Free A Deadly Business by Lis Wiehl

there wasn’t even a sliver of beach. With a feeling of unspeakable horror, she understood she could not save Scott.
    And then the water began to rise.
    It was more than just the tide coming in. She realized it was a tsunami, a growing wall of water that quickly swallowed the boulders and then ate up the space that had separated her from the waves. Soon it would pick her up and smash her against the rocks, or push her down, down, down, so deep she would never come up for air.
    A small insistent voice slowly roused her.
    “I wet the bed, Mommy. And now it’s cold.”
    With a groan Mia pushed herself up. Brooke was standing next to the bed, pushing her shoulder with one of her little hands. There was no ocean, no tsunami. Scott was long dead, even if the repercussions of what he had done weren’t.
    Mia had had nightmares about the ocean since she had nearly drowned when she was five. She hadn’t learned to swim until Gabe started clamoring to go to the pool. She had found an adult learn-to-swim class, and every Wednesday she forced herself to go. After nearly every lesson she threw up, but she persevered. She still hated it, but she could do it. The irony was that Mia lived in a city defined by water, bordered by Puget Sound on one side and Lake Washington on the other.
    Now she shuffled down the hall to the laundry closet. It seemed oddly empty. Shouldn’t there be more sheets and blankets? Were they stuffed in one of the laundry room’s baskets? Or had Brooke built a fort someplace that she hadn’t noticed? But that didn’t explain the shelf that was normally stacked with toilet paper. Half of it was missing.
    Was Gabe sneaking out to TP people’s houses? Did kids even do that anymore? And if they did, and he did, how was he getting out without waking her? Her bedroom was on the other end of the hall, but these days it seemed like she slept as lightly as if she’d drunk two cups of coffee before going to bed. Which sometimes she had.
    Mia remade Brooke’s bed while Brooke curled up on the carpeted floor. It only took a few minutes, but still her daughter was asleep by the time she finished. She picked her up and laid her down, pulled the quilt over her shoulders. Too tired to carry the soiled sheets down to the basement laundry room, Mia compromised by tossing them down onto the tile floor of the first-floor foyer.
    She meant to return to her room, but when she went back to check on Brooke, the temptation proved too much. She curled upbeside her on the toddler bed. Brooke was usually a restless sleeper, flinging her arms and legs about as if she were performing jumping jacks in her dreams, but for once she was still. And oh, how Mia missed the warmth and companionship of another body in bed. She curled around her daughter and held her close.
    She closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her. The day ran through her head again in a series of frightening images. Young’s contorted face as he ran toward her. The squad cars outside her house. The cops with their guns drawn. Charlie talking about the unexplained injuries to Scott’s head. Betty’s beautiful, complacent face. The glittering diamond ring bouncing across the floor. Scott drowning.
    What secrets had he taken to his grave?
    And what would happen once she started to uncover them?

CHAPTER 16
    TUESDAY
    V in opened the closet door to get his coat. He paid no attention to the figure lying on the floor, jackknifed at the waist, dark hair covering its face. Its right leg stuck out at an odd angle.
    He had bought the girl on Craigslist. You could get anything there. Even girls made of plaster, girls who had once been painstakingly dressed in the fashions of the day, posed to entice customers to buy what they wore. Girls who had eventually been discarded to make room for newer, lighter models made of plastic.
    Up close, she didn’t look that real, what with the chip missing from the tip of her nose and her oddly pink skin. But if you laid her out at night in front of a