Once Trapped by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blake Pierce
Published: 2018-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

After a couple of rings Riley heard Van Roff’s gruff voice answer the phone.

“Hey, Agent Paige. What’s up? I take it you’re in a sunny little golf-obsessed town in Georgia. Or more precisely, at the mansion of one late Edwin Gray Harter.”

Riley was startled.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Oh, I never give away the secrets of my trade.”

Riley thought for a moment, then smiled as she remembered how Jared had found out about Harter’s murder.

She asked, “Might it have something to do with a certain online service called CrimeWidth?”

She heard Van Roff gasp a little.

He said, “Uh … how did you guess?”

Riley laughed and said, “I never give away the secrets of my trade. Now don’t tell me … you listen to CrimeWidth when you have trouble sleeping.”

“OK, now you’re just doing some spooky mind-reading number on me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m known for that kind of thing.”

Roff laughed and said, “When I heard on the alert feed about some rich dude getting knifed to death in Monarch, Georgia, of course I thought, ‘Hmmm … same MO, probably the same killer. I’ll bet Agent Paige is on her way to the crime scene right now.’”

“You’d have won that bet,” Riley said.

In a husky growl Roff said, “I don’t guess you called me directly from a crime scene because you adore the sound of my voice.”

“Well, of course you do have such a lovely voice, but …”

Riley paused and thought for a moment.

“Our killer seems to have a pretty nimble way of getting around security. This time he got into the mansion despite a supposedly unhackable system called SafetyLinks. I wondered what you might be able to tell me about it.”

Roff was silent for a moment.

Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, let me get back to you about that.”

He ended the call without saying another word.

Riley stood staring at her phone for a moment, feeling a little mystified. This didn’t seem like Van Roff at all. She figured his knowledge of high-tech devices of all kinds was pretty much encyclopedic. Hadn’t he ever heard of SafetyLinks?

She realized there was no point in just standing here waiting for the Seattle geek to get back to her. She hoped he’d come up with something useful soon.

Meanwhile, she had asked Chief O’Neill and his team to meet downstairs. It was time for her to join them.

Riley took the elevator down to the ground floor and found O’Neill and his people gathered together in the huge, pristine formal living room. Jared was there too. She wished they’d chosen some smaller sitting area elsewhere in the house, but everybody was already here, waiting for her. She couldn’t help but feel a little amused to see uniformed officers trying to make themselves at home on snow-white furniture that looked like it had never been used.

Everybody looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Riley herself stayed on her feet. She said to Chief O’Neill and the group, “Does anybody here have any new observations or theories?”

O’Neill got to his feet. “Three of my people talked to the whole live-in staff, and I met with them all briefly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.