Free A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) by Lauren Carr Page B

hair coloring. She wore her thick hair down to her waist in loose waves. Like Margo in high school, Heather wore heavy makeup and showed off her large breasts. She also displayed tattoos on each arm and one around her neck that resembled barbed wire.
    Like mother, like daughter.
    “There is a law against murder,” he reminded the girl.
    Sneering, she turned to her lawyer to return fire at their enemy.
    “Josh,” Christine said, “it was nothing more than a catfight. No one was hurt. The coach didn’t even write it up.”
    “She started a fight because she heard from someone—” He turned to Heather and asked, “Who told you that Grace said you were a bitch?”
    She answered with an exaggerated shrug, “I don’t remember.”
    “It was upsetting enough to you that you got into a fight with Grace for having said it, but you don’t remember the name of the person who told you she had said it?”
    “If she had called me a bitch to my face I would have respected her for it.”
    He doubted it.
    “Are we done here?” Heather asked her mother. It was an order for them to go. “There are other things I’d rather be doing.”
    “Yes, we are.” After ordering her lawyer to end the interview, Margo stood up.
    “No, we’re not,” Joshua objected.
    “Yes, we are.” She ushered her daughter to the door.
    “Are you charging my client with anything?” Christine slapped her notepad shut and stood up. She tucked her pen in the inside breast pocket of her suit jacket.
    “Obstruction of justice if she doesn’t tell me where she was when Grace Henderson was killed.”
    Heather paused at the door. She rolled her eyes when she answered, “Let’s see. Where was I Monday between four-thirty and five o’clock? Oh, yeah, I remember. I was fucking my boyfriend.”
    Without giving Joshua a name or place or phone number, Heather went out the door. Even with the sophistication he had developed in his travels around the world with all types of people, he was still shocked by her mother’s lack of shock at her teenage daughter’s announcement that she was having sex while one of her schoolmates was being killed.
    “I guess that means Heather has an alibi and you have nothing.” Margo snickered on her way out the door.
    “Nice seeing you, Josh,” Christine quipped while she moved toward the door to follow her clients.
    “Wait a minute.”
    At the door, she turned to him. “Margo is right. You don’t have anything against her daughter.”
    “Not yet.” He draped a leg across the corner of the conference table. “My question is why are you defending Rex Rollins?”
    “What’s it to you?”
    “Your clients are usually of a higher caliber than he is. He’s been in court almost as much as I have and he always gets a public defender because he’s broke, and right now he’s unemployed.”
    “But he still has the right to the best defense possible.”
    “The best defense he can afford. Who’s paying his bill?”
    “That’s none of your business.”

Chapter Five
    The next day, Joshua groaned when he and Seth Cavanaugh arrived at the Henderson home to find Gail Reynolds’s sports car parked in the driveway. The detective and county prosecutor had arrived to search once again Grace’s bedroom to look for evidence that would further connect her to Billy Unger and tell them where they might find their suspect.
    The artist to whom Tad led the investigator had put the eagle on Grace’s rear end and confirmed Nicki’s statement about Billy and Grace’s relationship. According to the tattooist, Billy brought her in and paid cash for the artwork. The artist thought her fake driver’s license was real. Otherwise, he swore, he would never have broken the law by giving a minor a tattoo.
    With two witnesses to claim Billy was her boyfriend, the authorities could assume he was the baby’s father, and that made him their prime suspect. Joshua obtained a warrant to bring him in for questioning.
    The problem was that no one