An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (best beach reads .txt) 📕

who told me about the job opening at the bakery. She even gave me a reference. She was such a nice girl, and she was so happy about being a mom. What kind of monster kills a pregnant girl?”

“She was pregnant?” I exclaimed. Nothing in the report Stein indicated had mentioned that.

“Yeah,” Davis nodded. “She had just found out. She was so excited about it, always talking about how her deadbeat ex-boyfriend Ian was gonna step up and be a dad. If you ask me, that SOB is the one who killed her.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked. The report had mentioned an ex-boyfriend, but they had broken up a few weeks prior, and he’d had an alibi, so the police had quickly cleared him.

“Things weren’t good between him and Josie,” Davis explained. “Josie caught him cheating on her, and they had this big, messy breakup like a month before she died. She found out she was pregnant after they had already broken up, and she told me that she was going to tell him about it and make him marry her. I told her she was nuts, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“Did she ever tell him?” I asked. The more details I heard, the more suspect the ex-boyfriend sounded.

“I don’t know,” Davis scoffed bitterly. “Someone slashed her throat three days after that. Doesn’t that seem like a pretty big coincidence?”

“It does,” I frowned.

“Finally,” Davis huffed. “Someone who doesn’t have their head stuck up their own butt. I kept telling the cops that Ian had something to do with it, but they wouldn’t listen.”

“Let me guess,” I muttered. “He had a bunch of pictures up on social media that conveniently placed him somewhere else during the time the crime took place?”

“Yeah,” Davis scowled. “How did you know? He posted a bunch of pictures of himself with some girl out on his boat that morning. Does that mean something?”

I exchanged a frustrated look with Jase. Once again, we’d come upon a case where the most likely suspect had an airtight alibi, backed up with photo evidence.

“It might,” I nodded. “You’ve been a really big help, Mr. Davis.”

“Nah, it’s nothing,” he shook his head. “I just want whoever did this to get caught. Josie was one of the few good people in this world, man. She didn’t deserve that.”

I smiled at him sadly before standing up to leave.

“I’ll come back and let you know as soon as we solve this case,” I promised.

“Thanks.” He nodded as he got up to show us out. Once Jase and I were standing outside again, he opened his mouth as if to say something. After a few seconds, though, he just nodded awkwardly before closing the door.

“That was rough,” Jase muttered as we made our way back down the stairs.

“Yeah.” I nodded.

“If the pattern continues,” Jase sighed. “I’m guessing we’re going to find some connection between Ian and a different crime. Ryan Rothschild was connected to the Rutherford case. Shane was connected to this case, which means Ian will probably be connected to a different one, right?”

“Probably, but what the hell does this mean?” I grumbled in frustration. It was like some seriously screwed-up version of a chain email. “We need to call Stein and have him find out who Ian is and see what he can dig up about him.”

“All right,” Jase said as he fished his phone out of his pocket. I walked silently back to the car beside him as he called Stein and asked him for the information. Once we were back inside in the car, I leaned back in my seat and tried to make sense of everything that had happened so far. It seemed like the deeper we looked into this, the more questions we had without getting any closer to the truth.

“Great, thanks,” I heard Jase say before he ended the call and dropped his phone onto the center console between us. “Stein said he’ll get right on it and call us when he’s got something.”

“Okay,” I sighed. We still had no idea how all the cases were connected. Shane, for some reason, had the address of a crime scene hidden within the depths of his computer, but it was the wrong crime. What did Josie and Ian’s domestic drama have to do with him? It was as though the pieces of a puzzle had all been scattered and put back together in the wrong places.

It had scarcely been five minutes before Jase’s phone went off with a loud buzz.

“That was fast,” I muttered as I plucked the phone off of the console and answered the call. I put it on speaker so we’d both be able to hear Stein.

“Hello?” Jase called. “What did you find?”

“A lot, actually,” Stein replied. “Turns out your suspect is quite the socialite. His full name is Ian Brooks. He’s the son of a fairly renowned neurosurgeon. It didn’t take long to find pictures of Josie with him on his social media platforms. It was just as you said, too. He posted a bunch of pictures of himself on a boat the morning that Josie was killed.”

“So he matches the current pattern,” Jase replied.

“That he does,” Stein agreed. “What’s more, he’s having another party tonight. If you want to talk to him, that’ll probably be a good opportunity. I’ll send the information over to you now.”

“Thanks, Stein,” I replied. I wasn’t confident that this wouldn’t just lead us on another wild goose chase, but we had to follow whatever lead we could.

“No problem,” he responded. “I’ll let you two go now. See you back at the office.”

“Right, bye,” I replied before ending the call. I watched as Jase pulled his laptop out of his bag and started to look through the information that Stein had forwarded to him.

“The party’s tonight at eight,” he informed me. “On a yacht.”

“A yacht?” I scoffed as I took the tablet from him. Displayed on the screen was a post from one of Ian’s social media accounts. He was