Wrong Turn by Diane Fanning Read Free Book Online

nine o’clock.
    When she arrived home, Chester, her gray tabby, greeted her with a vocal interlude and a series of acrobatic maneuvers in, around and over the furniture. She served him a smelly cod, whitefish and shrimp combo that filled him with rapture. Why was his current greatest love the stinkiest excuse for food she ever found in a can? Her nose wrinkled and lips curled as she covered the portion remaining in the tin and shoved it into the refrigerator as quickly as possible.
    She slapped together a butter, pickle, ham and Swiss sandwich, grabbed a glass of Merlot and settled at the dinette table with a pile of transcripts. She pulled out the first one but then remembered that she’d gotten an alert when she was in the warehouse that she had a voicemail message on her cell. She pulled it out to see if there was any reason to return the call that night.
    She winced when she saw that she’d missed a call from Charley Spencer. The two had bonded tightly a few years ago after the discovery of Charley’s mother’s body in the basement of the Spencer home and had stayed in touch ever since. Lucinda hit the message playback button.
    ‘Lucy, I think maybe somebody I know did a bad thing but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was just trying to act tough. Maybe she was trying to scare me. Or maybe it’s just one big joke. I don’t know what to do. I need your advice. Call me anytime, day or night.’
    Lucinda smiled at the last sentence; Charley was definitely a drama queen. She looked at the time on the top of the screen: 9:43 p.m. Way too late to call an eleven-year-old on a school night. She made a mental note to try to catch Charley in the morning before she left for school. Back to the stack of papers. More than two hours of reading refreshed her memories of the investigation but brought her no new insights and not a single new fact to the surface.
    She looked up at the clock, yawned, and decided she could get through one more witness interview by midnight and then she’d have to get to bed. She picked up the transcript of the exchange between Lieutenant John Boswell and Sherman neighbor Lisa Pedigo.
    Halfway in, she encountered three heavily redacted pages. Her alertness snapped to high. Originals should never be redacted; only the publicly disseminated copies should have blocked-out material. Was this a mistake? Or was this the deliberate obliteration of information? Boz wouldn’t do that, would he?
    She grabbed one sheet of the adulterated document, pulled the shade off the lamp on an end table, turned it on, and held the paper over the bulb in an attempt to read the words behind the black permanent marker. Impossible. It had to be a mistake. Maybe the original had been accidentally distributed and these redacted pages inadvertently placed in the file. But if that had happened, wouldn’t there have been a media outlet taking advantage of the slip?
    She went to her computer and logged into the department site where she searched for the Sherman files. She went through the detailed list of transcript documents four times before giving up. Maybe, she thought, it’s in the wrong folder. She scanned through the complete list – still no sign of the Pedigo interview.
    Could it be mislabeled? She opened each document one at a time, viewing every one of them just long enough to determine that the contents were an accurate reflection of the file name. She reached the end of the list with no sign of the interview transcript. It simply was not there. What did that mean? And what did she need to do next?
    The first question troubled her deeply. Boz meant a lot to her and to her career. Not only did she get her job because of his death, but she learned an awful lot from him as she assisted him in the investigation – serving as everything from a backboard on which he could bounce ideas off, to a simple gofer, running hither and yon at his command. Did Boz make a mistake or did he intentionally make a decision that was, in all