Free Stay Dead by Anne Frasier

about my dad.” She held up the book so he could see the cover. “This book is about him, about Jackson Sweet.”
    “That’s an interesting bit of information.” What he didn’t add was that it was something she should have mentioned earlier.
    “Anything specific you can recall?”
    She didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to look at this from the outside, not the inside. She wanted to look at it from the perspective of a detective, not a victim. But over the years she’d come to realize that putting yourself into the mind of the victim was often the way to figure out the criminal. The victim was often the secret. But even though she understood the process, she didn’t want to go there.
    “He . . . he wanted me to tell him about Sweet.” She forced herself back to the place she didn’t want to go. Back to that day, that moment, that conversation. But not beyond. She would isolate that one thing. It was enough; it was all she could handle for now. “He wanted to know what it felt like to be the daughter of a conjurer.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    She thought about it a moment, trying to remember. “At first I told him I didn’t know. That made him mad.” And then he’d hit her. He’d done things to her.
    She stared at David. At his hair. All soft and clean. She could feel it and smell it even though she wasn’t touching him. “I told him what he wanted to hear. It was all a lie, but I told him.”
    “That’s often the best thing to do in a hostage situation,” David said. “We kept thinking he was obsessed with you, the cop. All the newspaper clippings, the news footage, the secret photos. But I don’t think it had anything to do with Elise, the cop, Elise, the detective. I think it was all about Elise, the conjurer’s daughter.”
    Now that she was looking at Tremain’s books, and now that she’d found the one about her father, she had to agree.
    Would she ever leave her past behind? Would it always haunt her? Here she’d taken up the most practical, the most pragmatic of occupations, yet the past wouldn’t let her go. It seemed impossible to hate a person she’d never met, but she often found herself hating her father. It was bad enough to be abandoned by him, but the legacy he’d left . . . It had made her the target of many jokes, and her adoptive mother had turned against her because of it. And now . . . If what David was theorizing was right, then her legacy had drawn a madman to her. And she’d done nothing. Absolutely nothing in her life to earn such negative attention other than deny, deny, deny root magic and conjuring.
    “I thought he was obsessed with me because we were closing in on the Organ Thief murders.” That’s what they’d all thought. But no . . .
    Many times she’d fantasized about moving to another part of the country where nobody knew her history. Take up a new name. Create a new identity, an identity that had nothing to do with Jackson Sweet, the man who seemed forever tied to her.
    But what about David?
    He’d have a new partner. Or maybe he’d just work alone, with the help of Mason and Avery.
    “I don’t want to be thought of as a conjurer’s daughter. It has absolutely nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with who I am.” She could feel her mind shift from where it had been ever since her kidnapping, to this. And this was anger.
    Over the years, she’d felt a slow-boiling anger directed at her father, an anger she felt was somewhat unjustified. Recently she’d begun to accept what he’d done, and had begun to come to terms with her heritage. But apparently she was fooling herself, because now, realizing that the kidnapping might have been due to her connection to Jackson Sweet, the man who’d abandoned her, the man who’d never seen her or called her or said one word to her . . . now she was once again filled with resentment and rage.
    She was an adult. She had a teenage daughter. How could she still harbor these feelings toward