heart. There was never going to be a conversation without the lawyers.”
    Cathy noted the wistfulness in his tone. She tried to imagine what had happened. How had the clown gotten in? An extra key … a garage door opener … an unlocked door? Had he found Annalee in her office and taken her upstairs at gunpoint? Cathy didn’t know whether Annalee had been shot in the tub or standing in the bathroom. The clown was clearly staging things to implicate Jay. Using Jay’s gun, leading him to find her body …
    But no matter where he’d shot her, she was just as dead. And Jay looked just as guilty.
    “Would he have needed to know her password to send something from her email account?”
    Jay rubbed his forehead. “She uses Google mail. Last I knew, she was always signed in. She checked her mail multiple times a day and didn’t have to type her address and password every time. If he used her laptop, he could get instant access.” He closed his eyes. “I should have seen that it wasn’t her