Colton Manhunt (The Coltons 0f Mustang Valley Book 6)

by Jane Godman

  “Does your daughter have a good friend at school?” Rena asked.

  “She and her roommate get along great.”

  “Do you have her roommate’s phone number?” Rena followed up.

  The man nodded. “In case of emergency,” he said.

  A.L. was pretty confident this hadn’t been the type of emergency that Picus and his wife had been anticipating. Having a daughter close to the same age, he had an idea of how tough it might be for the kid to hear the news. Rena had been smart to think of getting some on-hand help.

  “We’ll take that number. Once you’ve talked to your daughter,” he said, “we’ll contact her friend, ask her to stick close to your daughter until you can get there.”

  With shaking hands, the man pulled the number up on his phone. Rena entered it into her phone. “Call your daughter, sir,” A.L. said.

  Picus pressed a button, held the phone up to his ear. “Hey, honey,” he said softly. “It’s Dad.”

  A.L. and Rena drifted ten feet away. There was no dignity in death, but the man deserved a little privacy to deliver the news.

  “Guess I’ll make that call, then,” Rena said.

  “I can do it,” A.L. said. He’d had some practice with emotional teens.

  “I’ve got this,” Rena said, already dialing.

  A.L. nodded and listened while Rena explained the situation briefly, providing just enough detail that the girl understood the gravity of the situation.

  Rena hung up. “She’s at the library, but she said she’ll find Hailey Picus and be there until Mr. Picus arrives.”

  “Good. We should try to talk to the neighbors.” They walked to the house on the right. Knocked sharply. No answer. Maybe not home from work yet.

  They crossed in front of the crime scene tape and walked up the sidewalk to the house on the left. Before they could knock, a voice behind them said, “That’s my door.”

  The woman, very Scandinavian-looking with her blond hair and fair skin, had a much darker-skinned baby on her hip. The kid had a pink headband wrapped around her mostly bald head.

  “Detectives McKittridge and Morgan,” he said. Both showed badges. She barely glanced at them. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Reese Holden.”

  “Were you home this afternoon, Mrs. Holden?”

  “Ms. Holden,” she corrected. “I’m not married. And yes, I was home.”

  “Did you see or hear anything unusual?” Rena asked.

  The woman shook her head. “I’m a graphic artist and I work out of my house. My office is in the basement, on the back side.”

  “Have any knowledge that Mrs. Picus was having trouble with anybody, that anybody would want to harm her?” Rena continued.

  “Jane is delightful,” she said. “Was. Was delightful.” The woman nervously straightened the headband on her kid’s head. “It’s like those other women, isn’t it?”

  No woman was feeling safe in Baywood anymore. “We can’t comment, ma’am,” he said. “You don’t happen to have any exterior security cameras, do you?”

  “No. But I might think about getting one,” she said.

  He understood. No doubt, others were probably thinking about going to the sporting goods store and picking up a shotgun. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, we’d appreciate a call,” he said, handing her a card. Rena did the same.

  They were walking away when Rena turned. “How old is your baby?” she asked.

  “Seven months,” Reese said. “I adopted her when she was twelve days old. I wanted a baby but didn’t want the husband that generally comes with it.”

  Rena nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “I get that.”

  A.L. rode shotgun while Rena drove. He liked to look around, to study the landscape. Jane Picus had lived within the city limits of Baywood. The fifty-thousand-person city bordered the third largest lake in west-central Wisconsin, almost halfway between Madison and Eau Claire. Generally peaceful, that many people in a square radius of thirteen miles could do some damage to one another. Add in the weekend boaters, who were regularly overserved, and the Baywood Police Department dealt with the usual assortment of crime. Burglary. Battery. Drugs. An occasional arson.

  And murder. There had been two the previous year. One, a family dispute and the killer had been quickly apprehended. The other, a workplace shooter who’d turned the gun on himself after killing his boss. Neither had been pleasant, but they hadn’t shaken people’s belief that Baywood was a good place to live and raise a family. People were happy when their biggest complaint was about the size of the mosquitos.

  Now, for-sale signs were popping up in yards. There would likely be more by next week. Four unsolved murders in forty days was bad. Bad for tourism, bad for police morale and certainly bad for the poor women and their families.

  In less than ten minutes, they were downtown. Brick sidewalks bordered both sides of Main Street for a full six blocks. Window boxes, courtesy of the garden club, were overflowing with petunias. The police department had moved to its new building in the three-hundred block over ten years ago. Even then, it hadn’t been new, but the good citizens of Baywood had voted to put some money into the sixty-year-old former department store. There was too much glass for A.L.’s comfort on the first floor and too little air-conditioning on the second and third. But it beat the hell out of working in the factory at the edge of town.

  Which was where his father and his uncle Joe still worked. The McKittridge brothers. They’d been born and raised in Baywood, raised their own families there and had never left.

  A.L. had sworn that wouldn’t be his life. Yet, here he was.

  Because of Traci. His sixteen-year-old daughter.

  He and his ex-wife, Jacqui, hadn’t done much right together, but Traci was the exception. And he didn’t intend to leave Baywood until she graduated from high school. She was changing. Maybe it was just hormones. But he was worried. She didn’t confide in him anymore, didn’t share her secrets or dreams. Maybe thought he wouldn’t understand. Maybe thought that he’d never had any of his own.

  Kids were wrong about a lot of things.

  Rena pulled into a parking spot at the side of the building. Unbuckled her seat belt. Opened her door.

  “I’m not looking forward to this,” he said, his head turned away from his partner.

  Rena sighed loudly. “I know. I’m going to miss him. I really wasn’t expecting Toby to do this.”

  Toby Kingman had been with the Baywood Police Department for thirty-two years. He’d been A.L.’s boss for twelve and Rena’s for eight. Two months ago, before the murders had started, he’d given notice to his boss that he was retiring.

  The hissing and moaning could still be heard.

  Toby Kingman was a cop’s cop. Understood what it was to work the street, knew the bullshit that cops put up with. Didn’t back down from supporting his cops when they were right.

  Didn’t protect bad cops, either.

  That made him okay in A.L.’s book. He would miss the man. Two nights ago, they’d had his retirement party. The one that counted. The one where cops gathered in a dark and familiar bar and told stories, the kind where service was understood and really appreciated.

  Tonight, the city was putting on some official thing to celebrate the event. A.L. would normally have skipped out, but the word had come down that attendance was mandatory.

  “Rumor is that they’re going to announce the new chief,” Rena said. “It sort of lacks some class that they’d do that the same night that they celebrate Toby’s retirement.”

  A.L. turned to look at her. “You were expecting class?”

  “Neither of the two deputy chiefs want the job. Piss poor succession planning if you ask me,” Rena said.

  “Not great,” A.L. agreed. Toby had been good at so many things but probably hadn’t given enough
thought to who would ultimately fill his shoes.

  “They’re going to have to tap the detective ranks. It should be you,” she said. “You’re the best detective on the force.”

  “It won’t be me,” he said knowingly.

  Rena didn’t argue. “You’re too cantankerous.”

  A.L. shrugged. It was unlikely that anybody considered him management material, even though he’d done many of the right things. Had gone to college and earned a criminal justice degree. Gotten a beat cop job in Madison. Four years later, had transferred to the SWAT unit. Professionally, he’d had it going.

  Personally, things had been rockier. Two years into his job in Madison, Jacqui had gotten pregnant. They’d dated for only six months, but he’d been confident they could make it work, and eight weeks before Traci was born, they’d tied the knot. When she’d been four, and the marriage was already on a downward skid, Jacqui had wanted him home more. He’d left the SWAT unit and moved back to Baywood to take the open detective slot. Things were better for a while but, ultimately, not good enough. The divorce five years ago had been a relief.

  Rena got the rest of the way out of the car, slammed the door and started walking. “And,” she said, picking up the conversation, “they want somebody who will kiss their ass every now and then.”

  “I kiss your ass. Isn’t that enough?”

  “You maybe bite my ass, but you definitely don’t kiss it,” she said over her shoulder.

  He smiled and caught up with her.

  “It won’t be me,” Rena said. “I’ve been discounted.”

  He didn’t bother to placate her and tell her that her thoughts were unfounded. She’d made the mistake of confiding in a friend, who hadn’t had the sense to keep her mouth shut about it at work, that Rena and her husband were taking fertility treatments. Sexism, just like racism and ageism, was real. She’d been labeled “on the mommy track.” Not in any file and never in any public venue. But that wasn’t where the real decisions were made. No, those still happened over beers by mostly white men.

  “I think it will be Faster,” she said.

  She was probably right. Christian Faster had been a detective for a few years. He was less than thorough, didn’t really give a shit about victims and cheated on his wife. But he was a supreme ass-kisser. “Who cares?”

  “I do. You should.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll know soon enough.”

  The party was on the third floor, in the large conference room. On the way there, he and Rena stopped on the second floor, in the office that they shared with the four other detectives on the force. It was empty. Likely everyone was already assembled upstairs. Word would have spread quickly that there had been another murder, and cops weren’t immune to the need to ruminate and speculate. But even within the department, information was being handled carefully in a need-to-know manner. Members of the task force that had been initiated after the second murder would be briefed at the daily morning meeting. As the lead detectives on the case, either he or Rena had to be there to provide updates. It had been chaired by Toby. Now the new guy would have that responsibility. “I’m giving them ten minutes,” A.L. said. They needed to start dismantling Jane Picus’s life as soon as possible.

  Rena nodded. And, like the good mind reader that she normally was, said, “We should probably start at the flower shop. They’re open until six.”

  He checked his phone. It was almost five. The store was just down the street. “Okay,” he said. He looked at his partner a little closer. She really did look tired. “Hey, are you feeling all right?” he asked.

  Copyright © 2019 by Beverly R. Long

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  ISBN: 9781488063961

  Colton Manhunt

  Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Jane Godman for her contribution to The Coltons of Mustang Valley miniseries.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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