Read Online Fall by Candice Fox - Free Book Online

was hooked. She began hunting across the internet for cold cases she could conceivably solve, or at least contribute to, gaining a tasty share of the reward money. Sometimes it required her to do some unethical things. She wandered around in restricted-access police archive rooms. Now and then she carefully plugged her clients for details on their cases, making them reveal things that wouldn’t necessarily be therapeutic in their revealing. She cultivated a network of administrative assistants, lab technicians and secretaries who now and then slipped her the information she needed. It wasn’t ethical – but it wasn’t hurting anybody. She told herself that all good detectives bent the rules.
    Imogen was far more powerful as an armchair detective than she might ever have been as a cop. Sometimes it made her feel sorry for people like Frank, with his constant phone calls about reports, warrants, codes, legislations – crime-scene handling and the endless, endless discussion of contamination. Contamination of crime scenes. Contamination of impartiality. Contamination of witnesses. Frank’s work in homicide had turned him into a physical and metaphorical germophobe. He wrapped the tasteless chicken and mayo sandwiches he took to work like they were radioactive. He wouldn’t talk about anything related to his cases, wouldn’t give her those tasty little tidbits she needed to fuel the hungry, voyeuristic thing inside her. Not until she begged him, anyway.
    Imogen was no germophobe. She got as dirty as she could in her perfect hobby. She loved the feel of grit beneath her nails from digging and digging for truth, like a happy little mole.
    After the Cherry boy, there’d been a few other half- and quarter-reward jobs, but nothing that had excited her like seeing the forensics team break earth above the boy’s grave, the dig marked out on her coordinates, on her intelligence. She solved the mystery. She caught the bad guy. She hadn’t felt that same exhilaration since. But now, sitting outside Maggie Harold’s house, Imogen believed she could feel that rush again.
    She folded the map in her lap and looked at the dusty windows of the little hovel outside Scone. Mynah birds tussled over territory on the lawn, hopping angrily in the grass, kicking up dust. It was dry out here. A nowhere place dotted with tiny towns where everyone knew everyone, punctuating huge distances where no one knew anyone at all. The house had been difficult to find, but now that she had, Imogen wasn’t leaving until she was certain the woman calling herself Eden’s biological grandmother was revealed as a fraud. One at a time, slowly but surely, Imogen would tick off all the lies of Frank’s partner, reveal her for what she really was. The missing Tanner girl.
    By the time she dropped this on the homicide department, there would be no keeping Imogen’s name out of the paper. Eden Archer would be her greatest catch.

 
    Eden’s mistakes at Rye Farm had left her with much more than a slit belly, though that was the worst of her physical injuries by far. The incision the killer made began just above her belly button and travelled upwards, deep enough to completely ruin all core strength she had previously possessed but blessedly not deep enough to spill her guts. In the violence before this injury, she had her nose broken, four teeth cracked, tendons permanently ruined in her neck and her left eye socket fractured. She compressed a disc in her lower back falling from the twine that had suspended her in the pig kill sheds.
    All of these things took time, and money, to fix. Some things Eden knew would never be right, not in the days in the hospital, or the weeks in the rehab clinic, or the hours she spent on massage tables trying to repair ruined bits of herself. Eden had trusted one of her attackers, a foolish young girl she thought she might be able to help. It would be the last time Eden let the