Read Pushed Too Far: A Thriller for Free Online Page B

Unfortunately they’d come up with the same result as Val had the first time. The women who would have shared mito DNA with Kelly had been dead and buried for years. The cousin had even supplied lists of three cemeteries where the past few generations were buried, the one on Sunrise Ridge and two in northern Illinois. The rest of her relations were either not part of her maternal line or male, facts which struck them from contention.
    In addition to the Jane Doe case, she’d been trying to juggle the investigation into Kelly’s death. She’d arranged for two SCUBA divers with the sheriff’s department to check the area where Kelly was found, but there was no sign of a baby. If the child wasn’t with Kelly when she died, it was alone, someone was watching it, or the killer had taken it. They needed to find that baby. Just one more urgent thing to add to the list.
    And now Monica had gotten the idea into her head that Val should make one last ditch effort to confront Hess before he became a free man.
    “Hess’s hearing is on the afternoon docket, so he’ll be brought down to the jail tomorrow morning.” Monica took a sip of coffee, shooting Val a strong stare over the rim of her mug.
    “What are you hoping to get from this? He’s not going to confess.”
    “Don’t sell yourself short.” She raised her eyebrows and nodded in an attempt at encouragement. “If not a confession, maybe something just as good. A slip up. A detail we missed. It doesn’t have to be gift wrapped, just something we can use to arrest him before he walks out the door.”
    Val wanted to buy into Monica’s seemingly endless optimism, but the fact was, she knew Hess much better than the DA did. “I’ve talked to him before, remember? Hess doesn’t slip up, and he only hands out details that help him.”
    “So use the baby.”
    Val brought her own cup to her lips. She couldn’t even taste the coffee, it was so weak, but it gave her a chance to stall a beat, to think.
    “Come on, Val. Harlan said the caesarean scar is less than a year old. The baby fits the timeline.” Monica counted off points on her fingers. “Kelly gets pregnant, then disappears. We find Jane Doe and believe she’s Kelly. But even though Kelly’s alive, she doesn’t come forward. Not even through a sensational trial. Why?”
    She could see where Monica was heading. “Kelly was glad Hess was arrested. She left because she was afraid of him.”
    Monica gave an enthusiastic nod. “Maybe because the baby is Hess’s.”
    “Or maybe it’s not.”
    “Either way, Kelly chose to let the world believe she was dead so that Hess would go to prison. He has to have some kind of reaction to that.”
    Val set her cup on the desk. “It is something we didn’t know before.”
    Monica perched on the edge of her chair. “You think it might work? Shock him into saying something he normally wouldn’t?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “But you’ll give it a shot?”
    Val checked her watch again. She had only a few hours to figure out how she would approach Hess, and time relentlessly ticked away. “I guess I’ll have to.”

     
    In a room full of average men, Dixon Hess would win a prize for being the most average.
    His light brown hair was short, but not too short. His clean-shaven face was pleasant at first glance, but not too pleasant. He was already dressed for court, wearing a suit, his shirt a crisp white, his tie disarming pink. To a casual observer, he probably looked like any upstanding guy on his way to any office job in any city across the country. In a word, generic.
    But only if they weren’t close enough to see his eyes.
    Ice blue. Hard. So sharp, Val could feel them cut.
    He sat next to his lawyer, a stylish-on-a-budget public defender named Tamara Wade. But though she was leaning close, talking in his ear, he didn’t seem to be listening.
    All of his attention was focused on Val.
    She nodded to the two deputies in the room, took her chair, and plunked the heavy