Tell No Lies Read Online Free Page A

she could have said no.
    Only right now it seemed so wrong.
    Ian Patterson was behind bars for the attempted murder of her sister. He was suspected of having murdered two more women and was possibly responsible for the disappearances of at least three others, including a young reporter who worked for her sister.
    Augusta struggled with her guilt.
    How could she have been so wrong?
    After his arrest and her initial shock, she had fully expected them to let him go, saying it was a mistake. Her soul was dying a little with every day that passed without his release—not so much because she needed to see him, needed to confront him, or even because she had been so very, very wrong about him, but because she had been so willing to do battle with her own flesh and blood in defense of a stranger.
    And because she craved his tongue between her legs . . . even now.
    The memory of it made her yearn to slide her hand beneath the covers. Was it any wonder she couldn’t sleep? She felt like a traitor and a hussy.
    With a miserable groan, she tugged the covers over her head to block the blinking red numbers on her alarm clock. Hopefully, everything would look better in morning.
     
    6 am
     
    Morning sun glinted off the metallic roof in the distance.
    Feeling the strength of his surroundings, he anchored his small boat, glad for the day off and the quiet sunrise. Later, the marsh would be a steam bath, but right now it was serene and beautiful. Birds swooped around him, plucking insects and tiny shrimp from the surrounding waters. For all anyone knew, he was just an ordinary fisherman poling his boat along the flooded spartina flats in search of tailing redfish . . . and the blood at the bottom of his boat, beneath the blade of his knife, was from his last stringer of fish.
    There was time to do this right.
    He wasn’t in a hurry.
    Encroached upon by the sea, this place was just another castoff of humanity, abandoned, forgotten, picked away by the beaks of birds and visited by creatures whose only purposes included eating, sleeping and defecating.
    Like the Morris Island Lighthouse, you couldn’t reach it except by boat. Even then, access to the inside of the building was available only to the most agile and intrepid. The walls were high, the doors and windows long boarded up, and the trestle beside it was a huge steel skeleton, rusty and ready to come down if the winds blew just right.
    A boat whizzed by, rippling the water in its wake. Annoyed, he pulled in his line, watching the wavelets travel as far as the building’s pylons.
    Inside the decaying carcass of the building itself, nothing of value remained. Like the rest of Charleston’s ruins, it was slowly returning to nature. But the roof was intact, concealing what lay within from an aerial view, and at most, the flame-scarred brick, like the multitude of stranded boats along the shoreline, drew curious glances, but nothing more. Local fishermen turned a blind eye to it. Weekend warriors were more interested in having a beer behind the wheel of their ski boats, and the possibility of water moccasins or gators kept even the most curious in their boats.
    It made a fitting way station—until he could determine how best to reclaim his sacred ground.
    He waited for the water to calm, and the wake to pass.
    Redfish were opportunistic feeders. They lived along the edges of a channel, where the tidal currents were concentrated, positioning themselves to take advantage of the current. The trick was to know where to fish and to keep your bait on the bottom along the edge of a structure situated in the middle of a changing current. The building made a great obstructer, giving the fish a perfect spot to take advantage of the changing flow.
    That was the key. Knowing when and where to fish . . . unless you were willing to make do with trash fish.
    He wasn’t.
    He hadn’t cared too much about entombing Pamela Baker in his special place. She was trash fish. Part of a game, no more—a game