Perfect Read online

  Leaning back in her chair, she gazed at him with a mixture of disdain and frustration. “I don’t believe for one minute that he killed anyone. Now, let me ask you something, Mr. Richardson.” Ignoring Ted’s warning squeeze on her knee at her combative tone, she said, “Put yourself in my place and assume for the sake of rhetoric that I took you as a hostage and you managed to escape from me. You hide from me, but I think you’ve fallen into a deep, icy creek. From your hiding place, you watch me run down to the creek and dive into that frigid water. I dive again and again, calling your name, and when I can’t find you, you watch me stagger out of the creek and collapse in the snow. But I don’t get back on my snowmobile and go home. Instead of that, I give up. I open my soaking shirt so the cold will kill me faster, and I lean my head back and close my eyes and stay there, letting the falling snow cover my head and face . . .”

  When Julie went silent, Richardson raised his brows. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is,” she said tersely, “would you, after seeing that, believe I actually murdered someone in cold blood? Would you try to wheedle information out of me that could only get me shot down before I could prove I didn’t kill anyone?”

  “Is that what Benedict intends to do?” he demanded, leaning forward.

  “It’s what I would do,” she evaded, “and you didn’t answer my question: Would you—after you knew I tried to save your life and wanted to die when I thought I failed— try to wheedle information out of me so you could get me captured and probably killed in the process?”

  “I would feel compelled,” Richardson retorted, “to do my duty and help see that justice was done to a convicted murderer who also happens to be a kidnapper now.”

  She looked at him for a long moment and said quietly, “In that case, I can only hope that you find a donor heart because you obviously don’t have one of your own.”

  “I think that’s enough for today,” Agent Ingram intervened, his voice as pleasant as his smile. “We’ve all been up since last night when you called.”

  The Mathison family shoved to their feet in various stages of sleepless stupor. “Julie,” Mrs. Mathison said stifling an embarrassed yawn, “you’ll sleep here in your old room. You, too, Carl—Ted,” she added. “There’s no point trying to get through all those reporters again, and besides, Julie may need you with her later today.”

  * * *

  Agents Ingram and Richardson lived in the same condominium complex in Dallas; they were friends as well as co-workers. Locked in thought, they rode in silence to the motel on the outside of town where they’d been staying for a full week. Not until David Ingram pulled their sedan to a stop in front of their rooms, did he finally venture an opinion. He gave it in the same disarmingly pleasant tone that had fooled Julie into thinking he believed everything she said. “She’s covering up something, Paul.”

  Paul Richardson frowned at the peeling white numbers on the door of his room, then he shook his head, “Nope. She’s on the level. I don’t think she’s hiding a thing.”

  “Then maybe,” Ingram said sarcastically, “you’d better start thinking with your brain instead of the organ that took over as soon as she looked at you with those great big blue eyes of hers.”

  His head jerked around. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Ingram said in disgust, “that you’ve been developing an obsession with that woman ever since we got here and you started checking her out with the local citizens. Every time you learned of some new good work of hers, you got softer, every time you talked to another one of those handicapped kids she teaches, and whose parents adore her, you got in deeper. Shit, when you found out she also tutors illiterate women and sings in the church choir, you were ready to nominate her for sainthood. Tonight, every time she looked disapproving of your voice or your question, you lost your momentum. You were already biased in her favor when you only had her picture, but when you saw her in the flesh tonight, your objectivity went straight to hell.”

  That’s bullshit”

  “Really? Then suppose you tell me why you were so damned desperate to find out if she slept with Benedict She told you twice that he didn’t rape her or force her in any way to have sex with him, but that wasn’t enough for you. Why the hell didn’t you just come out and ask her if she let him screw her. Jesus,” he said in disgust, “I couldn’t believe it when you asked her if she could describe the bed linens on his bed for us, so we could try to trace the manufacturer and locate the owner of his hideout that way!”

  Richardson shot him an uncomfortable look. “Was it that obvious?” he asked, opening his car door and getting out. “I mean, do you think the family noticed?”

  Ingram got out, too. “Of course they noticed!” he snorted “Nice little Mrs. Mathison was fantasizing about smothering you with some of her cookies. Paul, use your head. Julie Mathison is no angel, she’s got a juvenile arrest record—”

  “That we wouldn’t have known about if a copy hadn’t been left in the files from the Illinois foster care authorities instead of being destroyed years ago, like it should have been,” Paul interrupted. “Furthermore, if you want to hear the truth behind Julie’s petty rap sheet, then call Dr. Theresa Wilmer in Chicago like I did, and let that shrink chew your ass off. She thought—and still thinks—that Julie is as straight and as fine as they come and always was. Be honest, Dave,” he said as they walked side by side up the path to their adjoining rooms. “Have you ever in your life seen a pair of eyes like Julie Mathison’s in your life?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a derisive snort, “Bambi had ’em.”

  “Bambi was a deer. And his eyes were brown. Hers are blue—like translucent dark blue crystals. My kid sister had a doll with eyes like that once.”

  “I do not believe this conversation!” Ingram exploded in a low voice. “Listen to you for God’s sake!”

  “Relax,” Paul sighed, raking his fingers through his hair. “If you’re right—if she helped Benedict in his original escape or if she gives us any reason to believe she’s concealing information about him now—I’ll be the first one to read her Miranda, and you know it.”

  “I know,” Ingram said, shoving his key into the lock and opening his door while Richardson did likewise. “But Paul?”

  Paul leaned back from his own doorway. “Yeah?”

  “What are you going to do if the only thing she’s guilty of is sleeping with Benedict?”

  “Find the bastard and shoot him myself for seducing her.”

  “And if she’s innocent of that as well as collusion with him, then what?”

  A slow smile tugged at Paul’s mouth. “In that case, I’d better find myself a heart she’ll approve of and get myself a transplant. Did you see the way she looked at me earlier tonight, Dave? It was almost as if she knew me somehow, as if we knew each other. And liked each other.”

  “There are women all over Dallas who know you in the biblical sense of the word, and they all like your great big—”

  “You’re just jealous because that gorgeous blonde who used to be married to her brother won’t give you a second look when she comes over to the house,” Richardson interrupted with a grin.

  “For a dinky little town,” Ingram reluctantly agreed, “there are some highly unusual women here. Too bad they don’t have a decent motel.”

  45

  I DON’T BELIEVE WE HAVE to go through this just to have some peace and privacy!” Julie cried in helpless exasperation late that afternoon as Ted flipped on the revolving lights and siren on his patrol car and floored it, racing away from her parents’ house beneath the banner stretched across Main Street that read WELCOME HOME, JULIE, with the press in hot pursuit. “How am I ever going to teach my classes when I go back to work on Monday? When I went home today, I got mobbed by reporters before I could get inside the house. While I was in there, the phone never stopped ringing. Flossie and Ada Eldridge are in seventh heaven with all the excitement to watch and gossip about next d