Free Deception with Murder (A Rilynne Evans Mystery, Book Two) by Jenn Vakey

area.”
    “You’re going to completely ignore my question, aren’t you?” she asked.
    “That was my plan,” he responded, not taking his eyes off of the map.
    She opened her mouth to counter, but knew that no matter how she argued, chances were she wouldn’t get anything out of him. She gave him one last frustrated look before directing her attention to the papers at hand.
    “Okay,” he said, placing stickers on the map. “These are the locations of all of the cell towers in the city. First lets find out which towers were hit and how often; then we can map out each service area and try to narrow down locations that he could have been.”
    It took them only five minutes to mark down all of the phone calls made.
    “Let’s start with the most frequently used towers first. This tower was used thirty-two times over the last two months. And-” he said, pulling out a compass and drawing a circle around the dot, “-it covers this area. What do we know that’s in this area?”
    “That’s his undercover apartment,” she said, pointing to a cross street within the circle. “What do we have next?”
    “This tower was hit eight times,” he said, drawing another circle. “And I think that’s the location where he was meeting the perpetrators to collect the stolen items and hand over the money. Next would be this one,” he said as he drew a third circle. “This one tower only covers a few residential neighborhoods on the edge of the woods,” he said. “And this house-” he pointed to a house within the radius, “-is the vacant house that Shane was found in.”
    Rilynne reached down and picked up the reports. “They show four calls pinging off of that tower in the last two months. I think we need to go back to the scene. If he was making frequent visits to the house, he might have hidden his journal there.”
    *
    The house was still taped off when they arrived. Other than the blood, which had not been cleaned up, the house was empty.
    “I’ll start up stairs,” Matthews said, not pausing to look around.
    When he disappeared onto the second floor, Rilynne leaned against the wall opposite the blood spatter and closed her eyes, concentrating on Villarreal and the house. After nearly ten minutes of not seeing anything, she gave up and started pacing around the room.
    “Okay,” she said aloud to herself. “If I was going to hide something, where would I start?”
    She stepped into the large kitchen and began opening all of the cabinets and drawers. Other than some warrantee paperwork for fixtures in the house, they were empty. She was just making her way into the living room when a voice came from the top of the stairs.
    “Up here,” Matthews called out. Rilynne took the stairs two at a time and found him pulling a vent cover off of the wall in the first bedroom. “There’s something in here,” he grunted.
    He tossed the cover to the ground and reached his hand up through the open hole, pulling out the worn maroon journal. As he flipped it open and thumbed through it, Rilynne saw a look of relief pass over his face. “Yeah, this looks like it. Let’s head back to the station.”
    Rilynne started reading as Matthews backed out of the driveway.
    “Wow, he really was thorough,” she said. “It looks like he wrote every detail in here, no matter how insignificant. Apparently Peterson is allergic to blueberries,” she grinned.
    “Flip to the back and see what it was that made him think he was getting close to closing the case,” he said.
    Rilynne flipped to the last page that had been written on and paused. “There are pages missing. It looks like four pages have been torn out. The last entry is dated a week before his death.”
    “He must have thought that his cover could be in danger,” Matthews said. “I’ll turn around and we can go search the rest of the house.”
    “No,” Rilynne said quickly. “We can send a forensic team out to look, but I doubt that he would have hidden them in the same