If You Really Loved Me Read Online Free Page A

tangible support for the developing case. He would collect physical evidence and photograph everything within the yellow cordon ribbons. If the shooter proved to be Cinnamon—or any other member of the family or regular visitor to this house—Morrissey's job would be more difficult. Trace evidence is more meaningful in a stranger-to-stranger homicide. Everybody who lived here could be expected to leave fingerprints, hairs, fibers, body secretions. Nevertheless, Morrissey would retrieve what might be meaningful later.
    McLean asked Alan Day and Andy Jauch to diagram the scene. Darrow Halligan, back from observing the fruitless efforts to save the victim at Fountain Valley Hospital, was assigned to heel-and-toe it up and down Ocean Breeze Drive—to canvass the neighbors to see if anyone had heard or seen anything unusual during the night.
    Where there had been chaos, there was now a sense of order, stunned and disbelieving as the survivors might be. Each member of the Garden Grove investigative team was painstakingly carrying out his assigned task.
    There was no need to hurry any longer.
    The investigators knew now that two adults, two teenagers, and a baby girl had lived in this house up to the wee hours of the morning, apparently in a family unit of some kind, although their connections to one another were not clear. Linda Brown was dead. Cinnamon Brown was missing. Patricia Bailey sobbed as she sat in the dining room with Linda's baby in her arms. David Brown chain-smoked, visited the bathroom frequently, and paced, his face a study of worry and pain.
    Officer Scott Davis radioed the Dispatch Center with a description for Cinnamon Brown. Patricia thought she had been wearing a sweatshirt and pants. Brown hair, brown eyes. A little over five feet, maybe 120 pounds.
    David Brown, trembling with stress, inhaled deeply and then snubbed out a half-smoked cigarette as he waited in his living room to talk to Fred McLean. Brown's family had evaporated. He had lost his wife; his daughter was somewhere out there in the night.
    What had gone wrong?
    McLean observed David Brown. The man looked forty-five or fifty, but Day, who had done an initial interview with him, said that he was only thirty-two. McLean asked him his birthdate—just to be sure.
    "November sixteenth, 1952."
    That made him only thirty-two, all right. He was short, not more than five feet seven or so, and thick in the middle, his skin and muscle tone that of a man who rarely went out in the sun and seldom exercised. Brown's hair was dark brown and lank, thinning, and his eyes an oddly variegated mixture of colors. Scars from teenage acne marred his skin. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face, and his hands shook as he lit yet another cigarette.
    Well, hell, the man's world had just exploded. How was he supposed to look? The picture of health and vigor?
    At first glance, David Arnold Brown seemed a man without power, a man who had lost his grip on the reins of his existence. His very posture was limp, his narrow shoulders dragged down by the impact of his wife's violent death. But when he spoke, in response to McLean's questions, his voice was startling. He could have been a radio or television announcer. David Brown had a deep baritone speaking voice, and he answered McLean's questions easily and with authority. He was not vague about what had happened. Painful as it was, he had apparently accepted the fact that his daughter was the shooter. He repeated to Fred McLean the sequence of events he had given to Day, adding a bit of information here and a speculation there.
    He did not seem surprised that Cinnamon had done something so inexplicably cruel. Not at all. It was almost as if he had seen disaster coming and yet been incapable of heading it off. Now, he was trying determinedly to arrange the frayed ends of his life, and the strain was profound.
    "My head aches," Brown murmured to McLean,
    "Do you need some aspirin?"
    "No . . . never mind."
    Fred McLean