Everywhere She Turns Read Online Free PDF

She flipped through the chart and continued. “At Detective Braddock’s request I performed a priority tox screen and a brief visual assessment as soon as she arrived.”
    Shelley had told her the truth. For once.
    The bottom fell out of CJ’s stomach. Her head started to spin with emotions she couldn’t afford to feel right now.
    “There is,” Dobbins said as she prepared to open the bag, “evidence of past physical trauma, bruises from several days to more than a week old, as well as abrasions, scratches, and bruising as recent as a few hours before death.”
    CJ managed a nod. “Her ex-boyfriend beat her up pretty badly just over a month ago.” The bastard. CJ would bet anything he had done this. She turned to Braddock. “Have you arrested Ricky Banks?” If Braddock hadn’t taken that step already, he was a bigger fool than she’d thought. “You know what he did to her on a regular basis.” Banks’s mistreatment of Shelley went back more than a decade. “It’s a miracle this didn’t happen before now.”
    “I’m well aware of Shelley’s relationship with Banks,” Braddock confirmed. “He’s at the top of our suspect list.”
    He’d removed the sunglasses. She tried to read what she saw in his eyes, couldn’t. That he shifted his attention away from her scrutiny too quickly suggested there was more he had no intention of sharing.
    The outrage that always accompanied any time she spent in his presence stirred. “I want all the details, Braddock.”
    He shared a look with Dobbins. CJ’s anxiety level skyrocketed.Why didn’t he just give her the facts he had? On the flight here, she’d compiled a mental list of questions she needed to ask. Between arranging that flight and clearing her schedule at the hospital, she’d had her hands full until she’d collapsed into the seat on the plane.
    “You’re aware,” he began, choosing his words so carefully that she couldn’t possibly miss the tactic, “that there’s a lot we won’t know until the autopsy is complete.”
    That part she got. The outrage shifted into all-out fury. “But there are things you do know, like who found her? Where was she? What were the circumstances?”
Breathe
. Her mind kept telling her to look down, to just look at Shelley, but she couldn’t. Not and hold it together.
    “There are things we don’t fully understand just yet,” he confessed. “It’s complicated. In the best interest of the investigation, we’re not prepared to release certain details at this time.”
    “Are you refusing to tell me anything at all?” Could he do that? More of that anxiety and outrage coiled inside her. She needed to know, to understand how this had happened.
    “I’ll give you what I can.” Reluctance and frustration presented itself in his posture, on his face. “She was found in the woods on the west side of the intersection of Triana and Johnson. A couple of kids stumbled upon the scene just before dark on Saturday evening. A nylon rope had been used to hang her . . . by the neck. There was drug paraphernalia. But as Dr. Dobbins said, none in her blood.”
    The image of Shelley hanging from a tree in those woods invaded CJ’s mind.
    Well before becoming a doctor, CJ had been intimately familiar with murder. She’d grown up in a neighborhood where the occasional murder and the frequent robberies and assaults were more often than not a part of the norm. Her own father had been murdered. But this wasn’t the guy down the street . . . or the bastard of a father who’d slapped their mother around and terrorized his own children.
    This was Shelley. Her
baby sister
.
    CJ didn’t wait for Dobbins. She reached down, carefully opened the bag. Her heart sank.
    She stared at her sister’s ashen skin. Long honey-blond hair lay behind her head like a silk sheet. Her blue eyes, the same deep, deep blue both she and CJ had inherited from their mother, were closed in death. Her slender throat was bruised and bore angry ligature