Above Suspicion by Sharkey Joe;

Author:Sharkey, Joe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-11-30T04:48:43+00:00

11

The change from Pikeville to Miami had been abrupt. Overnight they’d traded the black and gray of an Appalachian late winter for the sudden Technicolor blare of southern Florida in spring.

“Daddy, you can see the sky all over,” Danielle had exclaimed with childish delight from beside the pool of the residence hotel where the bureau had installed them while they looked for a new house. At four, she was already learning to read and write. Mark Jr., at sixteen months beginning to exhibit his father’s dark good looks showed his appreciation for the improvement in scenery in a way that reminded Kathy of her husband—he’d simply hurl himself onto the thick rich grass beside the pool and roll around in it like a pooch freed from its kennel.

Kathy felt like a woman awakening from a trance. She thought of the joke about pounding your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop. At once, she was renewed; she felt young again, not haggard and ashen as she had been in the last months in Kentucky. The troubles in Pikeville swirled out of mind.

Only the phone calls intruded, and these she accepted with the mild annoyance of someone fending off telephone sales solicitations. Soon after they left, whenever Susan called for Mark, as she did several times a week, Kathy exchanged a few arm’s-length pleasantries, handed the phone to Mark, and walked away to do other things.

There was plenty to do. It fell largely to her to settle her family into a new home, a task that she threw herself into with verve. Mark had a new job to acclimate himself to, and old business in Kentucky to finish. She figured that after the chop-shop trial, Pikeville and all that went with it, not the least of which was Susan, would be history, to be filed away with her old calendars.

For the first time, she felt like part of the “FBI family” that she had read about in orientation brochures from the academy. Mark finally had bosses, colleagues, and a support system at work. With help from the bureau’s relocation office, she quickly found a house, a three-bedroom condominium in a new subdivision beside a canal. The town, Sunrise, lay at the western edge of the coastal sprawl, on the fringes of the Everglades, but still only a forty-five-minute commute from the FBI office in North Miami Beach.

And then, in June, the phone calls from Susan had stopped. With so much emotional and physical distance between them, Kathy accepted the news of her disappearance impassively. She had done her best with Susan, who never listened. If Susan had taken off for Chicago or Cincinnati, as Kathy assumed she had, the futility of what she had tried to do was another unpleasant memory to forget about and write off to experience.

So eager was she to embrace a new life that Kathy failed to calculate the emotional distance that still separated her from Mark. He was the more

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