Tell No Lies Read Free

suspected murderer Ian Patterson had been sitting in a jail cell for more than three weeks. There was a dead girl lying near an open grave in an abandoned graveyard and a missing kid—a twelve-year-old boy—and it was entirely possible they had the wrong man behind bars.
    He stared down at the body, unblinking.
    From the beginning, Patterson had insisted on his innocence. Only now it seemed the man might be telling the truth. But if Patterson didn’t kill Pamela Baker . . . who did? That was what Jack had to figure out before the case against Patterson collapsed.
    Before Cody Simmons turned up dead, as well.
    Talk about shitty Mondays. He glanced at his watch. It was 2:20 A.M . He wondered how Rose Simmons was doing. The kid’s grandma had been rushed to the emergency room after the news of his disappearance—heart attack. He knew the old lady personally and hoped she would make it.
    The medical examiner gave him a glance over her shoulder. “Well, Jack,” she said. “It’s official. This makes number three. Now you’ve got yourself a serial case.”
    With the discovery of the first body, a college student, Jack’s gut had told him they were dealing with a serial killer, and he had nearly lost his job trying to get the higher-ups to listen. Now it was the last thing he wanted to hear. “You sure?”
    She peeled off her gloves as she faced him, grimacing. “As sure as I am that Baker is dead.”
    They both turned to look at the body that had been hauled out of the grave. Sliced from pelvis to breastbone with the blade of a sharp instrument, she lay sprawled under the trees, her body tinted blue-green under the moonlight that sliced through the canopy of green. Her hands were posed prayerfully and taped together. Her mouth also was taped shut, her eyes bulging and sightless.
    “Obviously, we’ll want to be certain of her identity before we release the news,” she added. “I’ll be able to tell you for sure once we get her into the lab.”
    After a month of looking at her picture day in and day out, Jack didn’t need a lab report to know who it was. Unfortunately, Baker’s time had run out.
    Cody’s clock was ticking now, and if Ian Patterson wasn’t guilty, then they didn’t have a clue where to begin. “Thanks,” he said, and walked away.
     
    Tuesday, August 17, 2:15 A.M .
     
    Augusta pressed her eyes shut, trying to block out the images taunting her.
    After two weeks, a good night’s sleep still eluded her. She took pride in the fact that she didn’t have any hang-ups, and wasn’t the type to sleep around, but something about Ian Patterson had made her throw all caution to the wind—not that she could add that particular virtue to her list, mind you. She was stubborn, impetuous and nonconforming, but caution was not really a strong point. This time she might have really screwed up.
    The night they’d discovered Kelly Banks’s body, she had, in fact, been with Ian at the Windjammer, a beachside bar on the Isle of Palms. By now she had fully expected to be brought in for questioning, but so far Ian had remained silent about their time together. Why, she couldn’t fathom, but she guessed everything would come out once they proceeded with a trial.
    She could see the papers now: Aldridge Heir Steps Forward with Alibi for Murder.
    Her sister Caroline was going to flip.
    As publisher of the Tribune, Caroline would take heat over it and Channel 11 would seize the opportunity to excoriate her.
    But Augusta had gone over it again and again in her head.
    Alibi or not, it wasn’t as though Ian couldn’t have committed that particular murder. Still, he hadn’t seemed like a killer. Augusta had been so certain he was being persecuted by her sister and by the media that she had jumped to his defense.
    “You’re pushing all my buttons,” he’d warned with that slow smile and Southern drawl that somehow managed to confuse her. “You don’t want to go there.”
    “You’re not a priest any longer,”