Love Inspired Suspense April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Laura Scott (speed reading book .txt) 📖

Liam pushed back his fear for Paige and focused on what Reva was saying.

“I’m going places. I can’t afford to make careless mistakes like that.”

“You don’t call murder a ‘careless mistake’?”

“I call it a means to an end. What are the lives of three nobodies compared to mine? I’m going to make a difference in the state, then in the nation. Nothing’s going to stop me.”

Liam folded his arms across his chest. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Her smile was intolerably smug. “You? You won’t stop me, because you’ll be dead.”

“You’d kill me?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I’ve tried hard enough. This time I’ll make sure.”

“What happened to you, Reva? You were a decent kid from a decent home. What went wrong?”

“I got smart.”

“That’s all you have to say. Why? Why kill our friends? Why try to kill me? You and I were friends.”

“You were Marie’s friend. Never mine.”

“You’re wrong.”

He needed to keep her attention on him and give Paige time enough to find Jonah. “The gas in your house? That was you.”

Reva gave a trilling laugh. “Of course. I turned off the safety valve and cut the line to the stove. Then all I had to do was fake being asleep and waking up to find my house filling with gas. I had to keep you from looking too closely at me. Becoming another victim was the easiest way to make you look in another direction.”

“You could have died.” Disbelief sliced through him at the risk she’d taken.

“I was safe enough. I called 911, hysterical and sobbing. Everybody bought it. Including you.”

Paige hadn’t, Liam thought. She’d questioned Reva’s surviving the incident from the first. He should have paid attention to her doubts, but he’d been unable to see the girl he’d known from so long ago as a murderer.

“You should have left it alone,” Reva said, her voice hard once more. “But, no, you had to keep digging.” Fury flashed in her eyes, spilled over in an angry spate of words. “I should have known you’d be a problem and taken care of you first. Once the blackmail stopped, I would have stopped killing people. There’d be no point in it. If you want to blame someone, blame whoever is blackmailing me. That’s the real culprit.”

“And the people you murdered are just so much collateral damage.”

“Of course. What else?” She brushed her hand through the air, dismissing killing three people. “Doesn’t matter now. You’re going to die, along with that son of yours and, of course, your little friend, Paige.”

“You’d kill a child?”

“It’s survival of the fittest. You have to be willing to do what’s necessary if you’re going to succeed. You were a big-time Delta operator. You should know that.”

“You’re sick, Reva. I wonder how I didn’t see it before.”

Irritation spiked in her voice. “What I am sick of is this tedious conversation.”

She shrugged, the motion lifting her dark hair in a bouncy fluff.

“At least tell me why. Why kill our friends?”

“You still don’t get it, do you? It was my fault that the bus went off the bridge that day.”

“Your fault?” Liam shook his head. “Pope fell asleep at the wheel.”

“I made him do it. Not on purpose. I wanted to stay around the school after the game. There was a boy on the other team who I wanted to notice me. So I put something in Pope’s water bottle that I thought would cause him to fall asleep while we were at the game. I never thought he wouldn’t use it until we were on our way back. By then, it was too late.”

Liam struggled to make sense of her words. “You put a sedative in his water bottle...all so we could stick around and you could get some boy to notice you?” Even as he said the words aloud, he could scarcely believe them.

“He was on the other team. We’d flirted a bit at other games. If I had time with him, I could have gotten him to ask me out. But no. Old Goat Pope had to drink a soda at the game. He never touched his water bottle until...until it was too late.”

“You could have said something, stopped him from drinking it.”

“What? Like, ‘Hey, Mr. Pope, I doctored your water bottle and you’re gonna take a nap real soon’? If I’d known what would happen...but I never dreamed he’d drive the bus right off the road and into the river. I was on the bus, too, you know.

“By the time it was over, it was too late. Those kids died. I couldn’t tell the truth then.”

“Okay. But why kill the survivors now?”

“I told you. I’m being blackmailed. It has to be one of the survivors, someone who saw me that day. I’ve paid out $275,000 so far. Another payment and I’ll be ruined. I won’t have enough money for my campaign, much less anything else.”

“Like fancy shoes,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just something Paige mentioned.”

“Ah, yes. Smart, smart Paige. She should have minded her own business. Like you.” Reva glanced about. “I didn’t expect she’d let you come here on your own. She must be trying to find that brat of yours.”

Liam didn’t bother responding to that. He needed to keep Reva’s attention on him. “Let me guess. The blackmail started about six weeks ago.” Paige had been right all along in her conviction that Sam was connected. He was busy putting together the pieces in his head. “You could have refused to pay. Let the truth come out. What you did was bad, but it wasn’t murder. Manslaughter maybe, but not murder.”

“I’d be ruined personally and politically. And there was nothing to be gained in letting everyone know what really happened. I can’t have it come out that I caused the bus accident. I can’t.” She said the last more to herself than to him, as though she’d had that same argument in the past, trying to convince herself of the rightness of her actions. She lifted