The Best Victim (Kindle Serial) Read Online Free PDF Page A

truth from disparate pieces. “You said ‘we’ before. ‘Until we catch’ the person who killed Rachel. So that means you need my help, right? It’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
    Remembering his recent access to FBI records, she ventured yet another guess. “You know about me, what I do, and you think I can help you somehow.”
    “Something like that,” he admitted.
    “ Exactly like that, and if you want my help, you’re going to have to answer my questions like you promised, Durant. Or whoever the hell you are.”
    “They might’ve drummed me out of the bureau, but they didn’t take my name. It’s Brent Durant, just like I told you.”
    She wouldn’t bet on it, but right now something else he’d said pricked her attention. “Drummed you out? I thought you said you were suspended.”
    “It started out that way. But when they figured out I’d never stop, they made it permanent.”
    She digested this new information, wondering if this man ever opened his mouth without spewing lies or half-truths. “ Never stop what ?”
    He slowed to turn onto the same state road she would have taken if she’d gone to visit Rachel, as she should have. As Lauren stroked the dog on her lap, she struggled to keep her head above the sense of unreality rising like an icy tide, threatening to drown her. She had nearly forgotten what she’d asked him when he finally deigned to answer.
    “I never stopped ignoring my assigned cases and looking into suicides across the country. Looking for connections where nobody else sees them.”
    “What sort of connections?”
    “Younger women—all blond and attractive—with no history of depression or suicide attempts.”
    “What else?” she asked. “What else did you find that linked them?”
    “Not enough to convince the SAC—that’s the special agent in charge—to pull me off drug trafficking and let me run with this full-time. But then again, he wasn’t really listening, only watching me like I was a damned time bomb ready to go off any minute.”
    Smart guy , Lauren thought, remembering how swiftly, how violently Durant had ripped out her phone and answering machine. Putting the memory aside, she said, “Well, I’m not him. I want to hear it. What else connected these women?”
    “Every one of them had been involved in some recent tragedy, one receiving widespread negative publicity.”
    Lauren frowned, thinking of Rachel’s accident, of the new stories surrounding both the drowning and the lawsuit, along with the heartbreaking photos of the pregnant victim and her children splashed across the evening news. There had been interviews with loved ones, too, friends talking about the Megan’s devotion to her church and family, her many acts of kindness, how she’d sold her own car to help pay for therapy for their little boy, an adorable, blond four-year-old born with Down syndrome.
    In the eyes of the media, Megan—a pretty blonde herself—became the perfect mother, a sainted victim who inspired candlelit services and roadside memorials heaped with flowers, teddy bears, and crosses. Rachel, on the other hand, was just as quickly vilified after former judge and current cable TV darling Jaycee Joiner had unearthed a tagged Facebook photo showing Rachel, clearly buzzed, at a friend’s bachelorette party months before. It had been enough for the host to brand her a party girl, a reckless threat to respectable married women, and lambaste the grand jury for failing to punish the perpetrator of this “blonde on blonde crime.”
    After a couple of hellacious weeks—weeks in which Rachel was publicly crucified as the “Blonde on Blonde Killer”—the furor was drowned out by an even more sensational news story involving a drug-addled young starlet accused of murdering her own baby. Still, Lauren had regularly searched the web for anything and everything to do with Rachel’s case. Unlike her sister, she was net-savvy enough to stop short of reading various forum comment