The Murder That Never Was: A Forensic Instincts Novel by Andrea Kane Page A

mourning of her lost life as a gymnast, her recent arthroscopic surgery to repair her torn rotator cuff, and her now-impossible goals as an Olympic hopeful.
    What if Jim and the killer who had shot that Lisa girl were after her, too? What if they planned to kill her? What could she do to hide? To stop them?
    She couldn’t run away, not without her parents calling everyone up to the National Guard until they found her. And she couldn’t talk to anyone, including the police. Not without proof.
    She’d tried so hard to get it. She’d had both her blood and her urine checked, hoping there’d be evidence of the drugs in her system. But it had been too late. Whatever Jim had given her clearly had a short half-life and had already dispersed. It had been a long shot anyway. Jim wouldn’t have chosen a steroid that could be detected in the bloodstream for months, maybe even longer. So that possibility was out. And now Julie had vanished along with whatever she might have found out. So Shannon had nothing.
    She’d considered going to the cops anyway, to tell them everything she knew and to see if they could help her. Not only to protect her, but to find Julie and determine what she knew and if she, too, was in danger. But she couldn’t. The risk was too great. Not only could the killers be following her, but she herself might be in legal trouble, no matter how hard she’d try to make the police understand that she’d thought the pills she was taking were healthy supplements. Why would they believe her? She was an Olympic hopeful who’d do almost anything to get the gold.
    God, she’d been such an asshole.
    In the meantime, she couldn’t disguise her state of mind. Her parents were frantic, her psychiatrist was deeply troubled, and her tutors were well out of their league and afraid to say or do the wrong thing. So Shannon shut down like a clam, distancing herself from everyone and going so far as to end her psychiatric sessions after an intensive two-week regimen of daily visits.
    Everyone attributed it to the devastation she was enduring about the shattering loss of her career. She let them think that. It was partly true anyway. As for the rest—if she wasn’t going to the police, she certainly wasn’t telling anyone else about Julie’s investigation and the PEDs Jim Robbins had been giving her.
    Shannon hadn’t seen Jim since the day she’d spilled her guts to Julie. It wasn’t a reach to guess that he believed—with a great sense of relief—that Shannon had just fallen to pieces and was avoiding anyone connected to her old life. Obviously, the last thing he wanted was to be found out. Shannon might have no proof that the supplements she’d been taking had been performance enhancing drugs, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a big stink about it and ruin his career—not to mention get him investigated and possibly arrested.
    Despite her fear, she was half tempted to take that step and blow open Pandora’s box.
    But she didn’t. She was too scared. And she was so alone.
    Then she got Julie’s Facebook message.
    And everything changed.
    Julie had finally reconnected. According to her private message, she’d fled to the East Coast after the murder, to some town in New Jersey called Upper Montclair. She’d sworn Shannon to secrecy about her location, and about the fact that she was opening her own gym in a week. She seemed really stoked about the gym. Normally, Shannon would have been thrilled for her. But now, all she could think about was danger and death. Julie really hadn’t addressed either or answered any of her questions. She’d just expressed concern for Shannon’s state of mind, and asked her where things stood in every aspect of her life.
    Was she too scared to even broach the subject?
    Shannon hadn’t wasted a second. She’d typed in a response, blurting out everything that had been crowding her mind these past weeks. How she’d withdrawn from the world and stopped seeing her therapist.