Racing the Devil Read Online Free Page A

trying to set myself up in the private detective business, it seemed only natural for me to move in with Jay.
    All right, maybe not natural, but right. It was a good trade. I got cheap room and board, a place to board my horses—a palomino quarter horse named Tex and a black Tennessee Walker called Crockett—and unlimited use of Jay’s swimming pool. He got someone to take care of him.
    The boyfriends came and went, but I was his family.
    I flipped open my phone again. The battery was low, so I dug through my pockets for a couple of coins, went back inside the motel, and called home.
    Jay picked up on the first ring.
    “It’s me,” I said.
    He let out an audible breath. “Thank God. Where have you been? I didn’t worry when you didn’t come home, but then the police were here, and . . . They went through your room. I couldn’t help it. They had a warrant.”
    Worse and worse. If they had enough on me for a judge to issue a search warrant, it was looking very bad indeed.
    “What did they take? Do you know?”
    “Hair samples. From your comb. They looked through all your clothes. Something about fibers and bloodstains. And they dusted for fingerprints. What a mess.” He was quiet for a moment. “They seemed especially interested in your theatrical makeup.”
    It had been years since I’d done any community theatre, but I’d found that a little facial hair could change a man’s entire appearance. Back when I worked undercover in vice, it came in handy. It still did.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call Frank and see what’s going on. If they’ve got DNA, this’ll be over with in no time.”
    “God, I hope so.” I could hear the mixture of anxiety and relief in his heavy sigh. “How can they even think you’d be involved in a thing like this?”
    “Somebody stole my truck last night. No, night before last.” I still wasn’t clear on the timing. I’d lost a day at least, but I wasn’t sure how. Had the cloying sweetness of the wine concealed something more sinister than fruit? “I’m sure this’ll all be cleared up soon.”
    But something niggled at the back of my mind. I hadn’t been in Hermitage on Friday night. I didn’t know the murdered woman, and I’d never visited the Cedar Valley Motel.
    So why did the police have my fingerprints?
    MY NEXT CALL went to Frank Campanella, Metro Homicide. For seven years, he was my partner. Now he was dusting my room for prints. It was his job, but the thought left a hollow feeling in my belly just the same.
    He answered on the third ring. “Campanella here.”
    “It’s me.”
    “Jared. Where the hell are you?”
    “Everybody wants to know where I am. Frank, you know I didn’t do this.”
    There was a long pause. When he spoke, there was a tinge of anger in his voice. “You want to hear what we’ve got so far?”
    “You know I do.”
    “We’ve got hair and semen. It’ll be a few weeks before we get a sure DNA match, but serology results show it’s your blood type. AB negative. I don’t have to tell you how rare that is.”
    He didn’t. It was a trait my brother, Randall, and I had both inherited from our father. “Okay. So it’s rare. There’s still plenty of guys in Nashville with AB negative blood.”
    “We’ve got your fingerprints. We’ve got your name all through her Palm Pilot. We’ve got a message from you on her voice mail telling her she’s one dead bitch if she doesn’t quit screwing around. We’ve got a witness puts your truck at the crime scene, and the receptionist there says a man of your approximate height and weight checked into that room. Guy had a beard, but we all know you wear disguises.”
    “You think I’m dumb enough to leave my hair and semen all over a crime scene? Or forget to wipe my prints? You think I’m dumb enough to leave a threat like that on tape?”
    “I wouldn’t have thought so. But it’s a crime of passion, which as we both know, makes men stupid.”
    “You really think I did