Read Online Cash Burn by Michael Berrier - Free Book Online Page A

looked carefully at her face again, looked at her eyes. “Okay.”
    Her head tilted slightly. “You believe me?”
    “Yeah. Yeah, I do. You don’t strike me as someone who makes things up.”
    She brought her hands away from the bench and they came together in her lap. She wove her fingers together and looked them over.
    “I know this sounds kind of strange, Ms. Russell, but I have a hunch about what happened to your son, and I wanted to see if you could help me connect the dots.”
    “Hey, I’m just glad somebody believes me. What do you want to know?”
    “Danton let me read his report, but there are some things I’m not clear on. Can you just tell me about that night? I’m sorry to put you through it again.”
    “What kind of hunch would a parole officer have about my son?”
    “It’s probably nothing. Let’s just say I’m doing some moonlighting.”
    “All right. I guess if you think you might be able to help . . . Tell me if this is too much detail. I got home from work around five thirty. Greg wasn’t home, but that wasn’t unusual—”
    “Sorry to cut you off, but in your statement to Danton you said you dreamed there was someone in the house.”
    Her eyes cut into a frown. “It wasn’t a dream.”
    “But your statement in the report—”
    “That’s what I thought at first. And if nothing else had happened that night, I might have just kept thinking that. But the more I thought about it . . . it wasn’t a dream. Someone was here. A man was in the house.” She looked to the door as if the place had betrayed her.
    “What did he look like?”
    She held Tom with her eyes. That expression of betrayal didn’t relax. “It wasn’t like that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean . . . look, I know how this sounds. You can think whatever you want about me. I didn’t see him. It was just that sensation you have when you’re not alone and it’s not somebody you know there with you. Where you know it’s somebody . . .” She looked behind him as if the words were hovering in the air, dodging her. Then her eyes returned to his face. “Somebody evil.”
    He began to think he’d been wrong about her. Without any answers, her mind was working to invent some. “So, you think this guy who was in your room had something to do with what happened to your son.”
    “Greg. His name is Greg.”
    He thought she might stare at him until he said it. “Okay. Greg.”
    “There’s more. The sliding glass door downstairs was unlocked. Sometimes Greg did that when he snuck out at night. I guess so he wouldn’t have to bring his keys. But the power was out too. When I woke up the next morning my alarm clock wasn’t on. Nothing was on. The power was out.”
    “Power surge?”
    “Maybe. Sure. That’s what you’d think. If your son didn’t happen to be murdered that night. Then you start wondering. You start thinking about every little detail of the day before. You go over every word you said, every touch. Every chance you could have done something different. What you’d say if you had just an hour again. A minute with him.” Her words cracked. She dropped her head.
    Tom didn’t move. He suppressed the urge to step to her and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”
    She waved a hand at him, the other hand drying her eyes.
    “Where do you work, Ms. Russell?”
    She took a deep breath. It jerked in but came out smooth. “Up off Wilshire on the west side. It’s about a twenty-minute drive.”
    “What do you do?”
    “Executive assistant. Up until this happened, anyway.”
    “Where?”
    “At Business Trust Bank for the last four years.”
    “I didn’t see that in Danton’s report.”
    “They never asked. Why?”
    “Just fishing. What do you do there at the bank? Do you have access to the vault?”
    “No.” Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. She stared at him.
    “What about keys? Do you have keys to the bank?”
    “I have a key that lets me in the office. But that wouldn’t