DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS Read Online Free Page B

something to settle her gaze on, then she looked directly at him. “What?” she said.
    He raised his eyebrows.
    “Stop trying to make me say something by being silent.”
    He lowered the front legs of the chair to the floor. He liked that she wasn’t easily rattled. But he wasn’t fooled by her outburst. She’d turned a favorite tactic of his back onto him. Break a silence with a noncommittal comment or an attack on the other person. But he knew how to play this game. “Okay. I’ll stop being quiet. Is there something you want to tell me?”
    Her gaze stayed on his face and her mouth turned up slightly. “No. Is there something you want to tell me?”

Chapter Two
    Ethan was startled, and intrigued. With those few words, Elaine Montgomery had managed to turn his tactic around again. She was on a mission to stay in control, to manipulate him. Well, it wasn’t going to work. This interview was not going to be easy, but it was definitely going to be interesting. He liked a challenge, and Laney Montgomery was definitely a challenge.
    “Sure,” he said. “I introduced myself earlier at the emergency room, but I think you might have been given something for pain. So in case you don’t remember, I’m Detective Ethan—”
    “I remember,” she said flatly. “You were nicer then.”
    “Delancey,” he went on as if she hadn’t interrupted. “My partner, Dixon Lloyd, and I responded to the murder of Senator Darby Sills this morning.”
    “Detective Delancey, how long are you going to keep me here?”
    He stood and stepped toward her, then propped his hip on the edge of the table, his thigh less than two inches away from her right hand. “It won’t be too long. I just want to expand on our earlier discussion. Why don’t you go through what happened from the moment you heard the noise from the sitting room? You told me that you walked in on the murderer within a couple of minutes of the sound of the first shot.”
    She scooted her chair away from him and turned it toward him. “It was probably no more than twenty-five seconds,” she corrected.
    “Twenty-five seconds,” Ethan said, jotting a note. “So what did the suspect do once he’d shot the senator?”
    “During that twenty-five seconds? I don’t know. I was opening the door and going into the sitting room.”
    Ethan sighed. He appreciated, but didn’t like, her type of witness. She wouldn’t let any fact slip by. Her account would be as accurate as she could make it. She wouldn’t voice any assumptions either, unless he specifically asked her to. “Fine. What did he do when he or she saw you?”
    “He, I think, judging by his build. He was thin, but that was about all I could tell in the dark. He turned toward me, lifted his gun hand and shot me.”
    Ethan knew the answers to a lot of these questions, from the officers on the scene, from the crime scene unit and from the few seconds he’d talked with Laney earlier, but he wanted to hear her version. “Right or left hand?”
    “Right hand.”
    “And what did you do?”
    “I saw the gun and hit the floor,” she said, touching the bandage gingerly. “Not quite fast enough, though.”
    “So you didn’t actually see him pull the trigger.”
    “No, technically that’s true.” She lifted her gaze to his and lifted one brow. “But I would like to go on record as saying that I believe the same man who shot the senator shot me.”
    Ethan laughed at Laney’s statement of the obvious. “Thanks for that insight, but that’s not what I’m asking. My question is, did he fire the weapon with one hand or did he support his gun hand with his other?”
    “I have absolutely no idea,” she responded. “I wasn’t looking at him when he shot me. Why would that even matter?”
    “Mannerisms. Sometimes we can eliminate people based on how they handle a gun.”
    “When he first raised his hand, he just held the gun out, like this.” She demonstrated. “Then I dived, he shot and I felt a burning