Love Inspired Suspense April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 by Laura Scott (free e reader .TXT) 📕

hot shower and clean clothes to make a woman feel better. She tossed the clothes she’d worn in the trash. There was no way they could be salvaged. She decided she didn’t need the sling anymore and tossed it, as well.

She dried her hair, touched her lips with gloss and decided she’d do. Liam hadn’t hired a glamorous model. He’d hired a trained operative, and that’s what he’d get.

Head in the game was what she needed. Anything else was off the table.

Liam studied the two whiteboards he had been keeping for the last month. On it were pictures of the victims, the survivors and the bus driver, with family members of each. Notes were scrawled beneath each picture with arrows connecting individuals to each other.

Above each picture was a label. Accidental. Natural. Homicide. Living. A map was taped to a second board, detailing where the victims had died, complete with names, dates and times. A drowning death at a beach. A short circuit resulting in a house fire. A fall from an apartment balcony. Three very different kinds of deaths, ruled accidents by the authorities.

But he knew better.

When he found proof, those labels would switch to homicide. Even if the police didn’t buy in to the theory, he knew it. He felt it in his gut, and he trusted it just as he had while leading his unit in Afghanistan. Call it instinct or intuition or whatever—it had never let him down.

Should he remove the pictures of the survivors’ family members? No way would they be involved in the deaths. They understood just how precious those lives were.

He shook his head in answer to his question. Those families were part of the whole, and if he was going to understand what was going on, he needed to see the whole of it.

Maybe if he mixed up the pictures, moved those of the victims and interspersed them with the remaining survivors?

He put thought to action, but the new juxtaposition didn’t shake anything loose. What wasn’t he seeing? He knew it was there, if only he were smart enough to make sense of it.

He and Paige had stumbled onto something yesterday. The killer was no longer trying to make it look like an accident.

Mentally he retraced their steps. First to Danny’s parents. There was open hostility from Mr. Howard, but Liam didn’t peg him as the killer. Grief over his son and then his wife had clouded his mind, but he wasn’t a murderer.

Nothing there.

Then...what?

It couldn’t go on. It wasn’t just his life, but those of the other survivors. It occurred to him that there were now two classifications of survivors—those of the original accident and those remaining after three had recently died. Four, he corrected himself. Sam Newley, too, was one of the original survivors.

What was Sam’s place in this? Logic said he didn’t have one. He’d died before the first accident/murder took place.

Liam had put up a picture of Sam, anyway. As an afterthought, he’d included Sam’s younger brother. It wouldn’t hurt to pay him a visit. Maybe Sam had said something to his brother before his death that would jog a memory loose in Liam’s mind. At this point, he was willing to try anything.

Though he’d talked with most of the other survivors about whether anyone had been following them or had tried to harm them, he’d come up empty and had only succeeded in scaring them. He couldn’t regret it, though. They were right to be scared. Maybe that would cause them to take extra precautions.

The pictures started to blur. His thoughts cycled over and over, a loop he seemed unable to break. What wasn’t he seeing?

The question tormented him until he turned his back to the board and pressed his fingers to his temples. The right piece in the right place would explain everything, only he wasn’t seeing it.

If only he could remember something, anything, to make sense of what was happening. He pulled out a notebook and pen from his desk. Computers were great, but sometimes writing things out helped to clarify them. He’d done the same when he was faced with a problem while serving in Delta.

He started with the morning of the accident. Methodically, he went through the events of getting ready. Having the breakfast he didn’t want but that his mother insisted he eat. Driving to school. Attending the pep rally before the game. Exchanging high fives with the players and other students. Eating lunch in the cafeteria because there wasn’t time to go off campus. And then the bus ride to the game.

What had he been wearing? Oh yeah. His letterman sweater. That was a given, even though it had been far too hot for the heavy garment on a day where the humidity and the temperature each topped eighty-five. Khakis. An off-brand pair of sneakers because his parents couldn’t afford a name brand and refused to buy him a pair despite his claims that everyone was wearing them. That had been a sore spot between them.

Looking back, he wondered why it had been so important that he wear a trendy pair of sneakers. Remembered shame filled him as he recalled the hot words he’d shouted to his mother and father for not giving in to his demands. He’d been unbearably arrogant and now marveled they’d ever put up with him.

Nothing was too small to overlook, so he recorded everything, even his capitulation on removing his sweater, acknowledging that it really was too hot.

He described each of the kids on the bus in as much detail as he could summon. Snippets of conversation appeared in his mind, and he transcribed them to paper as accurately as he could.

He shook his head as he called up the foolish dialogue that went on between his teammates and the cheerleaders. Light flirting mixed with some bruised feelings when a warm smile wasn’t returned or a coy flip of the hair was ignored. The players were full of themselves, and the girls responded to the