Read Online Smash Cut by Sandra Brown - Free Book Online Page B

at all on the flight back?”
Julie’s cheeks grew warm at the memory of what she’d done on the flight back. “Not long and not well. But I’m going to bed now, so I’ll be right as rain tomorrow.”
After a slight hesitation, Kate asked, “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“I mean about Paul.”
“I know what you meant.” Julie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m coping. What choice do I have?”
“You should get some grief counseling.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“As if losing Paul wasn’t enough, the guy who killed him is still free.”
“I met with the detectives this afternoon, even before I came home. They made no headway while I was in Paris.”
“It’s never this hard to solve a mystery on TV.”
Julie smiled in spite of the grim subject. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Rest well.”
Julie set her cell phone on the bedside table and picked up the TV remote. She was just in time to catch herself on the news, being ambushed by reporters as she left the unproductive meeting with Detectives Sanford and Kimball, who’d seemed more upset over her sudden departure from the country than by their failure to apprehend Paul’s killer.
“Don’t leave like that again,” Sanford had told her sternly. “We didn’t know you were gone until it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late to stop you from leaving.”
“Was I supposed to ask permission?”
“You must admit it didn’t look good,” Kimball had said.
“To whom?”
The detectives hadn’t answered that. Instead Sanford had asked, “What was so important in Paris that it couldn’t keep?”
She’d told them about the artist who was all the rage. “Granted, the timing was inconvenient. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have chosen to go during this period of mourning, but a narrow window of opportunity opened up, and I needed to get the jump on my competition, which is every other art gallery in the country.”
It was a valid excuse for the sudden trip, and they’d accepted it without argument, never guessing that the real reason for the trip had been the flight home.
She’d had plenty of questions for them, but they all boiled down to one: Has there been a breakthrough? And their roundabout answers amounted to one succinct reply: No.
“However,” Kimball had said, “we’ve got experts looking at the security videos from cameras in the hotel lobby. They record a frame every four seconds.”
“Like in a bank.”
Yes, they’d said.
“But what good will they do? We don’t know what he looks like.”
“No, we don’t,” Sanford had said. “So it’s a long, tedious process of elimination.”
“I’m afraid I’m still not following.”
Sanford had explained. “We’ve come up dry with hotel guests and employees. We’re still interviewing, but so far, nothing’s sparked. We feel almost certain our boy walked in, did the deed, walked out.”
Julie had looked at them in turn.
“It’s mere speculation at this point, but that’s what we’re going on,” Kimball had said.
Sanford had picked up. “We figure that, after he shot Mr. Wheeler, he ran into the stairwell where he’d left his shoes, along with a bag of some kind. Suitcase, duffel, something that wouldn’t attract attention in a hotel.
“He whipped off the mask, the glasses, and the tracksuit. He had on clothes underneath so that all he had to do was put on his shoes. He stashed his disguise in his suitcase or whatever, ran down the stairs to the lobby, and walked out of the hotel before anyone realized what had happened and security put a clamp on anyone leaving.”
Julie didn’t remember the elevator’s descent to the lobby, but she remembered those several minutes of sheer havoc after the doors opened and the people waiting for the elevator were exposed to the horror inside. Her bending over Paul, the blood forming a lake on the marble floor, and the distress of the other three passengers. That grisly scene had created pandemonium. The man responsible for it could easily have walked out unnoticed.
Unnoticed at the time, but caught on the security