Pretty Wanted Read Free Page A

been unable to locate the family of the young woman, including her sixteen-year-old daughter and newborn baby. Anyone with information is urged to contact CrimeStoppers line at 888-555-STOP.
    I stared at the screen, blinking. There was a photo of her, from a three-quarters angle, shoulders up. It was reprinted in black and white in the newspaper, so it was hard to make out her coloring, but her hair, which fell in textured layers to her jawline, seemed darker than mine or Leslie’s—maybe it was brown or red. She had finely plucked eyebrows and a smile that looked half formed, as if she’d been caught by the camera in midthought. Her eyes weren’t smiling. They were heavy—wary, almost.
    I kept looking at the photo, desperate for some connection to this person. This was the first time I’d ever seen her. I don’t know what I expected to feel, but nothing about her seemed familiar to me.
    “That’s my mother ,” I said softly, trying it on. “How is that my mother?”
    “She’s pretty,” Aidan said. “She looks nice.”
    These were not judgments I was capable of making. She was dead. She’d been killed . I’d never even had the chance to know her. The baby they were talking about—that was me.
    And the killer, there was no word of the killer. I scanned through the rest of the articles. After five years, the case had gone cold, apparently, dipping down to little mentions farther back in the papers. Blurbs.
    But there were things we knew already—things I didn’t particularly want to know, that made me think the police had to be overlooking something.
    We knew there was money, a lot of money—five million dollars in total—that Leslie had accidentally taken from our apartment the day she found our mom dead. She said she’d had no idea it was there. But sensing danger and the possibility that child services would separate us, she’d run out of the place as fast as she could, taking me and a duffel bag with her. The cash was in the bag, and we’d been on the road ever since—though I’d always stupidly believed it was because she was looking for inspiration for her paintings.
    We also knew that the two goons we’d run into, Chet and Bailey, had been after Leslie, hunting for the money. It didn’t take a huge leap of deductive reasoning to assume that they were my mom’s killers. They were certainly capable of it—we’d seen that firsthand.
    So we had some idea about the who. We just didn’t know the why. Or at least not completely. I still had no clue where the money came from, or how my mom was involved in any of this. Leslie said she thought our mom and Chet had some kind of thing going. That was something I didn’t want to think about. In fact, the idea made me want to heave.
    Aidan’s breath was hot on the back of my neck as he read with me, saying out loud what I was thinking. “I don’t understand how the case could be cold. Wasn’t the murder on Chet’s FBI rap sheet?”
    I nodded and unzipped my bag to pull out the FBI file we’d nabbed from Agent Corbin’s car. Flipping through it, I put my thumb on the line.
    10/22/1997 SUSPECTED MURDER
    “They knew Chet was involved, yeah. According to this, he was never convicted. Not enough evidence.”
    Aidan cocked a shoulder. “Gotta love the justice system. They probably didn’t have DNA. I don’t think they even used it for most cases back then. So he’s gotten away with it all this time.”
    I ran my hand over the bird pendant that rested between my clavicles. It was my mother’s. She’d given it to Leslie, who’d given it to me when we moved to Paradise Valley. Of course, it meant even more to me now, my one physical link to that unknown past.
    “We’ll get those bastards,” Aidan said softly but with determination. That’s what I loved about him. He was always on my side. He had no fear, and he was ready to take on anything. But he was also all too happy to walk into trouble, and sometimes I had to be our voice of