Nearly Found (Nearly Boswell Mysteries) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elle Cosimano (www.ellecosimano.com) grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, the daughter of a prison warden and an elementary school teacher who rides a Harley. She majored in psychology at St. Mary's College, Maryland, and set aside a successful real-estate career to pursue writing. She lives with her husband and two sons. Nearly Gone and Nearly Found are her first novels.

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“Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.”

                                                          —Dr. Edmond Locard

PROLOGUE

TJ Wiles sat behind me in chemistry class for nine months before I knew he was a killer. If I’d ever bothered to pay attention, I might have known sooner. I could have sensed the bitterness he felt for my father, my family, the rage boiling inside him. Maybe I would have felt what he was becoming, in time to save the people he killed. 

But my occasional backward glance wasn’t enough to see him for what he was. 

I hadn’t been able to see my father truly either. Once upon a time, he’d been the man who took me to Belle Green Park to play, who held me in his lap and did stupid magic tricks just to make me laugh.

But David Boswell was a thief. A liar and a conman who used his ability to taste emotion—by touching a person’s skin—to prey on his own friends, siphoning their assets to finance his illegal activities, using their clean money to launder his own. Because he could always tell what they were feeling, he was uncannily disarming, easily able to gain their confidence and assuage their fears. He played TJ Wiles’s father like a card, then tossed him aside when the stakes got too high, before disappearing altogether five years ago.

TJ had lived in Belle Green once, in a huge brick house with a manicured lawn as green as the golf course it nestled up to. But after TJ’s father went to prison, TJ’s mother committed suicide and TJ was left to live with his uncle here in Sunny View trailer park. A football scholarship had become his only hope for getting out—the same way the chemistry scholarship had become mine. He’d played hard, like his entire future depended on it, until the day he blew out his knee, and his entire future went with it.

My father hadn’t just hurt TJ and his family. He’d ripped TJ apart, leaving a dark hole inside TJ’s chest where his heart used to be. A space TJ imagined he could only fill by taking from me everything he’d lost. Two months ago, TJ testified that his hatred of my family drove him to kill four of my classmates in an attempt to frame me and exact some kind of twisted retribution against my father. TJ’s victims—kids I’d been tutoring, kids I’d cared about—were gone and they were never coming back. Posie, Teddy, Marcia, and Kylie. They’d still be alive if it hadn’t been for what my father did.

TJ hadn’t succeeded in destroying my life like he’d planned. But he had taken my chance at a scholarship, my two best friends, and my ability to trust people without imagining the worst in them. 

I’d spent years looking for messages from my father, scanning newspapers, mapping out the places I thought he might have been since he disappeared. I had so many questions—the kind my mother couldn’t answer because she had no idea what my father and I were capable of—that conman David Boswell and his daughter, Nearly, were both capable of tasting other people’s emotions just by touching their skin. I’d believed that if I found my father, I’d have all the answers and my world would make sense. 

But the one person I had more in common with than anyone on the planet had caused so much damage that four people were dead.  

Knowing who my father was, how could I keep searching for him? What if the only place left to look for him was somewhere in myself?

I pulled out the red thumbtacks from the map on the wall of my bedroom. One for every city where I suspected my father had been—Jersey City, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. I tried not to wonder how many other lives my father had ruined along the way. 

The pins prickled the inside of my fist. I dropped them into the wastebasket, massaging the marks they left in my skin and watching them fade. A scientist named Locard came up with the idea that we leave trace evidence of ourselves in every encounter, and that we in turn take something from everyone we touch, even if we can’t see it.

And those traces of my father—the pain he’d left behind in the people he’d stolen from, the genes I carried that made me just like him—terrified me. 

1

Gravel crunched in front of my trailer and the muted bass of a stereo blew in through the open windows. I licked peanut butter from my fingers and pulled back the curtain. The fabric smelled like smoke, even though my mom had quit smoking two months ago. 

Outside, heat waves radiated from the hood of the old black Mercedes that blocked my front porch. Reece Whelan sat in the driver’s seat, wearing aviator sunglasses, his lips moving to lyrics I couldn’t make out. 

I threw open the front door as he eased out of the car. 

“Where’s your bike?” I asked, letting the screen door slam behind me. 

He leaned back, his arms thrown wide to showcase the Benz. “What, don’t you like it?”

I bit my lip, taking in the way his T-shirt stretched across the broad planes of his chest. “Oh, I love it. But doesn’t it belong to Detective Petrenko?” 

Reece took the front porch steps two at a time and pulled me into him, looking smug. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to his tightly shorn hair, the soft prickly way it felt against my fingers when I ran my hands through it. His shirt smelled like Armor All and car leather. Different from the worn leather jacket I loved to bury my face in on the back of his bike. But under all that was the familiar citrus and sandalwood smell of his cologne and I drank him in.

He dangled the keys between us. “He probably won’t miss it. Want to take it for a spin? It has air-conditioning,” Reece teased. 

He leaned in to kiss me but I held him at arm’s length. “Wait. You stole Alex Petrenko’s car?”

He arched a pierced brow. “I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it. I stopped over at Gena’s place to check in. Petrenko was there. They were . . . otherwise occupied.” Reece let his eyes brush over me in a top-down way that still managed to make my knees watery, even when I wanted to strangle him.

I fought back a smile. “Okay. I get it. And?”

“And his keys were on the kitchen counter. I knocked on the bedroom door, and shouted ‘Can I borrow your car?’ He screamed something that sounded like Yes, yes. Hell, yes. Then Gena hollered something about getting the hell out of their house. So I did. And here I am.” He beamed, still waggling the keys. “With air-conditioning.”

The Benz dripped...