Private: #1 Suspect Read Free

locked when I came home. And now I was sure that every other entry point was secure.
    That could only mean that someone had entered my house with an electronic gate key and biometric access—someone who knew me. Colleen had been my assistant and my lover for a year before we’d broken up. I hadn’t deleted her codes.
    Colleen wasn’t the only one with access to my house, but maybe I wouldn’t have to guess who had killed her.
    My house was watched by the best surveillance system ever made. There were cameras posted on all sides, over the doorways, sweeping the highway, and taking in 180 degrees of beachfront beyond my deck.
    I opened the cabinet doors on the entertainment unit in the living room and flipped the switch turning on the six video monitors stacked in two columns of three. All six screens lit up—and all six screens were blank. I stabbed the buttons on the remote control again and again before I realized the hard drive was gone. Only a detached cord remained.
    I grabbed the phone by the sofa and called Justine’s direct line at the office. It was almost seven. Would she still be there?
    She answered on the first ring.
    “Jack, you hungry after all?”
    “Justine. Something bad has happened.”
    My voice cracked as I forced myself to say it.
    “It’s Colleen. She’s dead. Some bastard killed her.”

CHAPTER 3
     
    I OPENED THE front door and Justine swept in like a soft breeze. She was a first-class psychologist, a profiler, smart—hell, brilliant. Thank God she was here.
    She put her hand on my cheek, searched my eyes, said, “Jack. Where is she?”
    I pointed to the bedroom. Justine went in and I followed her, standing numb in the doorway as she walked to the bed. She moaned, “Oh, no,” and clasped her hands under her chin.
    Even as I stood witness to this heartbreaking tableau, Colleen was still alive in my mind.
    I pictured her in the little house she had rented in Los Feliz, a love nest you could almost hold in cupped hands. I thought about her twitching her hips in skimpy lingerie, big fuzzy slippers on her feet, sprinkling her thick brogue with her granny’s auld Irish sayings: “There’ll be caps on the green and no one to fetch ’em.”
    “What does that mean, Molloy?” I’d asked her.
    “Trouble.”
    And now here she was on my bed. Well beyond trouble.
    Justine was pale when she came back to me. She put her arms around me and held me. “I’m so sorry, Jack. So very sorry.”
    I held her tight—and then, abruptly, Justine jerked away. She pinned me with her dark eyes and said, “Why is your hair wet?”
    “My hair?”
    “Did you take a shower?”
    “Yes, I did. When I came home, I went straight to the bathroom. I was trying to wake myself up.”
    “Well, this is no dream, Jack. This is as real as real can be. When you showered, had you seen Colleen?”
    “I had no idea she was here.”
    “You hadn’t told her to come over?”
    “No, Justine, I didn’t. No .”
    The doorbell rang again.

CHAPTER 4
     
    THE ARRIVAL OF Dr. Sci and Mo-bot improved the odds of figuring out what had happened in my house by 200 percent.
    Dr. Sci, real name Seymour Kloppenberg, was Private’s chief forensic scientist. He had a long string of degrees behind his name, starting with a PhD in physics from MIT when he was nineteen—and that was only ten years ago.
    Mo-bot was Maureen Roth, a fifty-something computer geek and jack-of-all-tech. She specialized in computer crime and was also Private’s resident mom.
    Mo had brought her camera and her wisdom. Sci had his scene kit packed with evidence-collection equipment of the cutting-edge kind.
    We went to my room and the four of us stood around Colleen’s dead body as night turned the windows black.
    We had all loved Colleen. Every one of us.
    “We don’t have much time,” Justine said, breaking the silence, at work now as an investigator on a homicide. “Jack, I have to ask you, did you have anything to do with this? Because if you did, we