Whispers Read Free Page A

he’d unwittingly taken his first step into hell.
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    â€œI don’t care if you have to kiss Moran’s ugly ass or tie him up in lawsuits for the rest of his life. Find out something that we can use against him. Bribe him or kill the stupid bastard with your bare hands, Murdock! Just find a way to squelch the damned book!” Dutch slammed the car phone into its cradle. “Spineless cretin,” he growled, though in truth, Ralph Murdock, his attorney and campaign manager, was one of the few people in this world whom Benedict Holland trusted.
    Clamping down on the cigar jammed between his teeth, he floored the accelerator and his Cadillac shot forward, tires skimming on the narrow road winding through this stretch of old growth timber. The speedometer inched past sixty and mossy-barked fir trees swept by in a blur.
    Who would have thought that the ghost of Harley Taggert would rise now at this critical point in his life? And who the hell did Kane Moran, the man penning the story surrounding Harley’s death, think he was? The last time Dutch had seen him, years ago, Moran had been a mean-tempered kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska, a hoodlum always in trouble with the law. Somehow he’d scrounged his way through college and he’d become a risk-taking fool of a journalist who, because of some damned wound, had decided to settle down back home in Oregon to write a book about Harley Taggert’s death.
    As his car shot over the summit, Dutch experienced the tightening in his chest again, that same old sense of panic that squeezed him whenever he thought of the night the Taggert kid died. Deep in the darkest reaches of his heart he suspected that one of his daughters had bashed in the boy’s skull.
    Which one? Which one of his girls had done it? His firstborn, Miranda, a lawyer working for the district attorney’s office, was ambitious to a fault, her pride unbending. She looked so much like her mother it was spooky. Randa had inherited Dominique’s thick dark hair and sultry blue eyes. He’d heard comments that Miranda was haughty, that she had ice water running through her veins, but she certainly wasn’t cold enough or stupid enough to have murdered the Taggert kid. No, Dutch wouldn’t believe it; Randa had been too self-possessed, a woman who knew what she wanted out of life.
    Claire, his secondborn, had been the quiet one, a romantic by nature. As a kid she’d been gawky, plain in comparison with her sisters, but she’d grown into her looks, and he suspected that she would be the kind of woman who, as the years passed, would look better and better. At the time of Harley’s death she’d been a soft-spoken athletic girl, the middle sister, one to whom he hadn’t paid much attention. She never gave him any trouble except that she’d fallen in love with Harley Taggert. Then there was Tessa. The baby. And the rebel. There was no reason she would have wanted Harley Taggert dead. At least no reason Dutch knew about. And even now that thought settled like a stone in his gut.
    Until recently, Dutch hadn’t lost much sleep over the Taggert boy’s demise.
    Now, his fingers grew sweaty around the steering wheel. Claire, with her haunted eyes and smattering of freckles, wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t be. Christ, there wasn’t a mean bone in her body. Or was there? What of Miranda? Maybe he didn’t know his eldest as well as he thought he did.
    The sun was hanging low over the western hills, blinding him with its bright rays. He flipped down the visor. The road split and he turned toward the small town of Chinook and the old lodge he’d bought for a song.
    The Caddy shimmied as Dutch took the corner too fast, but he barely noticed as he slid over the center line. A pickup going the opposite direction blasted its horn and skidded on the gravel shoulder to avoid collision.
    â€œBastard,” Dutch growled,