Read Tell No Lies for Free Online Page A

I thought I’d restrain myself.”
    “Less armed than I was back then.” Dooley’s grin seemed more for their surprising rapport than at the crack. “Did you know the Hernandez brothers?” she asked. “Linebackers?”
    “I’m out of your age range, lady,” Cris said. “I knew the older Hernandez brothers. Carjackers.”
    Dooley laughed. “Jesus, those games. Ex-con parents rolling in on Harleys, bumping Tupac. You guys had those rump-shaking cheerleaders.”
    “Yeah, we did,” Cris said. “It was good to get out.”
    “Yup. I don’t see many grads in houses like this,” Dooley said. “Actually, I don’t see many grads I’m not handcuffing. ”
    They hit the landing, and Cris and Daniel slowed, the good mood instantly dissipating. On the kitchen island next to the pan of cooling chicken and Cris’s now-drained wineglass, the envelope and sheet of paper were spotlit like objets d’art.
    The inspector’s face shifted. All business.
    Dooley read the letter, then removed a pair of tweezers from her jacket pocket and used them to flip the sheet. “Weird handwriting, huh?”
    “The pencil really scraped into the paper,” Daniel said. “Like the words were carved. A lot of anger behind them. And the spatial organization on the page is off, too. See how it slants there? Plus, some of the letters are too close, others far apart. Might indicate dyslexia.”
    Dooley chewed her cheek, leaning over the paper. “A counselor, you said, right? Any other insights?”
    “Well, it’s probably from someone in Metro South. I mean, who would walk a letter to a rear mail room in a random building?”
    “Someone trying not to get caught.”
    “But the person obviously wasn’t planning to screw up and stick the letter in the wrong mailbox. He had to figure it would just get picked up with the rest of the outgoing mail and go straight out. Wouldn’t be marked until the post office. So there wouldn’t have been any trail back to the building to worry about.”
    “Point taken.” Dooley fluffed out a large evidence bag. “So who’s in your building on a given day?”
    “Aside from social-services workers?” Daniel said. “Felons, parolees, juvenile delinquents.”
    Dooley grimaced.
    “We’ve got Probation and Parole on floors two and three, Anger Management on the fourth, Domestic Violence on the fifth, and—” He caught himself. “Basically, there’s no one in the building who wouldn’t be a suspect.”
    “Splendid.” Using the tweezers, Dooley guided the letter into the Ziploc. “I’ll put on my Miss Marple costume and we’ll lock everyone in the conservatory until we straighten it out.”
    Daniel barely registered the joke, his thoughts moving to the people he passed in those corridors every day, rode next to in the elevators, made small talk with at the vending machines. One of them had issued a threat and carried it out with the edge of a blade. For a nausea-inducing moment, Daniel found himself considering the merry band of parolees who composed his own group. A-Dre’s scowl leapt up from memory, the heat behind his words: I am who I am because they made me this way.
    Dooley had said something.
    “What?” Daniel asked.
    She tapped the envelope with her tweezers. “I said, what do you make of the envelope? You said it was the kind used by the department?”
    “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it was an employee,” Daniel said. “We have supplies stolen all the time. Anything that’s not locked down.”
    “Sounds like you’re running some effective rehabilitation over there.”
    “The news said it was brutal,” Cris cut in abruptly. Her arms were crossed as if against a sudden cold, and Daniel realized she’d been missing from the conversation for a while. “The murder,” she said. “Was it brutal?”
    Dooley paused with the tweezers but did not look up. “Yes,” she said.
    Cris refilled her wineglass, her hand shaking. Dooley’s eyes lifted, taking note of the uneven pour.
    Rather