LITMIR.BIZ

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in achieving justice for the victim and everyone involved. “That one happened to work out,” he told Holly. “But it’s always a gamble, and I don’t think my publisher would appreciate the increased risk of having each book languish for years while I search high and low for a satisfying resolution.”

      “But you were fascinated by the Sandpoint Strangler.”

      He’d probably been more obsessed than fascinated. Even after leaving law enforcement, he’d continued to work the case, pro bono, with the hope of eventually putting it all in a book.

      “You’ve said yourself, a hundred times, that working the investigation gave you an insider’s view you simply couldn’t achieve when you were writing about someone else’s case,” she went on. “I know a book about him would really sell. Nobody’s done one yet.”

      “There’re still too many unanswered questions to make for interesting reading, Holly. People like a definitive ending when they purchase a true crime book. They like logical sequences and answers. I can’t give them that with the Sandpoint Strangler.”

      “Things change.”

      “I doubt there’s enough new information to make much of a difference,” he said.

      “So you won’t come?”

      “Holly—”

      “Where does that leave me with Susan, Caleb?” she asked, her veneer of control cracking and giving way to a sob.

      Caleb pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn’t want to let Holly’s tears sway him, but her distress and what she’d said were beginning to make him wonder. Susan had been his sister, too, for a while. Although she’d been a real pain in the ass, always getting herself into one scrape or another, he still felt some residual affection for her.

      “Have you called the police?” he asked.

      “Of course. I’m frantic!”

      He could tell. What he didn’t know was whether or not her state of mind was justified. “What’d they say?”

      “Nothing. They’re as stumped as I am. There was no forced entry, no sign of a struggle at her apartment, no missing jewelry or credit cards—at least, that we could tell—and no activity on her bank account. I don’t think they have any leads. They don’t even know where to look.”

      “What about her car?”

      “It’s gone, but I know she didn’t just drive off into the sunset. We would’ve heard from her by now. Unless…”

      “Stop imagining the worst,” he said. “There could be a lot of reasons for her disappearance. Maybe she met a rich college boy, and they’re off cruising the Bahamas. It would be like her to show up tomorrow and say, ‘Oh, you were worried? I didn’t even think to call you.’ He rubbed the whiskers on his chin, trying to come up with another plausible explanation. “Or maybe she’s gotten mixed up in drugs. She was always—”

      “She left her dogs behind, Caleb,” Holly interrupted. “She wouldn’t leave for days without asking someone to feed them. Not for a trip to the Caribbean. Not for the world’s best party. Not for anything.”

      Holly had a point. Susan adored her schnauzers, to the tune of paying a veterinarian six thousand dollars—money she didn’t really have—for extensive surgery when one darted across the street and was hit by a truck.

      Caleb rocked back and draped an arm over his eyes. He didn’t want to face it, but this wasn’t sounding good. Even if the Sandpoint Strangler was no longer on the prowl, something had happened to Susan. And the longer she was missing, the tougher it would be to find her.

      “When was the last time you saw her?” he asked in resignation.

      “Six days ago.”

      Six days…Caleb propped his feet on the desk and considered the book he was writing. It wasn’t going very well, anyway. After piecing the whole story together, he was actually feeling more sympathy for the girl who’d committed the crime than the abusive stepfather she’d poisoned.

      “All right, I’ll fly out first thing in the morning.” He hung up and looked around his crisp, modern condo. Shit. So much for putting some space between me and Holly.

      Somehow she always managed to reel him back in….

      

       M ADISON L IEBERMAN STARED at her father’s photograph for a long time. He gazed back at her with fathomless dark eyes, his complexion as ruddy as a seaman’s, his salt-and-pepper flattop as militarily precise as ever. He’d only been dead about a year, but already he seemed like a stranger to her. Maybe it was because she wondered so often if she’d ever really known him….

      “Madison? Did you find it?”

      Her mother’s voice, coming from upstairs, pulled her away from the photograph, but she couldn’t help glancing at it again as she hesitantly approached the small door that opened into the crawl space. She’d been raised in this home. The three-foot gap under the house provided additional storage for canned goods, emergency supplies, old baskets, arts and crafts and holiday decorations, among other things.

      But it was damp, dark and crowded—perfect for spiders or, worse, rats. Which was one reason Madison generally avoided it. When she was a child, she’d been afraid her father would lock her in. Probably because he’d threatened to do so once, when she was only four years old and he’d caught her digging through the Christmas presents her mother had hidden there.

      It wasn’t the fear of spiders or rats, or even the fear of being locked in, that bothered her at age twenty-eight, however. Ever since the police and the media had started following her father around, suspecting him of being involved in the terrible murders near the university only a few blocks away, she’d been terrified of what she might find if she ever really looked….

      “Madison?” Her mother’s voice filtered down to her again.

      “Give me a minute,” she called in annoyance as she opened the small door. “It’s a twenty-dollar punch bowl,” she grumbled to herself. “Why can’t she just let me buy her a new one?”

      The smell of moist earth and rotting wood greeted her as she flipped on the dangling bulb overhead and peered inside. Years ago, her father had covered the bare, uneven ground with black plastic and made a path of wooden boards that snaked through the clutter. These makeshift improvements reminded her that this was his domain, one of the places he’d never liked her to go.

      It didn’t make the thought of snooping around any more appealing. Her half brothers, Johnny and Tye, her father’s children by his first wife, stored things here occasionally, but she did her best to forget the dark yawning space even existed. She certainly didn’t want to spend any portion of what had started out as a relaxing Sunday afternoon scrounging around this creepy place.

      She considered telling her mother the punch bowl wasn’t there. But ever since her father’s suicide, her mother seemed to fixate on the smallest details. If Madison couldn’t find it, she’d probably insist on looking herself, and Annette was getting too old to be crawling around on her hands and knees. Besides, Madison and her mother had stood by Ellis Purcell throughout the investigation that had ended with his death. Certainly Madison could have a little faith in him now. The police had searched the house about four years after the killings began and never found anything.

       She wasn’t going to find anything, either. Because her father was innocent. Of course.

      Taking a deep, calming breath, she resisted the fresh wave of anxiety that seemed to press her back toward the entrance, and crawled inside. The punch bowl couldn’t be far. It would only take a second to find it.

      A row of boxes lined the wall closest to her. Some were labeled, others weren’t. Madison quickly opened the ones that weren’t labeled to discover some things her father had owned as a young man—old photo albums, school and college yearbooks, military stuff from his stint in

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