Serial Bride. Ann Voss Peterson

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СКАЧАТЬ glared at the suggestion as if considering leaving Bryce unconscious and bleeding if he didn’t zip it. “Reed is a cop. The detective in charge is out to get him. And now he’s out to get Diana, too.”

      Interesting, though he doubted it was the case. But Sylvie believed it. It had been easy to see through her previous lie. She wasn’t lying now. “So why aren’t the police here? If they really suspect her, I would think they would be searching her apartment.”

      “I imagine they’re on their way.” She glanced down the hall.

      “And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To search her apartment before they arrive.”

      She looked down. Her fingers tangled together. Busted. “If there’s something that might tell me what happened to Diana, I have to find it.”

      And he’d like to find it, too. More than she knew. “Then why are we standing around wasting time?”

      She stared at him a long moment, as if trying to decide whether she should trust him or not. Finally the press of time seemed to win out. “I thought I’d start in her office.”

      “Lead the way.”

      Sylvie marched down the hall, pushed a door open and led him inside.

      The office was a neat but obviously well-used workspace. White walls and desk gave the room a clean, fresh feeling. Papers rose in orderly stacked piles. But it was the splashes of color, the artwork and figurines dedicated to female superheroes, that made Bryce’s lips twist in an ironic smile.

      Too bad Diana herself was no champion of justice.

      Sylvie stepped to the desk, sank into the chair and wheeled in front of the file cabinet. She scanned the stack of student papers on top before gripping the handle of the top drawer and yanking it open.

      Bryce stepped close behind her, reading the files over her shoulder. Together they skimmed the contents. Student evaluations and files dedicated to her dissertation jammed the first two drawers. Sylvie had thumbed through most of the contents of the third drawer when Bryce noticed an unmarked manila folder peeking from the back. “What about that one?”

      Sylvie plucked the unlabeled file folder from the drawer and flipped it open. A photo stared up at them—ice-blue eyes in a face that looked much younger than its years.

      The back of Bryce’s neck prickled at the sight of his former client’s cold, hard eyes.

      “Who is this?” Sylvie asked.

      “Dryden Kane.”

      Her shoulders tensed. “I thought he looked familiar. Except that in this picture he looks so normal. Like the boy next door.”

      Bryce couldn’t argue. Dryden Kane did look more like an average suburban neighbor than the brutal killer he was. Some might even say he was good-looking. And that was exactly what made him so dangerous to the women he’d charmed into trusting him. God knew Kane’s civilized appearance had fooled him. He tried to swallow the bitter taste in his mouth. “What else is in the folder?”

      She turned the photo face down. Piled behind it were copies of old newspaper articles. Sylvie flipped through the first few, twenty-year-old articles detailing Kane’s brutal murders of blond college coeds and his circus of a trial. Behind those were articles half that old telling the story of his prison marriage to the misguided Dixie Madsen and their notorious escape and recapture. More recent articles poked out from underneath in the original newsprint.

      Bryce pointed to the photocopies on the top of the stack. “These look like they were made from microfilm.”

      “Microfilm? Like from a library?”

      “Yeah. See how a few of them are in negative? That happens with some machines. And the library is one of the few places she could get her hands on articles this old.”

      “Why would she copy all these articles?”

      Bryce didn’t know, but he had his suspicions. Of course, he wasn’t about to share them with Sylvie Hayes. “Whatever the reason, she had to be pretty dedicated. It takes a lot of time to go through microfilm.”

      A piece of paper stuck out from behind the stack of articles: an envelope addressed to Diana Gale, complete with canceled stamp and postmarked last month.

      Bryce’s heart pounded so hard he could feel each beat in his throat. “Is that a letter?”

      Sylvie let the copied article she was reading fall back into the folder and reached for the envelope.

      A loud thump sounded from the other room. “Police,” a muffled voice shouted from the hall. “Open the door. We have a warrant to search the premises.”

      Bryce met Sylvie’s desperate eyes. They’d barely scratched the surface. He needed to study the folder, to find out exactly what Diana Gale saw fit to collect, what she knew about Kane, and when she knew it. And most of all, he needed to read that letter. If it was from Kane and he had sent it last month, it might give him everything he needed to prove that for whatever reason, Diana Gale had acted as Dryden Kane’s conduit to the outside world. And that at Kane’s bequest, she had arranged Ty’s murder.

      Sylvie stuffed the letter back into the folder, snapped the cover shut and thrust up from the chair. “I’m not giving them this folder.”

      His feelings exactly. But there wasn’t much they could do to keep it. Not with the police right outside. “What are you planning to do?”

      “I don’t know. But I can’t just hand this over to Detective Perreth. He’ll only use it to twist things, to blame everything on Diana, not to find out what happened to her.”

      “If the police believe as you say, taking this folder amounts to removing evidence. It’s a criminal action.”

      “I don’t care. It might be my only chance to find Diana. To find the truth.”

      And Bryce’s only chance to find out who helped Dryden Kane murder his brother. A chill wound down Bryce’s throat and lodged in his gut.

      Sylvie ran her hands over her gown. “I was going to change clothes. Why didn’t I change clothes?”

      There was no room in that dress to smuggle a folder, that was for damn sure. The chill inside him grew until the walls of his stomach ached from it.

      Sylvie dropped her hands to her sides and started for the door. “I’ll throw it in my suitcase. I’ll say I came to pack my clothes.”

      “No good. If this Detective Perreth has a brain in his head, he’ll ask to search your suitcase before he lets you cross the threshold.”

      Another thump sounded on the door. The jangle of keys reached them.

      Sylvie looked around the room like a trapped animal. “What am I going to do?”

      Warmth leached from his veins, chills circulating through his body. He was an officer of the court. He couldn’t interfere with a legal search warrant. He couldn’t risk his livelihood, his freedom.

      He couldn’t.

      But СКАЧАТЬ