Kate Fairchild was waiting in the conference room of the Seattle Examiner when Mac Davis got off deadline. Well, she probably wasn't Fairchild anymore, Mac thought. She'd gotten married, and she was the type of woman who would take her husband's name.
Kate was tense, upset about something, nervously twisting her hands together. She'd once been taken hostage by a deranged gunman and never lost her serene poise. He grimaced. It must be bad for her to come here.
"Kate?" he asked. "What's wrong?"
"I need your help," she said simply, and she slid a snapshot across the table to him. It was an old photo, taken with a cheap camera, Mac thought, as he looked at it curiously. The photo was of a tall white man, with his arm around a woman — Asian, maybe Cambodian, maybe Vietnamese.
A young girl stood in front of them. Their daughter, he guessed.
He looked at Kate, and raised his eyebrow.
"The girl in the photo came to see me at U-Dub," she said. "She gave me the photo, and said she needs my help."
Mac frowned. "I'm not tracking."
"That's my father, Mac," Kate said. "Does he look dead to you?"
Mac looked back at the photo. No, he conceded, he didn't look dead to him.
Book 6 in the Mac Davis thriller series features a Marine turned cop reporter in Seattle.
L.J. Breedlove is a former journalist writing mysteries and thrillers about what she knows: complicated people, small towns, big cities, cops, reporters, politicians, assorted bad guys.
L.J. grew up on a cattle ranch and then went to college to be an oceanographer. She decided getting seasick was not a good trait for any oceanographer to have, and discovered journalism instead — a field that liked people who asked questions!
As a reporter and editor, she worked in Alaska, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and Washington, D. C. — places that have become the sites for her books. She got homesick for the Pacific Northwest and came home to work with college newspapers and teach journalism.
She is an over-educated, bleeding-heart liberal with a penchant for heroes such as Jack Reacher. She isn't particularly bothered by the inconsistency. Some of her thrillers have werewolves in them — that doesn’t faze her either.
You can follow her on Facebook at ljbreedlove. Best place to find her — besides a local coffee shop — is at ljbreedlove.com. You can sign up for her email newsletter there!