A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  “Ma’am?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t see him while you were at the bank?”

  “No.” A fresh wave of fear washed over her as she remembered the ATM, the gun at her cheek. “Maybe he saw me on the highway when I entered or left the bank. I was, um, driving kind of erratically. You said he called nine-one-one?”

  “The call came in at ten-sixteen. He told the dispatcher he’d seen you at the bank and believed you were being held at gunpoint.”

  Mia clenched her hands together again. Her stomach clenched, too.

  “Okay, and then when the car stopped and Hannigan jumped out, you say he exchanged words with your assailant?”

  “It wasn’t an exchange, really. He said, ‘You there!’ like he was trying to get his attention, stop him from what he was doing.”

  Stop him from killing me.

  She looked at her hands again and felt as if she was going to vomit.

  “Uh-oh. Head between the knees.” The paramedic pushed her head down, and Mia found herself staring at a crack in the pavement as she waited for the nausea to pass. More footsteps approached.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Mia closed her eyes at the sound of the familiar voice. Ric Santos. She’d known he would get here eventually, but she’d hoped to be gone by then.

  “We’re about finished up,” Macon reported.

  A pair of worn Nikes and frayed jeans entered her field of vision. “Caramia?”

  “What?”

  He dropped into a crouch and put his hand on her knee. He’d never put his hand anywhere near her knee before, and under normal circumstances, she probably would have gone up in flames. Right now, it was all she could do not to throw up on his shoes.

  “How’s the arm?”

  “Fine.” She looked up at him. Which was a mistake. His brown-black eyes searched her face, and she could tell he knew she was lying. It hurt like a bitch. Worse than anything she’d ever experienced. And she should be grateful she wasn’t lying in that road in the freezing sleet with a team of crime-scene techs surrounding her.

  She sat up straight and brushed the hair from her eyes. Ric stood. Mia felt his gaze on her, even sharper than usual, as she turned to Macon. “Was there anything else? I’d really like to go home.”

  “This could use a few stitches,” the paramedic said, applying the last in a series of butterfly bandages to the slash on her arm. “Otherwise, you’re going to have a nasty scar. We can drop you off on our way back to the fire station.”

  Mia took a deep breath. The last place she wanted to be right now was some ER waiting room. Just the thought made her shudder. “It’s fine.”

  The woman gave her a stern look as she put away her bandages and ointment.

  “I’d make the trip,” Ric said. “They’ll probably give you some pain meds.”

  Mia flashed him a glance. She hadn’t seen him in months, not since they’d worked a case together last summer. But it took only an instant for her to take in every detail about him—his lean, wide-shouldered build, his dark hair that was longer than she remembered and slightly mussed. He wore his scarred leather jacket and jeans, which told her he’d been off duty tonight. Had he been in bed when he’d gotten the call? Had he been with a woman?

  She couldn’t believe her thoughts had gone there, but Ric Santos had a reputation, and Mia couldn’t help thinking of it every time she saw him.

  “I’m fine. It’s only a flesh wound.” She turned to Macon. “Is that it, Detective?”

  Macon’s gaze went from Mia to Ric and back to Mia. “Just a few more things. We need a list of any property that was stolen with the Jeep.”

  “Property?”

  “Credit cards, keys, cell phone,” Macon said. “Anything he might use later.”

  Mia stared at him. A lethal criminal had not only her car but her keys, too. He could get into her house, use her credit cards. She felt sick again. A massive shiver moved through her.

  “If your purse was in the car, he knows your address by now.” Ric shrugged out of his jacket and held it out to her.

  She eyed it warily. Was this a peace offering? His way of saying sorry for befriending her when he needed something, then dropping off the face of the earth after he’d gotten it? Ignoring his gaze, she took the jacket, slipped her arms into the warm sleeves, and turned to Macon.

  “My house key is on my key chain,” she said. “And then there’s my purse, my wallet.”

  “You have someone you can call?” Ric asked. “Maybe a friend or relative you can stay with after you’re done at the hospital?”

  Mia looked at him.

  “You need to get that arm checked out,” he added, and those dark eyes dared her to challenge him.

  But she knew what it took to challenge Ric, and she wasn’t up for it right now. “I can call someone.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s getting late, but—”

  “Do it,” Ric said. “You can’t go home tonight.”

  Jonah sat in the cramped back office of the Minute-Mart, trying to glean a man’s identity from a blurry, poorly lit surveillance video. The good news was that an outdoor camera mounted on the southeast corner of the building had been trained on the parking lot when Mia Voss pulled up to the store. The bad news was that her assailant had entered the Jeep on the west side, thereby shielding himself—whether by luck or by intention—from the camera as he climbed into her vehicle. So despite the video footage, all they really knew at the moment was that they were looking for a white male, medium build, who might or might not be driving a stolen Jeep.

  “I’m just getting a shadow,” Ric said, rewinding the clip on the computer so that he could replay it for the umpteenth time.

  Jonah wasn’t sure what he expected to get from this, but arguing with Ric would be pointless. Ric was like a pit bull when he got focused on something, and his focus had been razor-sharp since the instant they’d rolled up to the crime scene.

  Or, more specifically, since they’d rolled up to the crime scene and gotten a look at the victim sitting in the back of the ambulance.

  “Something about this feels off,” Ric said now.

  Jonah downed another sip of tepid coffee. The manager had kept the cups full for the past two hours, but Jonah and Ric had been on a stakeout all day, and they were long past the point of caffeine helping anything.

  Jonah shook off the fatigue and tried to concentrate. His partner had that intense look about him that trumped exhaustion.

  “You mean because of the angle?”

  “Because of the car. A two-door Jeep.” Ric pressed play once again and watched the grainy image of a figure approaching the Jeep and—hidden from view—climbing in through the driver’s-side door minutes before Mia exited the store. “Look at this parking lot. An Explorer, a Tahoe, even a Lexus. Every one of those vehicles has four doors, and every one of them is worth more than that Jeep.”

  “Maybe the drivers didn’t leave them unlocked,” Jonah said.

  “At least two of them did. Watch the video. Hell, the Lexus guy actually left his keys inside when he ran in to buy cigarettes.”

  Jonah rubbed his eyes. “Maybe she pulled up and he liked what he saw, decided to go for it even if it meant the hassle of climbing into the backseat.”

  Ric’s gaze bored into his. He didn’t like this scenario, and Jonah could see why. One, it suggested that Mia was specifically targeted by the assailant. Two, it suggested that the guy hadn’t planned just to drop her off with a friendly wave when he got her out to Old Mill Road.

  The man had approached the Jeep from the southeast corner of the lot, which meant that he could have come from any of the businesses across from the Minute-Mart—the dry cleaner, the pet store, the doughnut shop. Not one of those places had a surveillance cam. And of course, he could have come from nowhere. Just some guy passing through town, looking for a soft target.

  Ric raked his hand through his hair and leaned back in his plastic chair. “I hate this case,
and it’s barely three hours old.”

  Jonah hated it, too. Any case that involved a cop getting killed—even a retired cop—was fucking miserable. Some cops were superstitious about working such cases, as if somehow the victim’s bad luck was going to rub off on them.

  “Yo, you guys still here?”

  Jonah craned his neck around, but the question didn’t merit an answer. Vince Moore stood in the doorway. He was halfway through what was probably a day-old hot dog, and pickle relish had dribbled down his shirt.

  “We found some brass at the crime scene,” he said around a mouthful of food. “Two spent casings. One in the ditch, one on the shoulder. You want me to send them to Austin?”

  “State lab’s backed up,” Ric said. “Send them to the Delphi Center.”

  Jonah looked at his partner. The Delphi Center was a private laboratory, which meant it was expensive. But Ric wasn’t likely to get any push-back on a case like this, not with a former San Marcos police officer laid out in the morgue.

  “Hey, doesn’t that girl work at the Delphi Center?” The side of Moore’s mouth curled up as he turned to Ric.

  “Which girl?”

  “From tonight. The one with the rack.” Moore made a squeezing motion with his free hand.

  “She’s a DNA tracer,” Ric said, turning his attention back to the video.

  “What’s the deal there? You doing her or what?”

  Ric looked at him.

  “I saw you two talking,” Moore said. “The way she was looking at you, I figured you were—”

  “I’m not.” Ric tapped the mouse again and replayed the footage.

  “So you lent her your jacket, but you’re not doing her. Mind if I call her?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  A grin spread across Moore’s face as he crumpled his hot-dog wrapper and tossed it at the trash can by Jonah’s feet. He missed.

  “Later, then.”

  When he was gone, Ric continued to stare at the computer screen, as if something new was going to happen.

  “He’ll do it, you know,” Jonah said.

  Ric looked up at him, and the muscle in the side of his jaw tightened. He glanced at the empty doorway. “How’d he know where she works, anyway?”

  “Every cop in the department knows where she works,” Jonah said. “She gave that seminar last year, remember? Touch DNA?”

  Jonah didn’t elaborate, but he could see the realization dawning. Dr. Voss had stepped up to the podium with her strawberry blonde ponytail and her crisp white lab coat, and by the end of her presentation, every man in the auditorium had undressed her with his eyes at least a dozen times.

  Ric rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Shit. This is going to be a bitch of a case. I can feel it.”

  Jonah watched the video as Mia slid behind the wheel of her Jeep, unaware that she was about to see a cop get killed and be forced to run for her life.

  “Yeah.” Jonah sighed. “I can feel it, too.”

  Ric pulled up to the warmly lit bungalow and shook his head. He should have known. Leave it to Mia to take perfectly good instructions and throw them right out the window.

  He double-checked the number as he walked up the concrete path. Four fifty-five Sugarberry Lane. The address sounded—and looked—like something out of a storybook. A giant oak tree dominated the yard. Neatly trimmed shrubs lined the sidewalk. The house itself was that quaint 1930s architecture that people with way too much time on their hands liked to restore. It had white siding, black shutters, and a wide front porch that at the moment was littered with piles of collapsed boxes.

  Ric eyed the boxes as he rang the doorbell. Looked as if she’d just moved in. Or she could have moved months ago, for all he knew. He hadn’t seen her since the summer. It had been four months since he’d given in to the urge to call her. Not that he’d missed her. He’d hardly given her a thought—except for a couple of times in the dead of night when he’d been driving home from work to an empty apartment.

  He heard footsteps, and the light behind the peephole went dark as she peered out at him. The lock tumbled, and the door swung back.

  “It’s three-fifteen,” she said, fisting a hand on her hip.

  She’d changed from that silky pink thing into flannel pajama bottoms and a snug-fitting T-shirt. He forced himself not to stare.

  “Just doing a drive-by. Your house is lit up like a stadium.”

  She stepped back to let him in, and he wiped his shoes on the welcome mat before stepping inside. She looked fresh from the shower and had her elbow wrapped in a clean white bandage.

  “That coffee I smell?”

  She tucked a damp curl behind her ear. “That depends. Is this an official visit, or are you here as my friend?”

  Friend. He’d never really thought of her that way. “A little of both, I guess. How’d you get home from the hospital?”

  “Sophie came to get me.”

  “And Sophie is … ?”

  “You know her.” She brushed past him and padded down the hall in her bare feet. Ric followed. “She works at the Delphi Center. You’ve seen her a thousand times.”

  “The receptionist,” he said. “The one with the great—”

  “Yes.” She tossed him an annoyed look over her shoulder.

  “I was going to say singing voice.” He followed her into a kitchen lined with cardboard boxes. “I heard she moonlights as a nightclub singer in Austin.”

  Mia reached for a coffee mug, and her T-shirt rode up to reveal a strip of creamy skin.

  “Sugar?”

  “Black.”

  She poured a cup as he leaned back against her counter and crossed his arms. “I thought you were going to stay with someone until a locksmith could get here.”

  She passed him the coffee, then added some to her cup, which was sitting on a drop-leaf table beside a window that faced the driveway. She was stalling for time.

  “I called one of those twenty-four-hour services.”

  “Bet that wasn’t cheap.”

  She shrugged. “Sophie has a friend in town. I didn’t want to intrude.”

  He watched her carefully. No boyfriend, then. Or even a friendly ex-boyfriend who would have offered her a spot on his couch. Ric could have let her crash at his place, but he didn’t trust himself not to take advantage of her fragile mental state.

  Although she didn’t look fragile. He watched her over the rim of the coffee mug. She looked wide-awake, energized, and completely caught up in some kitchen chore that involved about a hundred little spice jars. The hostility he’d sensed from her earlier had dissipated, but years of experience with women told him it wasn’t gone for good, just hiding.

  “You’re alphabetizing spices,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And it’s after three in the morning.”

  Sadness flickered across her face, and she glanced away. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Ric knew the feeling. Sometimes he’d come home from a crime scene completely beat and completely unable to shut it down for the night. Some scenes were like that.

  A scene where he knew the victim was always like that.

  “Is it your case?” she asked, and the empathy in her blue eyes made him uneasy.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you the one to tell his wife?”

  “His wife’s dead.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Dead?”

  “Passed away about a year ago. Cancer, I think.”

  Mia bit her lip, then turned around to face the sink.

  He frowned at her across the kitchen as she turned on the faucet and stared at the water. “What is it?”

  “Nothing, it’s just—” She busied herself washing her hands. “I thought he was buying ice cream for her. I guess he was going home to an empty house. God, that’s so lonely.”

  Interesting comment from a woman who lived alone.

  She grabbed a dish towel off the counter to dab her eyes. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Ric wa
tched her, knowing he should have waited until morning for this. She wasn’t in shape to answer questions right now. But murder investigations didn’t improve with age. He needed answers as soon as he could get them. He put his mug on the table, then pulled out a chair. “Sit down.”

  “Uh-oh.” She took a deep breath and sat, and he could tell she was relieved by the distraction. “Interview time. Are you going to tape-record me?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good memory.”

  He moved a wooden chair across from her and sat down. Their knees almost touched. He traced his finger over her thigh where blood had seeped through the flannel. “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing. I got tangled in some barbed wire when I was running.”

  “When was the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

  She gave him a baleful look. “I work in a crime lab. I’m immunized against everything under the sun.”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at her.

  “So, did you have a question?” she asked. “Because I’ve got a serious case of the jitters, and those spices are really calling my name.”

  “Did the perpetrator ever ask for your PIN?”

  She looked at him for a long moment. He could almost see her brain switching gears. “No.”

  “Do you think he saw you enter it when you were at the ATM?”

  “I don’t know. I keyed it in pretty fast. Why?”

  “It’s unusual, that’s all. You’d think he’d want it for later.”

  “I was sort of low on cash.” She cleared her throat. “My bank only let me get out three hundred, so maybe he figured I was broke.”

  “Are you?”

  She laughed. “That’s blunt.”

  “It’s just background.”

  “Yes and no.” She looked around. “I just spent every dime of my savings on this place, so I’ve got one big asset and very little cash. My grandmother would say I’m house-poor.”

  “It’s a nice place. You just move in?”

  “It’s been about two months. I’m still getting organized.”

  Ric glanced around the half-unpacked kitchen again, seeing it in a new light. She’d added a few personal touches—the Sierra Club calendar tacked to the wall beside the fridge, the flat-screen TV, currently muted and tuned to CNN, mounted in the breakfast room. The flowered wallpaper and white lace curtains, though— definitely not Mia.