DEFENGING THE EYEWITNESS

by Rachel Lee

  “Tino,” he said. “I went by Tino, a common nickname.” He crossed the floor to where she stood leaning against the counter, and caught her chin, making her look at him. “What’s going on? You’re not really looking like this because you’re wondering about my name.”

  She started to shake her head, but he wouldn’t release her chin.

  “Corey?”

  “It’s the notes,” she admitted finally. “It all just kind of hit me again. What the hell does it mean, ‘Like mother, like daughterʼ?”

  He hesitated, then released her chin to embrace her. “It means,” he said slowly, “that we’re going to have to solve a murder.”

  Chapter 10

  An overwhelming feeling flooded her, although she couldn’t tell if it was fear or anger. It just flooded her. She twisted out of his grasp, ready to fight.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “The police couldn’t figure out my mother’s murder eighteen years ago. What makes you think you can do it now?” Before he could answer, she glanced at her watch and said in a steely voice, “I’ve got to get to work.”

  Grabbing her tote and a sweater, she walked out without looking back. Solve a murder? Really? As if the Denver police hadn’t done their jobs when the case was fresh? Dig into that all over again now?

  That was when she realized that fear was driving her not anger. She didn’t want to dig up all that again. She didn’t want to have to retrace the most painful path of her life. She was terrified that doing so might awaken memories she didn’t want to have. That it might cast her back into the darkness she had been struggling with for so long.

  Her chest tightened until she felt she couldn’t draw in air. She had to slow her pace as her heart hammered loudly enough to deafen her. How could he even suggest such a thing? It was madness, and it was mean.

  After last night, it only seemed meaner. He’d opened up something soft and trusting inside her, a place that had never opened before, and then he slammed her with this?

  The notes were troubling, yes. Even a bit scary. But to think he could solve the murder of her mother after all this time and all the effort put into it seemed like pure hubris. Dangerous hubris. Nobody was as aware as she that she lived her life on a carefully balanced point surrounded by a moat full of monsters.

  She knew why she didn’t remember, and knew equally well why she didn’t want to remember. Maybe he wasn’t talking about poking into that blank space in her memory, but to start trying to recall things or answer questions might only tip her into that inky moat that surrounded part of her life.

  She couldn’t afford that. They’d have to find this tormentor some other way, or she’d just have to live with those unnerving notes.

  There was no other way.

  She reached the front door of her business and unlocked it with a sense of relief. Familiar faces would be arriving soon. She went to the bay window to check the displays, and forced herself to go through the motions of preparing for the sewing circle. When school was out and the ranches were busy, it was mostly a group of older women, but during the school year the store would swell with younger women whose children were in school. It was always a group full of good conversation. The way she felt right now, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep up her end.

  Damn Austin, she thought. It was as if last night had never happened. See if she would trust a man ever again.

  Lift her to a pinnacle of joy and happiness, then trash it all with a couple of words?

  Damn him, she thought again, and turned to greet the first customer of the day.

  * * *

  Well, that had gone swimmingly, Austin thought after he cleaned up the kitchen and headed to meet the sheriff. Although maybe going to visit Dalton might not be smart. Yes, everyone around seemed to think he was a friend of Gage’s, but his paranoia was reaching new heights.

  That last note had flipped some switch inside him. So much for finding a way back to ordinary life. Once again he walked the streets as a man on a covert mission, and any one of these people around him might be the threat.

  He shouldn’t have let Corey walk to work on her own, yet he knew as well as anybody that changing routine could give away information. He had no proof that someone was watching Corey, no proof that she was actually being stalked, but if something changed radically, it could precipitate action. Until he had some sense of the shape of the threat here, he didn’t want this guy to have any idea that his notes were having a serious impact.

  He didn’t see how dogging Corey’s steps could help. It might expose her to swift action at the first opportunity. Or it might push the problem further down the road. Hell, he hadn’t the foggiest idea what kind of person would even do something like this.

  The criminals he dealt with were more like a cross between gangs and businessmen. They didn’t play these kinds of games. The guy sending these notes was savoring something. Whether it was the idea of frightening Corey, or even that he was enjoying his private knowledge of what had happened to Corey’s mother, Austin didn’t know. There was something measured in this, too, something being carefully doled out in those notes. A control freak?

  Ten minutes later, he and Gage were having coffee together at Maude’s. The place was properly known as The City Diner, as the sign out front proclaimed, but he’d swiftly learned that the locals referred to it by the owner’s name: Maude’s.

  The place was only moderately busy at this hour, giving them privacy to talk and sufficient noise to prevent eavesdropping.

  “So you want the whole file on Olivia Donohue?”

  Austin nodded. “That last note shoved me into high gear. This guy knows something about the murder. Whether he’s going to try to hurt Corey... Well, I’m getting a bad feeling about that.”

  “It grows on you,” Gage remarked. He picked up his mug. “No prints, by the way. None. And that makes me even more uneasy.”

  Austin sat very still. He’d been hoping against hope that there’d been prints on that note. Not because they’d necessarily lead them to this guy, but because it would remove him from the category of major threat. If the perp was being careful enough not to leave any evidence, then he’d just moved himself into a whole new class.

  “Nothing else, either,” Gage continued. “I’d have been happy to find even a cat hair.”

  “Something,” Austin agreed. “This level of caution...” He left his sentence unfinished.

  “I know.” Gage sighed, rubbed his chin and signaled for more coffee. In the manner to which Austin had rapidly become accustomed, Maude stomped over, poured with a grunt, then marched away. No friendly chitchat from her.

  “Working a cold case is hell,” Gage remarked. “It’s hard to rustle up anything that hasn’t already been chewed over. Really, all you’ve got to count on is fresh eyes.”

  “That could be enough.”

  “Hope springs eternal.” He rested his elbows on the table, leaning in a bit. “There was some talk about Olivia back when.”

  Austin’s attention pricked. “What kind?”

  “That she was a lesbian. Didn’t date much in high school, I hear. But then she up and got pregnant and the gossip pretty much stopped. I wasn’t clued in to all that back then, since I was pretty much dealing with my own demons. I only remember it vaguely, but you know how small towns are. Somebody’s a little different, and folks start coming up with reasons.”

  “Would that have been a problem here?”

  “Hell, yeah. It would have been a problem a lot of places. Folks have gotten more tolerant, even here, but yeah, it would have been uncomfortable. I don’t recall hearing her giving people a reason to wonder. She just didn’t date much. Like that’s a crime.”

  “Corey doesn’t date at all. Are folks talking like that about her?”

  Gage shook his head. “
After what that girl’s been through, people seem more than willing to cut her any slack she needs or wants. They get that she’s still frightened.”

  Austin raised his brows. “I hope they don’t tell her that.”

  “Why would they? They feel a lot of sympathy for her and they like her. She’s pretty popular with the sewing and quilting crowd, too. Sometimes I think more people get to her shop during a week than go to church.”

  Austin laughed, but none of this was helping him get any closer to the problem. As if he realized it, Gage sighed and sipped more coffee, then fell into reflection. “I’ll get as much information out of Denver as I can. After all this time, maybe they won’t feel like we’re stepping on their toes.”

  Austin was all too familiar with that reaction. Jurisdiction mattered.

  “Something that’s really bugging me,” Gage said after a moment. “There was no physical evidence at the scene of Olivia’s murder, other than her and Corey, of course. No hairs, no skin flakes. Some fibers that could have come from anything—a cotton thread from a white T-shirt, a stray denim fiber or two, but nothing else.”

  Austin felt his heart stop. “Not one thing?”

  “Nothing the least bit useful. He must have shaved himself all over pretty good and climbed into freshly laundered clothes. Whatever he was wearing on his feet didn’t even track in anything that didn’t come from right outside the apartment. One of the crime scene techs figures he wore disposable booties over his shoes, gloves and maybe a ski mask. Hell, for all anyone knows he might have been wearing a Tyvek overall.”

  Austin felt ice creep along his skin. “Completely and carefully premeditated.”

  “Exactly. Which tells us only that he wanted to kill Olivia Donohue.”

  “So he must have known her.”

  “If I can get the report, you’ll read all about it. They checked all her known associates, even up here. Nothing. Everyone, amazingly enough, had an alibi. It would have been easier to deal with if there’d ever been another murder that fit this M.O. But there wasn’t, not before or since. A crime scene that clean stands out like a sore thumb.”

  Gage paused. “For your ears only. Corey doesn’t know this and I don’t want her to know unless there’s a damn good reason. In Olivia’s papers, the cops found a receipt from a fertility clinic. Corey’s father was a vial of sperm.”

  There went that possibility, Austin thought. No angry ex. “I won’t tell her,” he said. “She’s lost enough. She seems comfortable about not knowing who her father was. I’m not sure how she’d feel about this.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “I mean, I suppose it could be easier knowing there’s no guy out there who just didn’t want you, but that’s a boat I don’t want to rock. It hasn’t struck me as very high on her list of concerns.” But what did he know? He hardly knew the woman, he’d bedded her last night—which he was still pondering as possibly his greatest act of stupidity—but that didn’t mean he really knew what Corey thought about anything.

  But who ever did know another person fully? You could spend a lifetime getting to really know someone, and then still know only part of them

  Gage eased out of the booth and tossed some bills on the table. “I’ve got the coffee. I’ll get in touch with Denver.”

  “Thanks.”

  Austin sat there for a while, nursing his coffee and thinking. Not even Maudeʼs clomping by penetrated his deep well of thought. No father. A crime scene so clean it was memorable. Which brought him right back to those notes. They were clean, too. Not a hint or a clue on them except that they were mailed in town.

  That meant the murderer was stalking Corey. But why in the hell would he do that? Just to scare her? Or to let her know he was coming, that he intended her to die the same way her mother had?

  Austin had met some sick twists in his life, but this one took the cake. He had trained himself to remain calm on the job, but right now he was feeling anything but calm. A surprisingly cold anger filled him. Cold as the Arctic wastelands. He no longer had the least doubt what this guy wanted to do. The question about that had vanished.

  The question now was what he was going to do about Corey to make her safe.

  * * *

  Early-autumn twilights lingered, not as long as at the height of the summer, but long enough. When Corey closed up her shop, there was still enough light to walk home by. Her day had been busy, filled with women she liked, and gradually she had shed her earlier anger at Austin and decided she had overreacted. After all, if he asked questions she didn’t want to answer, all she had to say was no. She’d been a child when she had learned to evade those questions, and she hadn’t lost the ability.

  A lot of people were out on the still-warm evening. In the winter a lot of shops closed around six, but until then many stayed open later. It was kind of like an evening promenade, folks getting out for a postprandial stroll, kids tagging along in hopes of a stop for ice cream or another treat. The tiny ice-cream shop sold a lot of frozen yogurt these days, but inside it still looked as if it had stepped out of another time. Which it had. Once it had been the soda fountain. Now it offered ice cream, yogurt and smoothies.

  Corey realized she was feeling pretty good. Almost without noticing it, she was humming a cheerful tune as she walked, pausing to speak occasionally to someone she knew. Without giving it much thought, she headed straight for the ice-cream shop. When she came out, she had a quart of rich vanilla ice cream, some nuts and a bottle of hot fudge.

  She didn’t know whether Austin liked ice cream, or even which kind, so she hoped she’d picked a flavor he wouldn’t object to.

  It was hard to remember that only this morning she had been mad at him and frightened by what heʼd said. Somewhere along the way today, she had fallen more often into memories of the night they had shared. So here she came, bearing gifts.

  Maybe it was stupid of her, but it wasn’t as if the guy had been deliberately mean to her, even if it had felt that way for a little while. No, he’d been expressing concern. He was a cop. Of course his first thought would be about solving her mother’s murder. Man of action and all that.

  She was still smiling when she arrived home and entered. She could hear Austin moving around upstairs.

  “Austin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’d better hurry before the ice cream melts.”

  Then she went to the kitchen and started getting out bowls and spoons. She heard him trot down the stairs and enter the kitchen.

  “Ice cream?”

  “Vanilla,” she answered. “I hope you like it. I also bought nuts to put on it, and some hot fudge topping if you like.”

  Then she turned and saw him standing there in jeans and a black T-shirt, his fingers jammed into his front pockets. “Really? I love ice cream.”

  “Maybe I should have gotten you the kind with jalapeños in it.”

  His face lightened and he laughed. “To what do I owe this?”

  “It’s an apology for getting mad at you this morning. Plus, I wanted ice cream.”

  “I’m sorry I made you mad.”

  “Actually, I think I got afraid. I never did get that completely sorted out. Nuts? Topping?”

  He wanted everything and helped as much as he could. Soon they both had big bowls at the table.

  “This is one of humankind’s greatest inventions,” he remarked as he lifted the spoon to his mouth.

  “Did you know the Earl of Sandwich invented chocolate ice cream?”

  That raised both his dark brows. “I thought it was sandwiches.”

  “That was his descendant. No, I read recently that the first Earl of Sandwich invented chocolate ice cream.”

  “Well, I’ve been known to take cocoa powder and sprinkle it over a bowl of vanilla ice cream. It’s great. The Earl of Sandwich, hu
h? Those guys must have really been into food.”

  “Actually, I gather he was on some board of trade that was trying to find uses for things from the colonies. And what he made was more of a frozen drink than what we think of as ice cream.”

  “Who cares? I’m sure it was a great idea. Chocolate wasn’t always eaten sweetened. It still isn’t in some places.”

  “You’re neat,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “How many men will discuss recipes? You’re neat.”

  He laughed, shaking his head.

  “Actually,” she said after a few more mouthfuls, “I bet humans have been making iced drinks and other stuff ever since we noticed snow and ice could be useful.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. How did your day go?”

  “Very busy. It was nice.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry I walked out on you like that. I got too upset.”

  “I’m not blaming you. It probably did seem like a cockeyed statement.”

  “It wasn’t that it was cockeyed.” She nibbled on her lower lip, looking down into her bowl. Had she really eaten that much? “It’s that I don’t think we’ll ever know. Unless...”

  “Unless what?” he prompted finally.

  “Unless the guy who’s sending these notes is the man who murdered my mother.”

  * * *

  There it lay, Austin thought. The heart of the question, a live grenade between them. The only question was whether he should pull the pin or conceal his concerns from her.

  The urge to protect her warred in him because there were two routes to follow. He could shield her from his suspicions, or he could guard her by warning her about the danger. Either one might not save her from whatever her tormentor planned. But which would make her safer?

  On the face of it, it seemed like a stupid question. Knowledge was always a better shield than ignorance. But after what this woman had been through, he didn’t want to terrify her again. Hadn’t she been through enough?