She knew the diner. The one with no name. Half the town ate there on Thursday night because of the chicken fried chicken special. Her stomach rumbled in agreement with his plan while every other fiber of her being hesitated to leave with him and go somewhere so public.
Then why are you here? You came out here just to ask Gray to find this man for you. Go with him.
“Are you worried about people seeing you there? You’ll be officially in my custody if anyone questions you.”
That almost sounded like he was offering her protection. Someone had already done that. Could she trust Shaw Bennett any more than she could trust Fred Haskins? Courtney had done a lot of illegal things to stay alive. Just to survive.
“My bike is down the street.” She pointed toward the spot where she’d left it.
“Then you can follow me to the diner. I’ll meet you there.” He started walking off.
She laughed. Turning his back on her seemed a foolish action. If he wanted her in custody, how did he know she wouldn’t run again? “You trust me to follow you? Just like that?”
He stopped and turned. A strange expression covered his features, one she couldn’t interpret. “Follow or not. It’s up to you.”
He left her standing there with her mouth dangling open. A raging debate fought inside her head. Should she stay or should she go? Her life seemed to always come down to that question.
This time, she decided to go…with Shaw Bennett. “Wait. Can I ride with you?”
****
“Matt Dickerson, this is Courtney Crenshaw.”
Courtney winced. “Crenshaw isn’t my real name. I never married the…” She was about to say son-of-a-bitch, but bit her lower lip instead. It wouldn’t pay to lose emotional control so early in the conversation. She had to appear calm, reasonable. “My last name is really Jepson.”
The tall, thin man lowered himself into the chair between Bennett and Courtney, his serious gray eyes boring into her as if he wanted to drill down into her brain or something.
“So you’re the illusive Courtney Jepson, aka Courtney Crenshaw.” Dickerson turned his head toward Bennett. “So you finally caught her.”
Bennett sliced off another bite of chicken fried chicken. “Nope. She turned herself in.”
Dickerson leaned back, a surprised expression distorting his otherwise plain features. “Just like that? Why aren’t you taking her to the Fairview lock up right now?”
“For what?” Bennett’s even tone held just a hint of an edge.
“McCord let me look through the evidence on the Crenshaw case. Her fingerprints are on the handle of a bloody screwdriver. That’s the kind of tool that would make a puncture wound like the one in Crenshaw’s stomach.”
“It was self-defense,” Bennett replied.
“He was hitting me,” Courtney answered, explaining her actions in the same moment as Bennett’s defense of her.
She caught Bennett’s gaze. Another jolt of understanding shot through her. The man intended to protect her from prosecution. Why? Of course. He wanted her testimony against Fred Haskins. It was obvious. Why hadn’t she thought of that already? Well, if she was going to roll on old man Haskins, then Shaw Bennett better come up with a really good witness protection plan for her.
Dickerson grunted. “That’s what they all say.”
Courtney rose to her feet. “You don’t know me. You don’t know my life. You have no idea what I’ve been through. Who the hell are you to judge me?”
She glanced down at Bennett. His eyes caught hers and held steady, his gaze calming her. Her heart rate immediately slowed. Why did the man have that kind of effect on her?
“Sit down, Courtney. Dickerson is a cantankerous jackass. Just ignore him.”
She lowered her tired body back into her seat.
Dickerson shook his head as if he’d been punched. He whisper-shouted his question. “I’m doing you a favor being here tonight, Bennett. Have you already forgotten that?”
Bennett leaned across the table. “Do you want her to tell us what she knows or not?”
Dickerson’s nostrils flared.
“That’s what I thought.” Bennett leaned back and smiled.
Courtney glanced around the diner. For a Thursday night, the place seemed unusually deserted. No one appeared to notice the heated discussion in the back of the restaurant, or at least, no one appeared to care.
“Mr. Bennett, what are we doing here?”
He shot Dickerson one more pointed stare before he turned his brown eyes toward her. “Please, you can call me Shaw.”
Dickerson snorted.
“Shaw…I feel really, really exposed here.”
“No one’s going to bother you with me sitting here. Or Dickerson. So stop worrying and try to eat something.” He reached out and placed a hand on her forearm. “I’ve been watching the doors and the other customers. No one’s even noticed us.”
His touch sent a sizzle of electricity through her, a complete opposite reaction to the steadying calm of his gaze. The contradiction confused her. Did the man calm her or excite her?
She slid her arm from beneath his hand. “You only think no one’s noticed. The whole town knows I’m here by now. By tomorrow morning, there will be a million rumors floating around about what I’m telling you and how much trouble I’m in. I bet they already know you’re a state cop and they all want to know what you’re doing in Fairview.”
“By tomorrow morning, you’ll be somewhere safe. But for right now, I thought you might need something to eat.”
His reassuring voice settled over her. She studied him, trying to figure out what his ulterior motive could be. He flicked a finger at her plate. She drew in a deep breath and picked up her burger. Her first bite was heaven. She and Jared had lived on meatless spaghetti, grocery store chicken, tuna fish, and frozen pizzas. The last time she’d had one of the diner’s burgers was when she and Josh had grabbed a bite after the movies. That seemed like such a long time ago. Before she left her mother’s house to live with Jared. Before Ashley Rivers started treating Josh like crap.
The three of them finished their meal in silence, Shaw eating his chicken at a slow and steady pace in perfectly proportioned bites, Dickerson picking at his Cobb salad and occasionally hacking at a defenseless piece of wilted lettuce, and Courtney devouring every last bite of her burger like it was her last meal. She placed a hand over her mouth and emitted a not-quite-so-dainty burp.
Shaw smiled at her, and her heart did a strange little flip in her chest. She shifted her eyes and wiped her mouth to cover her sudden twitchiness, and then folded the napkin and laid it next to her empty plate. “So what happens now?”
“Tell me what you know about Omar Cooley.”
The man was direct. No nonsense. He always dove right into what he wanted to know. There would be no playing mind games with him. No deflecting questions she didn’t want to answer. No dodging anything uncomfortable or self-incriminating. He wanted complete honesty in exchange for his protection, and Shaw Bennett was in the habit of getting what he wanted.
Shaw was trying to connect Cooley to Haskins, just as she was. She deflated. Maybe she should have hung onto the papers she’d found in Jared’s bike instead of leaving them for Josh to find.
Her throat suddenly went dry. She licked her mouth, but her lips had cracked, leaving those irritating little tags of skin hanging. Courtney pushed her plate away from her, took another sip of water, and then cleared her throat. “I can’t prove anything.”
“I’m not asking for proof. Not yet.” Shaw’s tone was crisp and clean.
She forced down her misgivings. No turning back. “What do you want to know?”
“How Haskins and Cooley are connected.”
“Cooley worked for Haskins.”
Shaw nodded. “I figured that much. So you have no proof?”
“No.” She twisted one hand over the other, and then made herself stop the nervous habit. It was a tell, and he would guess she wasn’t telli
ng him the whole truth. “I had no idea Haskins headed the whole operation until a couple of weeks ago.” No need to tell him about her visit to Haskins. Not yet. “But you know, it makes sense. Haskins controls everything else in this county. Why not the meth too? He must have always done business directly with Cooley and left Lucy and Jared out. I never heard his name or saw him hanging around.” She licked her lips again.
“About a week ago maybe, Jared and I met him at a bar near the state line. I can’t be sure… I don’t know this for a fact, but it felt like they were meeting behind Cooley’s back because Jared warned me to never mention it to Cooley. They were talking softly, and I couldn’t hear well, what with the live band and everything, but I heard Haskins tell Jared to take care of Cooley.” She stopped to consider the odd incident. “I’m not sure why Jared brought me with him. That still seems weird to me.”
Should she tell them about her conversation with Haskins? If she did, they’d want to know why she went out to his place, and then she’d have to tell them she was Haskins’s bastard. She didn’t want to talk about that because she was still trying to wrap her head around it. Mentioning it would only push her back into an emotionally unstable state. More than anything, she wanted to keep her head. She was, after all, dealing with cops, and cops could be unreliable allies.
Shaw and Dickerson locked gazes. So much unspoken communication passed between them she could almost hear the buzz in the air. Finally, Dickerson sighed with frustration. “Go ahead. Tell her.”
The look in Shaw’s eyes informed her that he would have told her anyway, with or without Dickerson’s urging. Shaw wrapped his hand around his coffee cup and took a slow sip, an obvious maneuver to stall for time while he considered how he would word his next comments.
Finally, he set the cup down and lifted his head to look at her. “Even if Haskins did order his death, Jared didn’t kill Cooley. We think he died in an explosion. I haven’t been able to recover Cooley’s body yet, but a witness tells me he was in an underground meth lab when it exploded.”
Now, that sounded really familiar. Underground meth labs were Cooley’s thing.
Dickerson seemed to relax as if every ounce of tension had left his body. Shaw had apparently told her only what he thought she needed to know. Encouragement seemed to drift across the table from Shaw to Courtney. Unspoken, but still very real as if she could reach out and grab it with both hands.
“What exactly did Haskins say in the bar that night?”
She closed her eyes and pulled up the memory. Smoky. Loud. Breathing had been difficult. Fear had almost caused her to bolt out of the bar and run. Haskins had seemed to radiate danger that night.
“He said, ‘Cooley’s out of control, and he’s going to ruin everything. You need to take care of him.’ I thought at the time that he meant he wanted Jared to kill Cooley. I never thought he meant anything else. Jared…he’d never killed anyone. He went all white, like he didn’t have any blood any more. He was real nervous, fidgety you know, the whole rest of the night.”
Dickerson spoke. “Not exactly on point, Bennett. His meaning could be interpreted several ways. She’s doing a lot of speculating.”
Shaw waited a moment before asking another question. “Did Jared say anything else to you after that night about killing Cooley?”
She searched her memory, trying to recall if any little hint of what Jared planned to do had slipped out of his ugly mouth. “He didn’t discuss business with me. Just told me where to go and what to do, but I’m pretty sure Lucy Kimbrough was aware of his plans, whatever they were, because she knew Cooley was going to die.”
Dickerson nodded. “She’s right. Kimbrough said Jared wanted Cooley’s operation after he was dead. Jared died before Cooley. The timeline is off unless there were already plans in motion to kill him.”
Shaw appeared to chew on everything for a while. “If what you’re saying is true, Haskins is a suspect for conspiracy to commit murder.”
Dickerson cleared his throat and Shaw shot him a questioning look. Dickerson acted as if he were going to burst. “Shouldn’t you be interrogating her in an interview room and recording her comments? We won’t be able to prove what she said. What if she pretends she never said anything to us about any of this?”
Courtney straightened her posture. “You know what? I don’t have to say anything. Now or ever. I can stop this conversation right now. You wanna arrest me for stabbing Jared? Just do it. But if you do, you won’t get another bit of information out of me. You want me to lawyer up? I will.” She shot Dickerson what she hoped was a death glare.
He raised his hands and scooted his chair back a few inches from the table.
“Dickerson and I were about to go out to Cooley’s place. Will you come with us?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to ever go back out there again. The place gave off a weird, heavy, almost evil vibe.
“When we’re finished you can hide out at my place on Ashley Creek. Grayson is staying at Shaw’s Landing with Tori Downing. I think you’ll be safe from Haskins there.”
Well, that did change things a bit. The thought of seeing Gray was very appealing. She wanted his reaction to the news that they were brother and sister.
“Okay, I’ll go with you to Cooley’s place, but I’m not sure about going out to stay with Gray.” If she sounded skeptical, maybe he would push a little harder to get his way, and in the end, she’d get hers as well. She wasn’t prepared to let Shaw know why it mattered to her.
“Bennett, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Cooley’s house might be a crime scene. I don’t want her contaminating it.”
She smirked at Dickerson’s stuffy attempt at exerting his limited authority. “If Cooley’s house is a crime scene, it’s already contaminated. I was there earlier today, and the place had already been searched. If he had anything that connected him to Haskins, it’s not there anymore.”
“You’re sure it had been searched already?”
“I know it had. Cherish Duncan was in the house when I rode up, and she said someone had been there before her. I’m guessing Lucy had already gone through his stuff. I think she’d searched my trailer too.” No need to tell him what she’d been looking for.
Shaw’s eyes went wide. “What time did you see Cherish Duncan?”
“Around noon.”
“That’s impossible. A hiker found Cherish Duncan’s body on the Ashley Ridge Trail early this morning. She’d been dead a few hours before the guy found her. You couldn’t have seen her mid-day.”
She shook her head. “That couldn’t have been Cherish then. I’ve known her all my life. Whoever was dead on the trail wasn’t Cherish Duncan.”
Dickerson busted into their two-way conversation. “Who the hell is Cherish Duncan?”
Finally, something Courtney could tell them that didn’t involve her. “She was reported missing on Halloween a few years ago. Cherish told me she’s been in Fairview all along. She’s been with James Standridge.”
Shaw blinked. Stared at her as if he were speechless. Not once since she’d met the man had she ever caught him without words.
“Who’s James Standridge?” Dickerson’s voice rose with each word. A few of the other diner patrons glanced their way. He lowered his voice. “Is that the same Standridge that the woman drove over on the highway not long ago?”
So James was dead, just as she suspected.
Shaw finally found his voice. “Probably.”
Dickerson grunted. “This whole mess just keeps getting more and more complicated.” He pulled up to the table and leaned his elbows on the top. “It’s all connected, Shaw. The strange things that were going on at Laurel Heights. The weird stuff at Victoria House. Haskins and Cooley. There’s getting to be a high body count here, you know. A lot of death for such a small county. Standridge. Cooley. Crenshaw. Kimbrough. Grayson. And the woman they think is Cherish Duncan, whoever she is. That’s a long, long list.”
Courtney had one more name to to
ss out there. “It all began with Jeremy Haskins.”
Shaw turned his full attention toward her, settling an intense gaze on her. “There’s an undercurrent of evil in this town. A lot of incidents centered on the meth operation that we couldn’t shut down no matter how hard we went after it. We’ve watched Cooley for a long, long time. And you’re right. It’s not hard to believe that Haskins would have his hand in that operation. We’ve always had our eye on him. He’s into a lot of illegal stuff, but we couldn’t nail him on anything. But I think the problems in this area are rooted in a lot more than the criminal activities of living souls.”
“Bennett, don’t even go there.” Dickerson’s warning circled them and tightened around them like a strong cord of heavy rope, like a noose.
“This area is hot with paranormal activity, and I believe it all started a long, long time ago. With the Hamilton murders at Victoria House.”
Courtney felt the man’s sincerity down to her core.
“Why are you bringing that into this?” Dickerson hissed his question.
Still locked in an intense gaze with Shaw, Courtney added her own opinion. “I think he’s right. There’s always been something under the surface here. Something that felt as if it could hurt you real bad if you got too close to it.”
A flicker of appreciation flitted across Shaw’s face and then quickly disappeared. He pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “I need to go out to Cooley’s house anyway.”
Courtney’s heart rate sped up.
“One of our investigators is missing. Of course, his absence could have nothing to do with any of this, but I don’t want to take that chance. We think he might have found his way through the underground tunnels from Laurel Heights to Cooley’s place. I was hoping you could lead us through the tunnels.”
“I’ve never been there. Well, only once. This morning. And I didn’t see anything that looked like a door to a tunnel.”
Dickerson dropped his napkin on his half-eaten food.
Courtney finally stood to join the men. She snagged her foot on the chair leg and wobbled a bit.
Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4) Page 12