Read Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) for Free Online

worried about Bonnie’s unspoken concerns. Now when she woke during the night, it was as much to make certain Bonnie was still beside her as it was to shake off her nightmares.
    Judge West had triggered her entire emotional package as if she’d stepped on a land mine when she walked into his barn. Her pulse was racing, her face was flushed, and she wanted to punch something, if she could just stop shaking. She pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall, the stores closed for the night, the lot empty. Cushioning her head on the headrest, she closed her eyes, breathing in and out until she was calm enough to think clearly.
    Bonnie had taught her to triage when she found herself in the middle of a shit storm: focus on whatever was causing her the most pain, stop the bleeding, and then move on to the next crisis. Alex combined Bonnie’s medical model with her own, working the facts, taking them as far as they would go, identifying the gaps and digging deeper to fill them in, while resisting the temptation to write a case off as a simple one, because she knew that’s when a gap could swallow her whole.
    The photograph was at the top of her critical list. She’d shot Dwayne Reed in the living room of his mother Odyessy Shelburne’s house. Though she’d examined the photograph for only a moment, the setting looked like the crime scene. There was a body on the floor that could have been Reed, but the face was obscured. She was the woman kneeling next to him. That much was certain, and it might be enough to convince anyone else that the photograph was real, but Alex was certain it was a fake—not because it was inaccurate but because she couldn’t imagine who could have taken it. There were only a few possibilities.
    Odyessy Shelburne had wanted Alex convicted so badly that she perjured herself on the witness stand. She never would have withheld such damning evidence.
    The only other witness to the shooting was Gloria Temple, who was dead. Gloria’s cell phone was loaded with pictures, all of which Alex had seen, and the one Judge West was hammering her with now wasn’t part of Gloria’s collection. If it had been, Alex would be sitting on death row.
    Detective Hank Rossi had investigated the shooting, and sending a criminal defense lawyer to prison would have been the high point of his career. If the photo had been out there before her trial, he would have found it, and Patrick Ortiz, the special prosecutor who’d handled the case against her, would have hung her with it.
    If she was right about all of that, the alternative that the photo was a fake was still in play.
    Judge West knew the prosecution’s theory that Alex had staged the crime scene to make it look like self-defense, and he had access to the crime scene photos, which were part of the court file. If he was worried that Alex would back out of their deal, he could have manufactured the photo to keep her in line.
    Or maybe, Alex thought, he hoped the photograph would force her to confess her guilt to him, her admission giving him a more powerful weapon to use against her. But if that was his plan, it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t confessed and never would. Not to him. Not to Bonnie. Not to anyone. Not ever.
    If she was right that Judge West was behind the photograph and that he had been waiting for the right moment to use it, she had to prove that it was a fake. That was the only way she’d be able to make a clean break from him.
    The judge wasn’t the kind of person who would spend time hunched over a laptop manipulating images in Photoshop. Which meant he had to have had help, and the help was always the weakest link in any conspiracy. So all she had to do was figure out a way to prove the picture was phony, find whoever had created it, and then tell Judge West what he could do with it. Not easy, but it was enough to stop the bleeding.
    Her new client, Jared Bell, was next up on her critical list. If the case against him was as strong as Judge West had