Unlawful Contact by Pamela Clare Read Free Book Online

was much more open with you.”
    “We mostly talked about her plans and how much she wanted to raise Emily.”
    Officer Harburg nodded, a sad look on his face. “I doubt she’ll get that chance now.”
    Sophie knew it was the truth, but it still hurt to hear him say it. “I hope you’re wrong, Officer Harburg.”
    “It’s Ken.” He smiled, revealing a bit of seaweed that had gotten caught in his front teeth. “Call me Ken.”
    Definitely not fireworks.
    “Okay, Ken.” She forced herself to look into his eyes and not at his teeth. “What else do you know about Megan?”

     

    S OPHIE RETURNED TO the office to find that the DOC had approved her interview with Megan’s brother for four o’clock on Friday. It was the speediest green light she’d ever gotten. She hadn’t expected to hear back from DOC until next week at the earliest.
    Clearly Marc Hunter was hooked up and had pulled some strings.

     

    O N F RIDAY AFTERNOON , Sophie made the familiar two-hour drive down to Cañon City while listening to the BBC on her car radio. More violence outside Banda Aceh in Indonesia. An increase in the value of the Euro. AIDS orphans in South Africa.
    Her mind wandered off during a report about flooding on Denmark’s Jutland coast. Traffic was sparse for late on a Friday afternoon, the highway wet and icy in places. In front of her and to the west, Pikes Peak loomed jagged and white against the horizon, snow blowing from its summit like a frosty pennant. The sky to the east was clear and blue, but a bank of dark storm clouds rose ominously behind the mountains.
    There was a winter storm warning for Colorado’s Front Range tonight—twelve to eighteen inches expected just in time for Sophie’s commute back to Denver. If she’d had money, she would have reserved a hotel room in Colorado Springs and waited till morning when snowplows would have cleared most of it away. But she was trying to save money to help David with his next tuition payment, and a hotel room seemed like a frivolous expense, especially since she’d already spent almost four hundred dollars on studded snow tires.
    Just deal with it, Alton.
    She found herself thinking through the questions she wanted to ask Megan’s brother. Did he have any idea where his sister had gone? Did he know of anyone who might be helping her, giving her money or shelter or food? Had Megan ever contacted him about wanting to take Emily and run? Had he heard from his sister since her escape?
    Last night, she’d read through her notes from Megan’s interviews, looking for anything Megan might have said about her brother. She’d been surprised to find that Megan had mentioned him almost every time—how he’d gotten a message to her every day when she’d been going through heroin withdrawal, how he’d had his attorney deposit money into her commissary account so that she could buy an extra pillow when her pregnancy made it hard for her to sleep, how he’d worried that she wasn’t getting good enough prenatal care.
    Sophie had tried to reconcile Megan’s blindly heroic image of her brother to the cold reality of the arrest report CBI had e-mailed to her. Six years ago the man who cared so much about his drug-addicted sister and her baby had taken a high-caliber handgun and shot a fellow DEA agent, at point-blank range. Not just once, but three times. He’d put John Cross, a husband and father of four, in his grave in order to cover up his own drug dealing. Investigators had found two kilos of cocaine spread out between his house and car and had concluded that he’d killed the other agent to silence him. It was a violent act, heartless and brutal.
    How did he square those two parts of himself in his own mind?
    “God only knows why people do the things they do,” she said aloud, echoing Tessa’s words of a few days ago.
    She exited I-25 and wound her way to US-50, arriving ten minutes early at the Colorado State Penitentiary—a hulking zigzag building of red brick