Fatal Secrets - Desiree Holt Page 0,11

body was discovered on the outskirts of Helena by some kids looking for a place to get drunk or smoke weed. She was lying on the ground in a weed-infested patch of gravel between two deserted warehouses, right at the edge of town. According to the autopsy report, she had been strangled.

The police asked around Helena, but no one remembered seeing her after she left work. There were so many loose threads. Had she had a conflict with someone at work? Stepped into something in one of the high-profile criminal cases they were trying? Discovered someone’s volatile secret? Warren Craig and the police went through her calendar and the cases she’d been working on, but anything that popped died for lack of evidence. Someone floated the idea she was meeting with a person who had information on a case she was researching, but doing that wasn’t part of her job.

It royally pissed Zoe off that no one in a position of power was pushing this. Something definitely smelled wrong, and one of these days she’d find out what it was. She would not let Justine’s murder lie forever in the cold case files.

A lot of people besides Warren had tried to keep the story going for a while. Drake Temple, reporter for the Helena paper. Cal Woodrow, who ran the local public defender’s office. John Garcia, a young attorney also on Warren Craig’s staff. Even Craig’s admin. But whoever had done this had made themselves completely invisible. And, she was sure, with some well-placed help.

Zoe could still feel the pain after all these years, the angst of those days while the search was going on and then the despair and aguish when the body was found. Craig had called her then sent someone to bring her to the medical examiner’s office. He had told her he could do the identification, but she insisted on seeing the body for herself. It was the only way she could be convinced Justine was indeed dead. And all of his sympathy and respect for her friend didn’t ease the pain at all.

Her anger that the case was closed so fast had spilled over in every direction. No matter how people assured her every effort was made to find the killer, she never believed anyone. Justine was a good person, maybe a little brash but not someone to awaken that kind of rage in anyone. She haunted Warren Craig’s office and the police department, until Craig finally took her aside and told her in the nicest way possible, but firmly, that while the case would remain open, it was now officially a cold case until and unless something turned up to change that. In ten years, nothing had although at least once a year she visited the Helena police department to rattle some cages.

The continued lack of results plus her experience as a crime reporter had given her the incentive to write her first book on an unsolved case. When that was a mild success, her publisher had asked for another one. And now she finally had the courage to dig into Justine’s case. This time, no one was going to stop her.

Maybe.

Because when she got to her apartment and unlocked the door, the first thing she saw was a sheet lying on her living room floor with big splotches of red. In the center of the sheet was a female, with its throat cut and red staining the front. The sight froze her in place. She’d seen dead bodies, of course, as part of some stories she’d covered, but she realized as soon as she swallowed her panic that this wasn’t a human body. And the red wasn’t blood. It was a dummy of some kind, and the red came from paint. As she made herself walk closer, she realized the color was off. It was paint. That didn’t, however, lessen the impact of the words someone had written with a brush.

Shut it down or this could be you.

She backed up to the entryway and set her things down on the floor, trying not to shake. First her car, now this. She needed to call Warren Craig. Maybe this would make him or someone take another look, after all this time, at Justine’s disappearance. After all, it had to be connected, right? Nothing else she was working on would raise this kind of response.

But it was aimed directly at her, a fact that made her start to shake. She was trying to figure out