One Through the Heart Read Online Free Page A

tracks. One of your crew was spraying water to keep down the dust and he tracked some mud.’
    ‘But he didn’t try to hide his tracks, did he? So he knew you’d see where he walked. I think he was curious and he walked around and when you questioned him he exaggerated a little. He wanted to please you and he was trying to tell you he didn’t take anything or touch any evidence. He knows better. But what did you expect him to do when he got down there and saw what was there? Anyone would have taken a closer look. I would have.’ Hugh sighed. ‘He’s not as bad as I make him out to be sometimes. You’ve heard me talk about the problems with trying to get him straightened out, and that’s probably colored your thinking. But what’s the big deal here? Do you think Matt took something?’
    Hugh Neilley stared at Raveneau trying to figure out what this was really about. He couldn’t read anything in Raveneau’s eyes. Raveneau could be a cold sonofabitch when he wanted to be.
    Raveneau slid the case files toward the center of the table. ‘OK, let’s move to yours and Alcott’s investigation. Why did you move off of Albert Lash? What cleared him?’
    ‘The answer is we didn’t have anything that connected him to her disappearance and he had a pretty good alibi – not airtight, but better than most. He liked to work in the early morning. He’d get up, make coffee, and his housekeeper would let herself in at six thirty and make his breakfast. We interviewed the housekeeper several times and she said Lash lived by that pattern. She said he was like a clock and we used her testimony and the cook and the gardeners and all the other little people who made the great man’s house work. We mapped out his days using them and decided it was very unlikely he abducted her, took her over to Mount Tamalpais and killed her in the time frame we were looking at. For a variety of reasons we came to that conclusion, but a lot of it was verifying his statements to us through the people who worked for him.
    ‘The housekeeper got off by two thirty in the afternoon and had a son in elementary school that she was able to pick up after school every day, so she liked the early hours. She could always tell how long he’d been up by the coffee pot, how much coffee was left, how dried out the grounds were. He told us he was up a little before five that morning and working. She guessed about the same time when we asked her, and his editor in New York got an email at five fifty-seven Pacific Time.’
    He looked from Raveneau to la Rosa. He didn’t know much about her, knew she was at Vice before she came here. He didn’t particularly like the way she watched him and sat silent.
    ‘Of course, we didn’t know about a bomb shelter with a bloody cot in it back then. We were imagining her being incapacitated and then moved. The Marin coroner thought she was shot on the mountain and that’s where our ME came down too. We couldn’t see little leprechaun Lash carrying her very far so we ruled him out of moving her on the mountain. He wasn’t big enough.
    ‘We also had other reasons to believe the killing happened on the mountain. Remember, the dogs scented on a spot where the soil had residue that may have been her blood and that was after thirteen months and a winter. It wasn’t conclusive but it was corroborative from the angle we were looking at. And Lash was cooperative. You were at the house for the search, Ben. You remember the garden shed. You looked in there too, didn’t you? Did you see a hatch cover to a bomb shelter? You missed it too and you were looking for anything that would tie him in. She may have been alive on that cot underneath you when you missed a three-foot wide metal hatch covered by boards. How do you feel about that now?’
    Now Neilley felt more confident. He thought Raveneau didn’t really know what he was doing here. He obviously didn’t have any real questions about his and Alcott’s investigation.
    ‘At the