Wicked Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

items from the more affluent families in their neighborhoods or schools. Not that they weren’t affluent themselves. It was a lark, an exercise, a way to kill time. They were giddy and drunk with power and their own secrets. They were zigzagging toward something worse: home invasion. It would take only one time for a home owner to catch them in the act and the situation would turn from burglary to something far worse. The Seaside police weren’t really aware of the crimes yet, as the victims had been unilaterally silent. Maybe they thought their own kids were involved? Maybe they even were. The bottom line was these kids weren’t on anyone’s radar but his, and Harrison had stumbled on the story rather than sought it out.
    He’d moved from Portland to the coast, following his sister, Kirsten, and her daughter, Delilah, whom everyone called Didi, after Kirsten’s husband, Manuel Rojas, was gunned down. Harrison hadn’t meant to move with his sister. He’d intended to stay hot on the story and expose Manny’s murderers for the brutal killers they were. But that hadn’t happened; and when Kirsten, sad and broken, quietly asked if he’d come with her, he’d reluctantly done as she suggested; and now, over a year later, he’d just moved from her little bungalow into his own apartment, which was full of unopened boxes, a blow-up double mattress and sleeping bag, and a couple of camping chairs that could fold up into a sling for easy packing. Each sported a black, plastic cup-holder space in the chair’s right arm. He’d set many a beer in that spot and nursed it on the front porch of his sister’s place and now on the miniature side deck of his own.
    His sister’s husband, Manny, had been killed in a senseless shooting rampage when a kid opened fire on a group of people waiting to get into a nightclub before turning the gun on himself. Manny was in that line, trying to stop an argument that had arisen between two men over an anorexically slim blond woman who was smoking a cigarette nearby. Then the kid suddenly pulled out a .38 and sprayed several rounds into a madly fleeing crowd. Manny and one of the men were killed instantly, the other man and a woman and her boyfriend were critically injured and later died in the hospital, and the twenty-year-old shooter, who was underage and had never been allowed into the nightclub, turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. He was later found to be an unemployed high school dropout who was also a pharmacological repository. He was filled with enough meds to knock out an elephant. The anorexic blond woman was unhurt and had simply sauntered off. She was only known to exist because of the security cameras.
    It was ruled a terrible tragedy. The blame rested entirely on the extremely high and screwed-up kid, who’d been dabbling in drugs since anyone could remember. But he’d never shown suicidal or murderous tendencies. He’d never shown aggression. When Harrison got a look at the security tape of the shooting, he saw the kid had pulled out the weapon and shot Manny point-blank. Then he seemed to wake up and realize what he’d done, and he just sprayed gunfire from left to right and took out whoever was in his arc of fire before he killed himself.
    Manny’s partner in the nightspot, Bill Koontz, obtained full ownership of the place, while Kirsten received a small insurance stipend.
    Then Harrison got an anonymous tip from a cool female voice that suggested maybe the drugged-up shooter was somehow connected to the business partner.
    The blond woman? Maybe. Or maybe someone else. But as soon as Harrison started writing pieces that contained more questions and conjecture about Bill Koontz than cold, hard facts, he was shown the door of the Ledger.
    Which was just plain odd. A journalist was supposed to expose the truth, right? Even if it pointed to Koontz?
    These thoughts passed across his mind in half an instant. Yeah, maybe he’d screwed up. His sense of impartiality