Fatal Intent - Jamie Jeffries Page 0,58
attorneys in the case. The police. She’d have to wait until tomorrow to start digging for that information, since it was already too late at night to reach anyone who could help her.
Still puzzling over that mystery, Alex turned her efforts to finding out what she could about Jim Atkins. A simple Google search turned up over eight million hits, and Alex despaired of finding him unless his picture appeared. Even going to the images section seemed an overwhelming task. If she found his picture there, she had no guarantee of it leading anywhere with substantial information. After viewing page after page of pictures of men named Jim Atkins, Jim Adkins, Jim Akins and the occasional woman—who knew what they were doing in the results?—Alex left the site open and went to bed with sore, red eyes.
When she woke the next morning, something had clicked for Alex in her sleep. It couldn’t be, of course. The timing didn’t work out. Whatever her subconscious brain had connected during sleep, Harvey Lloyd’s dead girlfriend couldn’t have been her mother if the woman had been pregnant only five years ago.
Her mother would have been…forty? Thirty-nine at least, depending on the date of the murder. So it was possible, just not probable. She dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. Not that she wished her mother dead, but a break in that investigation would have been welcome. She still didn’t know where to start.
It was still early, so Alex ate breakfast, showered, and then started her search through the pages of Jim Atkins images again, waiting for nine a.m. when her friend in the Pima County sheriff’s department, Lt. Tom Wells, might be in his office, even on a Sunday. She hoped he would introduce her to someone in Pinal County she could use as a resource for locating the information about Harvey Lloyd’s murder victim.
Alex was starting on her second cup of coffee when she found Jim Atkin’s picture. She sucked in her breath, bringing with it a scalding sip of coffee. She choked, sputtered and jumped up to clean up the coffee she’d sprayed across the table and her laptop. Near-disaster averted, she looked again. Yes, that was definitely the man she’d seen leading the meeting.
She clicked on the picture, and then on the Visit Page button. Unbelievably, her luck held when it took her to his professional profile on a popular business-oriented social media site. What shocked her even more was the fact that according to his profile, Jim Atkins was a senior park ranger at Saguaro National Park.
How in hell had a bigoted person like the leader of the Patriots hidden himself in the mostly-liberal Park Service? Why would he jeopardize his job by involving himself in an organization that could at best be called radical, if not criminal? It made no sense to Alex. Maybe the Park Service wasn’t as liberal as she’d thought. She knew from her experience talking with and even dating some Park Service employees, especially Dylan, they were almost universally concerned about the environment, and she’d never met one she would call racist. Yet, Jim Atkins clearly was racist.
She wondered if Dylan knew him. It would be a long shot. Dylan hadn’t served at Saguaro, and hadn’t been back in Arizona for long. Still, the Park Service was like a smallish town. It seemed everyone knew everyone else. Maybe they had conventions or something. Thinking of Dylan made her remember they’d been missing each other with their messages for over a week, and he still deserved an apology from her for running out on him last weekend.
She looked at her cell phone. Eight-thirty on a Sunday morning. If she knew the boys, they’d be up and would have made sure Dylan was up to make their weekend pancake breakfast. She picked up her piece of cold toast, the meager breakfast she’d fixed to go with her coffee. The first bite was like ashes in her mouth.
What was she thinking? She could be with Dylan and the boys right now, laughing, making the pancakes and basking in family love. Instead, she was alone, estranged from her dad, incommunicado with her Nana and Dylan. She’d cut herself off from everyone she loved. She had to fix this, and fast.
Full of love and regret, she dialed Dylan’s number. This was too important for a text. A sleepy-voiced Dylan answered, and when she heard his voice, Alex choked on her tears.
“Dylan?” Her timorous question was barely audible, even to her.
“Alex,