Cover Your Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

easily caught and carried away. “Maybe one of the tour buses will drop off nearby. I’d take hungry tourists now.”
    Diamond studs winked from Colleen’s ears. “One can hope.”
    “Go ahead and start handing out the candles. The sun will be setting soon and you can light the candles. It will look good for the media as well.”
    “Will do.”
    Rachel’s hands trembled slightly when she shuffled through her papers wondering again if she’d made the right decision. This night had a greater potential for disaster than success.
    Colleen nudged Rachel’s arm with her elbow. “Relax. This is going to go well.”
    Being right didn’t guarantee success. “Let’s hope.”
    “Keep it simple. You are a good speaker, you have passion and your supporters will respond.”
    “My supporters.” A survey of the crowd stoked her worry. “You mean the rag-tag bunch we’ve strong-armed or bribed?”
    Colleen laughed. “That’s right. They will make up for their numbers with passion.”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “No. But we can pretend.” Colleen moved toward her friend, a smile on her face.
    Rachel dropped her gaze to her talking points. Stick to the facts. Add emotion. Eye contact.
    The facts were: thirty years ago a young mother, Annie Rivers Dawson, had been brutally murdered. Annie’s younger sister had arrived for a visit and discovered the house covered in blood and Annie’s newborn wailing in her crib. Police had been summoned. No body had been found but police concluded Annie could not have survived such blood loss. The case had gone unsolved for three months.
    The public had been in a panic knowing a young woman and new mother from a good neighborhood had been brutally murdered. The press had put tremendous pressure on the cops. There’d been extensive searches for the body until finally a tip led cops to the remains of a woman wearing Annie’s clothes and jewelry. The outcry for justice grew louder. Even the governor had weighed in on the case.
    Rachel’s client, Jeb Jones, had been a handyman in Nashville at the time of Annie’s death. He’d had an eighth grade education, was considered a good, if not, an inconsistent worker who drank heavily at times, and had been married with a nine-year-old son. He’d never made much money but he got by. And then one night cops, acting on a tip from a paid informant, had searched the trunk of Jeb’s ’71 Cutlass sedan and found a bloody tire iron. Jeb had been arrested. Under interrogation, he’d confessed, though within twenty-four hours he had recanted. The blood testing available at the time, crude by today’s standards, had indicated the two blood samples on the tire iron matched both Annie’s and Jeb’s types.
    Further investigation revealed that Jeb had known the victim. He’d worked in her apartment building and witnesses had later said he had been caught staring at Annie once or twice.
    His trial was set a month after his arrest and it lasted five days. Dozens testified that Jeb had a drinking problem and had cheated on his wife. Though Jeb had never denied he was a bad father and husband, he swore that he’d not killed Annie. He didn’t know how the tire iron ended up in his car.
    Rachel wouldn’t discuss science tonight but would stick with her emotional plea to the public: we need to pressure the cops for a DNA test.
    Christ, Rachel, these people couldn’t care less.
    Her brother’s voice all but hissed as she stared at the uninspired crowd and her stomach knotted another twist. She might not muster passion in this group, but the right television airtime could turn up the heat on the cops.
    The news van arrived and Rachel now coveted Colleen’s smoothness. Rachel had no soft edges. Life had sharpened those edges into razors.
    As the news crew unloaded a camera and the reporter checked her lipstick and hair, Rachel scanned the crowd one last time hoping for a flicker of excitement. Off to the left she spotted a man she’d missed the