4 The Marathon Murders Read Online Free PDF

scabbard
attached to my belt and answered.
    “What?” It carried the sound of
disbelief. “Here, tell Greg about it.”
    I took the phone and stuck it to my
ear. “What’s happened?”
    “I was followed over here to the
nursing home,” Kelli said. “The guy was pretty sharp. I’m trained for
anti-surveillance, and I tried a couple of elemental maneuvers to shake him. He
stuck right with me. I didn’t want it to be obvious that he’d been made. Since
I didn’t care who knew where I was going, I ignored him as long as possible. I
tried to get a license number, but he wouldn’t cooperate.”
    “Do you have any idea who it was?”
    “None whatever.” The words came across knife-edge sharp. “But I’d sure as hell like to find
out.”

Chapter 5
     
    “What do you make of it?” Jill asked as we pulled into the
parking lot near our office. “Who could it have been?”
    “I don’t know, unless Warren has
some competition.”
    “Be serious, Greg.”
    “Okay. It could relate to this
case, of course. But knowing her background, it might be something else
entirely.”
    “You say ‘knowing her background,’
but what do we really know about her?”
    I smiled as I got out of the car and
went around to open her door. “You ask good questions,
babe. I think it’s time we learned who Miss Kelli Kane really is.”
    Back in the office, I got on the
computer and did a quick check for Kelli Kane in Seattle. It brought up
nothing.
    “Her mother must have been a
Liggett and married a Kane,” Jill said. “Could we track it from this end?”
    “If Kelli’s forty- five, that would probably put her parents’ marriage back in
the late fifties. We could ask our newspaper buddy, Wes Knight, to look into
it, but I doubt their computerized files go back that far.”
    “What if we just ask him to do a
search on Kelli Kane?”
    “If she grew up in Seattle, they
won’t likely have anything, unless it has a Nashville tie-in. But it’s worth a
try.”
    I caught Wes at the newspaper office,
and he agreed to do a search for any stories involving Kelli Kane. I had fed
him enough news tips that he was usually willing to help us out.
    While waiting to hear back from
Wes, we ran a check on Pierce Bradley’s sister, Patricia Cook. We found her at a
Hartsville address. Her husband, A. B. Cook, was listed as an officer at the
local bank. I called the Cook’s home number, which was the one listed in
Bradley’s cell phone. Patricia answered. I identified myself and asked if she
might be able to help me find her brother.
    “Why’s a detective looking for
him?” she asked. “He in trouble?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “What’s he done?”
    “Nothing that I
know of. I just need to get some information from him.”
    “Well, I can’t help you. I have no
idea where he is.”
    Her tone indicated she not only
didn’t know where he was, she didn’t give a damn, either.
    “Mind telling me when you last saw
him, Mrs. Cook?”
    “Mr. McKenzie, it’s a personal
matter that I don’t care to go into, but my brother and I have not been on very
good terms of late. The last I saw of him was when he stormed out of here
Monday afternoon.”
    “You haven’t heard from him since
and have no idea where he went?”
    “That is correct.”
    Obviously, this was getting
nowhere. I thanked her and hung up. When I repeated the conversation for Jill,
she shook her head.
    “That could be the reason he didn’t
show up at the nursing home Monday night.”
    I agreed. “If he was all bent out
of shape, he might have decided to hell with it, cut out and got soused.”
    “If he was a
drinker.”
    I'd had some less than stellar
experiences with alcohol during my younger days, but I had long since learned
imbibing was best pursued in moderation. Not everyone followed that course,
though. I thought about contacting Mrs. Nelson at Allied Construction again,
but she probably didn't know anymore about Bradley’s drinking habits than she
did my own. While