The Devil's Anvil Read Online Free PDF

merely stared at the ochre shapes on the canvas, unable to focus on them, let alone bring them to life. The bold red slash she’d earlier applied was the only thing to catch and hold her attention, even if for only brief and fleeting moments.
    Finally she stood up and walked to the CD player positioned on a windowsill. The music CD – old-school jazz – had played out without her taking in any of the tunes and was now part of the way through its second revolution. Billie turned it off. The silence was noisier than when the soft strains had filtered unnoticed through her subconscious. She rubbed a hand over her face, and swore softly, then peered out of the window, the view allowing her to see all the way across the lake where her gaze settled on the distant shore. Momentarily she thought she saw a flash of red dashing along the shoreline below the trees, and she blinked in confusion, her pulse responding to the stimulus. It took her another moment to realise that the colour from the painting had etched its memory in her retina and she was only experiencing a ghost image.
    A poor metaphor, she thought.
    She turned from the window and left her studio, making her way downstairs to the kitchen where she immediately headed for the fridge. Inside was a bottle of wine she’d opened in celebration at selling her most recent work of art to a collector from Seattle. She poured wine into a tumbler she found resting on the drainer next to the sink. Any other time she’d have chosen a more suitable glass, but what the hell! This wasn’t a celebratory drink; she only needed the alcohol. After swallowing the wine in two long gulps she reached again for the bottle, but forewent the glass and elected to carry the bottle with her as she went outside and sat on the chair on her porch.
    Evening was descending.
    It was cold out on the porch and luckily she had been so distracted that she hadn’t taken off her coat from earlier. She pulled up her collar and snuggled down in the rocking chair, pulling her feet up under her. She drank directly from the bottle.
    Eighty million dollars.
    Billie couldn’t visualise what such a figure amounted to if the dollars were stacked one on top of the other. But Agent Cooper hadn’t actually said that Richard Womack had stolen such a large amount in cash, but that he’d siphoned it off to some untraceable account – maybe many accounts – somewhere offshore. Such an unimaginable amount of money gave credence to the fact that Richard had staged his own death, allowing him to disappear into obscurity from where he could enjoy his ill-gotten wealth. According to Cooper, Richard had sacrificed his own daughter in his plot to disappear without a trace.
    The ATF agent was wrong.
    Billie and Richard’s divorce had been acrimonious. By the end there were only two aspects of their marriage that they could agree on: they had grown to hate each other, but they both loved their daughter. Despite Richard being narcissistic, a conceited son of a bitch and a philanderer, Billie had never doubted his love for Nicola. He’d been petitioning for full custody for Christ’s sake! Why would he do that if only to murder her during his disappearing trick? Cooper had a singular take on things: by sacrificing his beloved daughter it added more plausibility to his own supposed death. Richard had proven to be both incredibly manipulative and supremely self-motivated when it came to embezzling the multi-million dollar sum, to a point where he would not wish to hand any of it away, not even to his child. Agent Cooper believed that Richard Womack was a sociopath, with no love for anyone but himself and his needs.
    Nicola had been killed, that fact wasn’t in dispute. She’d been stuck in the car when it went over the bridge, but it had nothing to do with Richard wanting a clean break so he could keep all the money to himself. Why would he need to murder his daughter, Billie asked the agent, when he could as easily have