Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

remnants of a fraying marriage. He’d taken more than a hundred thousand dollars, which had been her inheritance from a distant and very, very rich uncle.

Sandra Berkley went up to Katelyn’s bed, where she’d been sleeping for the past three days, and called her husband to let him know that Jake had been arrested. Harper was staying in a Kingston motel, saying he needed some space to sort things out.

“Are they saying he killed our daughter?” he asked.

“No. They really won’t say why, only that he’s been arrested. I’m not sure.”

“Should we go down there?”

“No, the police say not to. They say they are working on things and the gossip around town is way out of hand.”

“I hated that guy.”

“I know.”

“I miss you,” he said.

“I miss our daughter,” she said.

Sandra hung up and thought about what Dr. Waterman had disclosed. AB blood? That was not the most common of blood types. She knew someone who had that type.

Starla Larsen did.

Sandra remembered how Katelyn once remarked on it when she and Starla had typed their blood in middle-school biology. They were cleaning the grills in the restaurant and Katelyn had wanted to talk about Starla.

“No one else in our class had AB, Mom. Only she did. Doesn’t it figure?”

Sandra wasn’t sure what her daughter was getting at. “How so?” she asked.

“She’s so special, Mom. Everything about her.”

Chapter Forty-Three

His hair slicked back with a shellacking of hair gel, Jake Damon sat on a concrete cot in one of two holding cells set up in the back of the Port Gamble Police Department. For a man arrested on charges that he’d had an outstanding DUI—a man who was likely the stalker of a teenage girl—he was remarkably composed.

“You need anything?” Chief Annie Garnett, a S’Klallam Tribe member, asked.

“Just an apology,” Jake said.

“I was thinking about a candy bar or something,” she said.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “You’ll see.”

“You have a history, and we have the IP address tying you to the emails and chats sent to Katelyn,” Annie said.

“IP address? I don’t know a thing about that. What history?”

“Bellevue,” Annie said. “We’re getting the personnel papers about your dismissal.”

Jake blew up, his neck veins popping like roots under blacktop. “That? You think that’s some big deal that got me canned?”

“It involved an inappropriate relationship with a student, Jake.”

Jake regained his composure a little and shook his head. “Boy, are you going to look stupid.”

Annie had heard that before. So far she’d never looked stupid.

“We’ll see about that,” she said.

Jake stepped up to the bars of the holding cell. “No, you will. The ‘inappropriate relationship with a student’ that got me fired was because I gave money to the kid and his mother. Their house burned down. They had nothing. I wrote ’em a few checks. It was against district policy because I didn’t go through channels. That’s why they fired me.”

“I’ll need to verify that,” Annie said, turning away.

“You’d just better,” he called out.

Annie stopped and did an about-face. “Okay, if it wasn’t you, then who was tormenting the girl next door?”

Jake looked in her eyes and shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “Your information is crap.”

Even though she was wearing a silver mini and her go-to strappy heels, Mindee Larsen couldn’t turn a single head with her good looks as she arrived at the Port Gamble Police Department. Forget that it was the dead of winter and such a getup was so, so wrong. But the truth of the matter was, no one was looking at Mindee because she was hot, pretty or anything like that at all. They watched her every move because she was the girlfriend of the man in the holding cell, an Internet stalker who’d pushed fifteen-year-old Katelyn Berkley to the brink, and then coldly shoved her over its cruel edge.

Chief Garnett led Mindee to her office. It was a comfortable space, as police chief offices go. The walls were decorated with citations and S’Klallam tribal artwork. Behind her was a bookcase full of case files—perfectly ordered and complete. Most crimes in Port Gamble were property crimes, and those were usually solved in short order.

Annie knew Mindee quite well, at least on a professional basis. It was Mindee who did the chief’s hair—color and cut. From the very beginning, the chief had liked Mindee. She liked her over-the-top sense of style. She didn’t consider herself a Native American version of RuPaul, but if Annie had the body for a silver mini she’d be shopping at Forever 21 instead of Lane Bryant at the mall.

If only.

“Annie, just so you know, Jake could not have done this,” Mindee said, planting herself in a visitor’s chair across from the chief.

The chief offered her some coffee, but Mindee declined.

“I just bleached my teeth and they’re still a little porous,” she said.

“I know you care for Jake,” Annie said. Coming from any other cop, the words might have felt condescending. Not Annie Garnett. With all that she’d been through to get where she was, Annie never forgot what it felt like to be on the sad side of things.

Mindee nodded and searched her purse for a tissue.

Just in case.

“I love Jake, yes, I do,” she said. “After Adam left me… I don’t know what I would have done without him in my life.”

“Understood,” Annie said, her slightly deep voice resonating a kind of calmness that was needed right then. On occasion, Mindee could be a bit of a train wreck and she needed to be handled with some care. “You know why he’s here. And since you’ve come in, I’d like to ask you some questions, all right?”

“He didn’t do anything,” she said quickly and decisively.

A deputy passed the open doorway. When she caught him looking at her exposed thigh, Mindee brightened a beat. Finally someone noticed how sexy she was. What more did she have to do to get any attention around Port Gamble?

“How does he get along with your kids?”

“Fine. He gets along with them