Dead Wrong Read Free Page A

officer.
    Never happened. Not for her or for the other women. The captain must have seen them all swooning over those amazing blue eyes and only assigned male recruits to Mitch.
    Her crush ended, but not before she’d let him know of her interest, and he’d firmly rejected her. Now here he was, sitting next to her, and she needed to start acting like the professional she was and not some woman he cast aside—or worse, a victim.
    Father, I know what I’m going through is nothing compared to the loss of Nancy, but please help me get through this. Help me stay strong, do what I’m trained to do and find her killer.
    She lifted her head and waited for the world to right itself.
    “Better?” He watched her with his trademark stare. One eye narrowed, his mouth lifting a bit on the same side, the other eye dark and deadly intense.
    She nodded.
    “Good. How about telling me what happened?” He pulled a small notebook from his pocket, his gaze saying this was all business for him.
    All business...and the fact that it bothered her made her even more upset. “Nancy called me. She’s an old friend from college and a client of our agency.”
    “And Nancy’s the deceased?”
    She flinched at the clinical terminology. “Yes. Nancy Bodig.”
    He jotted her name on his pad. “Go on.”
    “Her twin brother, Nathan, died two months ago when his car plunged into a ravine. It was deemed an accident, and she didn’t question the ruling until last week.”
    “What made her change her mind?”
    “She kept Nathan’s cell phone active so she could call his voice mail. You know, just to hear his voice every now and then. But the last time she called, a man answered.”
    Mitch’s eyebrow rose. “And she thinks this means his death wasn’t accidental?”
    “Sort of,” Kat answered, knowing how lame it sounded. “He never went anywhere without his phone but the investigating officers didn’t find it at the accident scene.”
    “That doesn’t mean he was murdered. The phone could’ve been stolen or misplaced. Even lost in the crash area. Then someone found it and decided to use it.” He sounded so detached—professional like a cop should be.
    Now she knew how it felt to be on the other side. To be a victim. All she wanted to do was mourn the loss of a friend. Instead, she had to recount how she’d failed Nancy. It was almost too hard to go on. But if she didn’t, this killer would never be caught.
    She took a deep breath. “The state police said the same thing when Nancy approached them. I even told her that when she first came to see me.”
    “But?” He waited, pen poised over his notebook.
    “But then she told me she checked his online phone records. There were no outgoing calls and there was only that one incoming call after his death. Since then, I’ve monitored the account. Nothing.”
    “Maybe the phone company made some sort of mistake routing that call.”
    “I checked into that, too. Trust me, I checked everything I could about that phone. It all points to someone possessing Nathan’s phone. But not for regular use. So why keep it? Why answer only on that one day?”
    “Good questions, I suppose.”
    “That’s why I took her case and agreed to find out who had it.” She shook her head. The truth of her failure was about to come to light, and she waited until she’d stemmed off another round of tears. “I didn’t think she was right about the murder, but after tonight—” Her voice broke, and she couldn’t finish her thought, but simply stared down at the mossy sidewalk in front of her. The sidewalk she’d run up not an hour ago and found Nancy’s lifeless body.
    She felt as if she might lose it. Really lose it like she did the night her birth father killed her mother right in front of her. She was only eleven. A child. Watching the man who’d beat her mother time after time, finally going too far. Her mother, after years of letting a man control her every move, lying there. Lifeless.
    The pain