A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trus Reagan Keeter (most difficult books to read TXT) 📖

it was a mix up. She hadn’t believed him. She’d pressed him for details. But he hadn’t given her any, so what else was there to say?

David took a step closer to Alice. “Are you sure?” he asked, perhaps with more intensity than he meant to.

It scared Alice. “Yeah. Why? What’s going on?” Then she thought about the phone number Liam had given her. It was for emergencies only, he’d told her. Why did he need a number just for emergencies? She’d wondered about that at the time, then decided that any strange behavior should simply be chalked up to the stress he was under. Now, with David here, she wondered about it again. “Did something happen to him?”

“Maybe you should sit down,” Catherine said.

“What happened? Is Dad okay?”

“We don’t know,” David said. “The police revoked his bail and he took off. We need to find him. I need to convince him to turn himself in. Running like this is not going to do him any good.”

With that, Alice did sit down. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Dad wouldn’t do that.”

“He did,” Catherine said.

Alice shot her mother a hateful glare. “Of course you’d believe that.”

“It’s true,” David said. “I was there when it happened. When you talked to him last night, he was already on the run. So if you know anything at all about how I can find him, it would mean a lot. He’s running because he’s scared, and he needs me right now to talk him down.”

Suddenly the emergency number made sense. Liam had dumped his phone and was using one of those cheap pharmacy mobiles. Alice had seen it happen often enough in movies.

“I came across some important information,” David continued. “It will clear his name.”

Alice nodded slowly as she took in the news. She wasn’t surprised David was out there trying to help her father. “He gave me a phone number. He said it was for emergencies only. You can reach him on that.”

“What?” Catherine snapped. “You didn’t think to tell me about that last night?”

“He gave it to me. If he wanted you to have it, he could have given it to you.”

“Can I have it?” David asked.

“It’s in my room. I’ll go get it.” Alice stood up and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

“What’s going on?” asked Tommy, who was sitting on the landing and holding onto the balusters like they were prison bars. “Is Dad okay?”

“He’s fine,” Alice said. While she wasn’t so sure that was true last night, she believed it might be now. She went into her room and grabbed a Mead spiral notebook off her desk. It had “English” scrawled across the front in black magic marker. She flipped to the last page, where her dad’s number was written in the lower-right corner. The rest of the sheet was covered in doodles, mostly flowers and unicorns, that she had drawn during her teacher’s last long-winded lecture. Before she tore it out, removing only enough of the paper to capture the number, she copied it into her phone. She went downstairs and handed the slip of paper to David.

“We’re going to get this straightened out fast,” he said. “This will all be behind us soon.”

Liam Parker

Liam hadn’t been able to reach Jacob and didn’t want to leave a message. You never knew who might hear it. Probably not the police, but what if they did? For the time being, there was no harm in being a little paranoid.

He would call later. Or so he thought until Anita told him she had the name of the guy who’d made Elise’s fake ID. Armed with that information, additional calls to Jacob seemed unnecessary.

The conversation with Hawk/Hank was one Liam would have to have on his own, Anita said. She’d spent much more time getting in and out of the prison than she’d expected and had to go to work. “I’ll meet you at the diner at noon tomorrow and we’ll get back to it. I think we’re getting close to something,” she said, right before she hung up.

Clix was properly called Clix Studio, as indicated by the name over the shop’s door, and appeared to be a one-man operation. Although there was a lobby, there was no receptionist. Liam had an unobstructed view of a photographer shooting a mother and her baby against a roll-down backdrop of a park. As far as he could tell, there was no one else present.

The photographer, with his long gray hair pulled into a ponytail and a Fisher-Price rattle in hand, glanced over and said, “Have a seat. We’re almost done here.”

“No problem.” Liam had already decided to wait until they were alone to ask his questions.

The photographer turned back to his subjects. With his finger on the camera’s shutter button, he shook the rattle and made cooing sounds to draw the baby’s attention. He told the mother to “Smile!” and “Hold the baby a little higher, if you can.”

When the session ended, he cashed the woman out and said, “That baby is one of the best I’ve ever had.”

Liam thought it was a lie but the mother looked pleased. She thanked the photographer and left. Chimes strung to the door jingled on her way out.

“Now, what can I do for you?” the photographer said to his prospective client.

Liam got up and approached the counter separating the lobby from the studio.

“You know, you look familiar.”

“I get that a lot,” Liam said, which wasn’t true. He suspected the photographer recognized him from the newspaper or an online article about the murder. That was not something he needed the photographer thinking about, so he barreled forward with his first question. “Is your name Hank?”

The photographer’s smile faltered. “No. Why?”

“Hawk?”

“It’s Frank.”

The name sounded enough like the one he was looking for that Liam figured this had to be the right guy. Time to try out the tactic he had settled on. “Elise sent us to see you.”

“Elise who?”

“Dark hair. Skinny. Big blue eyes. You’d