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) 📖

the night before and stashed the steak knife they’d delivered with the meal in his suitcase. He had also ordered fresh towels that morning and every morning previous to get an idea of how long it would take room service to come. The answer was, on average, ten minutes. So the morning of the murder, with the steak knife hidden in his suitcase, he waited until Heather was in the shower, then called Matt and asked him to come over to the room. Frank needed to run down to the little shop in the lobby, he said, and asked if Matt could wait for the towels that were on their way. He made a point of being vague about what he needed, trusting Matt’s imagination to fill in the blank, and even then he knew the request probably sounded odd. But Matt was a friend, so even though he seemed a little confused by the whole thing, he agreed to wait.

Then Frank took the elevator down to the first floor, grabbed a toothbrush from the lobby shop (it was the first thing he saw), and, as he exited the hotel, made a point of waving to the receptionist.

He came back in through a side door he had scouted out on their first day and took the stairs back up to the twelfth floor. The towels had arrived while he was gone. He thanked Matt, sent him back to his room.

When the murder was complete and he had showered off the blood, he left the same way he had come and meandered around the city long enough to make sure the maids found the body.

As he had hoped, the facts seemed to fit perfectly with his story of an affair. Bada-bing, bada-boom. Matt was in jail. Frank was married to Kim. And little Connor was already starting to forget he’d had a father before Frank had entered the picture.

There were only two questions Olivia felt like she couldn’t answer by the time she closed the file, but neither mattered all that much.

The first was why Matt had been released from prison early. Oldrich had never given her a good answer, because unbeknownst to her, he had questioned the chief about the bribe and was told, quite pointedly, to keep his trap shut. The chief was tired of not getting his, he said. And what did it matter anyway? They were Americans. In other words—not his problem.

The second was what had motivated Aden to organize the attack. Matt didn’t know, he said. Aden had kept everything compartmentalized. But, at least in this case, she had a theory. A search of Aden’s computer pointed strongly to a website called BeyondUnderstanding.com. The name sounded like hippie bullshit. But when she browsed the content, she noticed a lot of cult-like language that endorsed mayhem as the route to freeing society from its “materialistic bonds.”

Kim struggled with her emotions. She was angry with Matt and Frank and, maybe most of all, herself. She cursed herself for believing Matt would cheat on her, then cursed Matt for locking her in a cage. She cursed herself for spending the last fifteen years with Frank, then Frank for putting all this in motion.

At least her brother Henry had come back up from Florida to help her through it.

Connor was surprised when, this time, the big man gave him a hug. But he was dealing with a lot of the same issues his mother was and probably looked like he needed it.

When Henry finally released Connor, he looked over at Olin, who was standing on the far side of the living room, and said, “Who’s this?”

Connor told him and added that Olin would be staying with them for a while.

“As long as he needs to,” Kim clarified, which, since Olin and Connor had both postponed college until next fall, would be at least a year.

But the invitation to stay had not come immediately. Connor had been in touch with Olin and Dylan regularly after they got back from Austin’s cabin, but had put most of his energy into dealing with his own emotions and making sure his mom was okay.

All things considered, Dylan seemed to be managing (which didn’t surprise Connor), and Connor was glad to hear the police had been able to track down Olin’s car.

But eventually Connor had learned Olin wasn’t handling things as well as he pretended to be. He didn’t have any family outside of his parents and, like Connor, no close friends. It was him and his pain, alone in the house twenty-four-seven. That wasn’t okay, so Connor had asked Kim about having Olin come and stay, and Kim had readily agreed.

The only thing Connor wasn’t sure how to handle was the money Austin had left him. (Even though Connor had come to terms with the fact that Matt and Austin were the same person, he still referred to him as Matt when he was talking about the time before Prague and as Austin when referring to recent events.) Austin had only had that money because people had died, and Connor didn’t want anything to do with it. But he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, either.

No matter how it had come to him, it still had value.

Maybe for some more than others, though. Because there was one other victim in this whole thing. Two, actually. Adriana and her daughter.

Connor had a suspicion the “Carlos” Austin had told him about was Adriana’s husband. And when Dylan, who seemed to be pretty good at tracking down information on the web, confirmed he was the man who had robbed Aden’s liquor store, he was certain of it.

The only problem was Adriana had said she didn’t want to see Connor again, and he doubted she would answer the door no matter how long he stood there knocking. Leaving the cash in an envelope on her porch wasn’t a good idea, either. Odds were it would be gone before she ever had a chance to find it.

However,