Read Online Thicker Than Water by MAGGIE SHAYNE - Free Book Online Page A

he figured the cops wouldn’t have had any reason to note her plate number. He looked at some of the cars more closely. The dark sedan in front of the building hadn’t been there before he’d gone inside. It was, he assumed, what the cops had driven here, and it was empty. He strained his eyes for a closer look. Yep. Crown Victoria.
    Quickly he led Jones to the Jeep, opened the driver’s door. Hell, she hadn’t even locked it, and the keys were dangling from the switch.
    He glanced back at her. “Go on, get in and get the hell out of here.”
    She nodded, but she didn’t get in. She gripped his eyes with hers instead. Big, brown and scared right now. It almost knocked the wind out of him. He had never seen Julie Jones look like that. Never.
    â€œYou’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” she asked him.
    Shit, for a second he thought she was going to thank him for helping her out. He was an idiot. “Not until I know what’s going on, Jones. But believe me, I will find out.”
    â€œDon’t,” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with you.”
    â€œBut it does have something to do with you, doesn’t it?”
    She pursed her lips, then turned away and got into her Jeep. He closed the door as she started it up. Then he yanked the door open again. “Put on your seat belt, Jones.”
    Pursing her lips, she pulled the belt around her, yanked her door closed and popped the clutch. The Jeep jerked, nearly stalled, but managed to take off. He heard her grinding gears and winced. Poor freaking car. If the transmission survived long enough for the kid to get her license, it would be a miracle.
    When her taillights were out of sight, Sean jogged into the alley, grabbed his bag of garbage and then ran a block to where he’d left his car. He didn’t relax until he got home, safe and sound. And even then, the questions kept going round and round in his mind. What was Julie Jones hiding? And what did she have to do with the murder of Harry Blackwood?
    * * *
    Julie pounded the steering wheel with a fist. She hadn’t found the documents. There hadn’t been anything there with her name on it, but that didn’t mean a thing. Any one of those dozens of folders and reams of papers could have been the one she was looking for, but she hadn’t had time to check them out.
    What if the police found the truth in that mess? What if they found out about Dawn?
    God, if it hadn’t been for that bastard MacKenzie showing up, she could have scooped them all up, thrown them into a trash bag from Harry’s kitchen and carried them home.
    If it hadn’t been for MacKenzie showing up, I’d have been caught there, red-handed, an inner voice whispered. I never would have found that fire escape in time to avoid the police, much less had the gumption to go down it in the dark.
    Oh, God, the police. She imagined them—the two officers, and that bitch Detective Jackson—were gathering up the papers and documents and videotapes one by one, even now. They would probably sit in a roomful of cops and go over all of them. If they found out the truth, her life would be destroyed. They would take Dawn away from her. Track down her birth mother’s relatives—the very same people Lizzie had been compelled to run away from all those years ago—and hand her over to them.
    Dawn.
    Shivering all over, Julie kept steering the Jeep with one hand, dipping into her jacket pocket with the other. She pulled out the two photographs she had found on the floor, both of them taken in a place so jarringly familiar that the sight of them had almost floored her. They’d been taken at Young Believers’ compound.
    She looked at them now, tried to make out the faces in the group shots. And finally she realized why one of those faces seemed so familiar. The young man with the three-piece suit and the automatic rifle was Harry