Dead Drop by Jack Patterson (reading cloud ebooks txt) 📕

few things in order first, but you need to go to a country where there's no extradition treaty so they don't pursue any trumped up charges. You being gone will make this case too costly to pursue.”

“So where should we go?”

“I’ve got just the place.”

CHAPTER 26

CAL COLLAPSED ONTO THE COUCH and held a bag of ice on his ribs. If he had a muscle that didn’t ache from his invigorating morning run, it hurt from the pounding he took at the hands of the assailant who attacked him in the alleyway after breakfast. He was already starting to miss Kelly, but now he wanted her home twenty minutes ago—even if he knew she’d give him a hard time about being careless. The beating wasn’t his fault, but he wondered why no one ever warned him about the Lynch family. Or maybe knowledge of their family’s power wasn’t well known beyond the docks.

He turned on the television and flipped the channels until he came to some basketball. March Madness had descended upon the rest of America and consumed the lives of sports fans who weren’t interested in solving murders. Cal had almost forgotten about the tournament.

Oregon was playing Xavier in a tense second-round matchup, and the outcome appeared destined to be determined by whichever team had the ball for the final possession. For a moment, Cal almost forgot about his injury. He sat up on the couch, rooting against one of his alma mater’s rivals. “Come on, Xavier!” he shouted, yet the second he did, he felt a tight twinge in his chest.

He grimaced as he watched the clock begin to tick away. “Come on, Musketeers!”

The sound of his phone buzzing interrupted his intense cheering for the lower-seeded team from Cincinnati. He glanced at the screen and didn’t recognize the number.

Who’s calling me now?

“Cal Murphy,” he said as he answered.

“Mr. Murphy, I’m so glad you picked up.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry. My name is Alicia Westin; I’m Sid’s sister.”

Cal leaned back on the couch. “I’m sorry about your brother, Alicia.”

“Thanks. It’s been rough on us, but we’re getting through it.”

Despite wanting to get back to the game, Cal turned the volume down on the television a few notches. Alicia’s strong English accent was a small consolation prize for getting interrupted at this point in the game. “So, how can I help you?”

“I noticed you haven’t written anything lately on the robbery. In fact, no one has. What’s going on?” She kept going without taking a breath. “The Seattle police won’t give me any answers by saying they can’t talk about an ongoing investigation. It seems odd that they're not interested in the fact that Rebecca kept pestering Sid to up their life insurance. I want some answers.”

“Slow down, Alicia. Just slow down. I might be able to help, but I want you to take a deep breath.” He waited for a moment until her shallow breathing ceased. “Are you okay now?”

“That depends on what you're about to tell me.”

“Before I answer some of your questions and tell you what’s going on, I want to know why exactly you feel like your brother’s death was a murder. What makes you think that? By all accounts from law enforcement officials, it was an armed robbery gone bad.”

“I know that’s what it looks like, but I don’t think that was really the case. The robbers escaped with a measly two hundred thousand dollars. What four guys would rob a bank for just fifty thousand each? The risk and reward equation seems off.”

“Any other reasons?”

“Sid told me about a year ago that Rebecca wouldn’t stop bugging him to up their life insurance.”

“Is that one of the reasons why he served her divorce papers?”

“No.” Alicia paused for a moment. “Rebecca was never interested in my brother really. She just wanted his money, and she used her assets to put him in a trance. I’d been telling him that for years, even before they married. He finally woke up to the truth and realized what he should have a long time ago.”

“And you feel like she wanted more money and created a plot to have him killed?”

“Yes. Sid already had a two-million-dollar life insurance policy and, unless he was lying to me, he had quite a healthy bank account through investmenting on the stock market and had more than twenty million. Rebecca would live a comfortable life if something ever happened to him. But she demanded he increase the policy to ten million.”

“Uh, huh,” Cal said as he scratched down a few notes on a pad. “And you think that extra eight million was the motivation she needed to kill him.”

“Maybe. I don't know if he ever actually increased his policy or not. I just remember hearing him complain incessantly about her nagging to get him to do it.”

“That’s an important fact. If there’s any way you can get that—”

“Mr. Murphy, do you think Rebecca’s going to tell me that now?”

“I never suggested asking her.”

The line went silent for a few seconds. “Oh, are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

“I just asked if there’s any way you can get that information. How you get it is up to you. But it sure would be helpful to know that if you’re really going to accuse your sister-in-law of a murder-for-hire plot.”

“I just can’t believe he’s gone,” she said before breaking down and crying.

Cal grew uncomfortable with her show of emotion. He hated watching his wife cry, but he could almost always do something to comfort her. But a woman he’d recently met over the phone now heaving sobs? Cal realized there was nothing more he could do for her—or nothing more he could learn from her at the moment.

“Again, Alicia, I’m sorry for your family’s loss, but I will look into this. I’m no longer the reporter assigned to this story, but I will do my best to explain this to my editor and see what he says.”

“You're not the reporter on