by Julie Miller
More awake and on guard and ready to face whatever reaction Rosie had to that steamy shower they’d shared, he sought her out and found her sitting on the braided rug in the library. He needn’t have worried about her having regrets or feeling self-conscious about her beautiful body or feeling pressured to turn one night into a full-blown relationship. She jumped up from the boxes and papers she’d been sorting and hurried across the room, smiling.
The jeans she wore kind of caught him off guard. He wouldn’t have thought she even owned a pair with that wardrobe of dresses she usually wore. But he couldn’t help but smile back—or cling to the kiss she rose up on tiptoe to give him. “Morning, Rosie Posy.”
“Max, look what I found.” She hadn’t pinned her hair up yet, either, which distracted him from the stationery and envelopes she juggled in her hand. “I was going through some old letters Richard had written me. I felt like I was starting a new life today so I wanted to get rid of my past. I mean I’m thinking of myself as Rosie instead of Rosemary now. I’m not afraid some creep will come to my house every night anymore. I was going to throw away all these old letters he sent me.”
He put a hand up to stop the philosophical discussion he wanted to hear more about—later—and urged her to get to the point. “What did you find, Rosie?”
“This.” She tossed most of the letters she held into a box, then unfolded one stamped with the Bratcher law firm name at the top. A rock settled in Max’s gut. This couldn’t be good. “Richard must have stuck this letter in the wrong envelope. It’s to his mistress, not me.”
He took the letter. “You know, for a man I’ve never met, I sure do dislike him.”
Rosie pointed to the salutation at the top of the paper. “Look who it’s written to.”
Max drew in a satisfied breath as the third piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Charleen Grimes wasn’t the only woman Richard had cheated with.
“We’ve been looking for the wrong mistress.”
It was a love letter to Hillary Wells.
* * *
“I’M TIRED OF WAITING.”
“Sir, I told you she was on a conference call... Sir?”
Rosie nodded to the sputtering assistant at the front desk as Max flashed his badge and marched right past him into Hillary Wells’s office at the Endicott Global building.
She plowed into Max’s back when he suddenly stopped. He spun around to catch her hand and keep her from tumbling, but she could see what had stopped him. The office was empty.
“Is there a back door to this room?” Max asked. “She’s not here.”
The assistant stepped into the office and looked around, too. He threw up his hands as if surprised to see his boss had left.
Max clapped him on the shoulder and pushed him out of his path. “Nice stall, kid. You hear from the boss lady, tell her KCPD wants to have a conversation with her.”
“Yes, sir.”
While they were driving down the highway, Max alerted the Cold Case Squad that Hillary Wells was in the wind. She’d skipped out on her appointment with Max and Rosie and hadn’t left her contact information with her assistant. She wasn’t answering any of her phones, and, according to Katie, who’d tried to locate her via GPS, Dr. Wells’s cell phone had been turned off.
“Wait a minute.” Katie hesitated, probably reading something off one of her computer screens. Rosie had put Max’s cell on speaker and held it up for him to speak and hear while he drove the Chevelle.
“What is it, kiddo?” Max prompted.
“It looks like she has a cabin down by Truman Lake. I’ve got a ping off her vehicle’s smart system there.”
“Give me a twenty.” Once Katie gave them the cabin’s location and directions to get to it, Max made his way to the south end of the city and drove over to one of Missouri’s most popular recreation areas.
An hour later, after a scenic drive through the northern edge of the Missouri Ozarks, they pulled into a gravel driveway behind a dark green pickup truck.
“Son of a gun.” Katie’s research was right on the money. “She’s here,” Max announced, nodding toward the windows along the front of the cabin that had been opened to let in the warm summer breeze. He took Rosie’s hand and pulled her into step beside him and they walked to the front door. “Today, maybe you’d better let me do the talking. I have a feeling the good doctor won’t be such a cooperative witness this time.” He knocked on the door. “KCPD. It’s Detective Krolikowski, Dr. Wells. I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”
When the woman didn’t immediately answer, Rosie asked, “How does this work, exactly—you ask her if she killed Richard?”
Max grinned. “Well, the direct approach doesn’t usually work for most suspects.”
“It worked for me.”
He reached over and sifted his fingers through the ponytail hanging down the back of her T-shirt. “You, Rosie March, are the exception to most rules.”
After more than a minute with no response, Max knocked again. “KCPD.” He motioned Rosie to stand back to the side as he pulled his weapon.
His wary posture put her on guard, too. “Do you think something’s wrong?”
His shoulders lifted with a deep breath. “I hope she hasn’t done anything stupid like take some of her own drugs to get out of doing prison time.”
“Suicide?”
Max’s jaw trembled before he knocked on the door one last time. He was thinking of his friend Jimmy. “I’m comin’ in, Dr. Wells.”
Rosie clung to the safety of the wall while Max turned the knob and pushed open the door.
A gunshot exploded close to Rosie’s ear and Max went flying back off the front step. “Max!”
He hit the ground with a horrible thud and pulled his knees up, groaning, rolling from side to side as the front of his shirt turned red with blood.
Hillary Wells marched out of the cabin, shifted the aim of her gun at Rosie and warned her, “Don’t move.”
Rosie clung to the cedar planking of the cabin while Hillary picked up Max’s weapon, which had been jarred from his hand when he’d landed.
She unloaded the magazine of bullets from his gun and tossed the weapon one direction into the woods surrounding the house, and the magazine into the trees in the opposite direction.
Hillary turned back to Rosie, using her gun to give succinct directions. “Now handcuff his wrists together. Then get his keys and load him into the backseat of his car. You’re driving.”
* * *
ROSIE SWIPED AWAY the tears the spilled from the corner of her eye, not sure if they were tears of fear that Max’s head kept lolling from one side to the other as he bled out into the backseat, or pure, white-hot anger for the woman sitting in the passenger seat, calmly giving driving directions while training her gun at Rosie to ensure her cooperation. She suspected it was a little of both. Hillary Wells had killed one man Rosie had thought she loved, and now the woman was going to kill Max. And that would be a loss from which Rosie was certain she’d never recover.
Rosie glanced down at the typed suicide note Hillary had forced her to sign by threatening to shoot Max again. The Endicott Global CEO had written an essay of pure fiction, where Rosie confessed to murdering her abusive ex-fiancé by filling a bottle of champagne with RUD-317, seducing him in his condo and sneaking out after he’d overdosed on the drug. When the Cold Case Squad detective unmasked her as the killer several years later, she shot him before her secret could be revealed. But she’d fallen in love with the detective and, regretting her rash action, killed herself.
Rosie shifted her grip on the wheel and tried to think of a way she could escape and get Max to an ER for medical treatment. He kept sliding in and out of consciousness. His breathing was labored and his skin was far too pale.
“No one who knows
me will ever believe that note.”
Hillary smirked. “They won’t believe you’re a strong enough woman to commit cold-blooded murder?”
“No. They won’t believe I’d ever want to seduce Richard.”
The deep-pitched chuckle from the backseat infused her with renewed strength and determination. “That’s my girl,” Max rasped.
But Hillary didn’t appreciate the humor. “I knew you were going to be trouble. You couldn’t be content, could you? Nobody could prove you murdered Richard, but as long as you were the police’s prime suspect, no one was looking at me, either.” She indicated a narrow side road and ordered Rosie to turn. “Richard was a scumbag—greedy, self-centered, violent—the world is better without him. It was a win-win situation. You weren’t in jail and he was out of your life. But you had to know the truth, didn’t you?”
“He’s never been out of my life since I met him. Clearing my name is the only way I can finally say goodbye to his influence over me.”
Sheer will seemed to fuel the grumbling voice from the backseat. “Why did you kill him, Doc? You didn’t like that he cheated on you, too? Or are you just a man hater?”
“It was purely business.” She pointed to a gravel road among the trees. “Turn here.” Rosie obeyed, following Dr. Wells’s directions deeper into the forested recreational area dotted with remote cabins around the dam and creeks that fed them. “Richard was a two-night stand. I picked him up in a hotel bar.”
Rosie glanced in the rearview mirror. Max opened his eyes and nodded. He remembered it, too. Rosie had picked him up in a bar and recruited him into helping her. She hadn’t regretted a moment of their time together since.
“How is murder a business deal?” Rosie asked, concentrating on the narrowing road. They were dropping in altitude, too. They were approaching a remote cove off the main lake.
“I needed someone else dead and out of my way before he cheated me out of my life’s work and rightful position at the company.”
“Lloyd Endicott?” Max guessed.
“Yes.” The woman was completely unapologetic about the death of her so-called friend and mentor. “I knew I’d be the first person the police would look at if it was proved Lloyd’s death was anything but accidental. So I made a deal with a colleague to arrange for his death, and in exchange, I was asked to eliminate Richard.”
“Strangers on a Train,” Max muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. I have a couple of friends who like old movies.”
Turning up her nose as if polite chitchat was beneath her, Hillary used the gun to give Rosie the next direction. “Pull up over there at the old boat ramp. Leave the engine running.”
“Who wanted Richard dead?”
“I’m not allowed to say. A deal’s a deal.”
“Killing us can’t be part of the deal. Isn’t the trick to getting away with murder that you have an airtight alibi while someone else does the dirty work for you?”
“Hence, the signed confession. When your bodies are found, they’ll find the letter and file your deaths away as a murder-suicide.”
Rosie’s heart squeezed in her chest at the pained expression on Max’s face. She knew it wasn’t just the bullet hole in his gut, but the memory of his best friend’s suicide that was tearing him up.
Forcing Max to suffer like this, taking away the man who’d given her a few days of happiness simply wasn’t fair. Not after everything else she’d been through. She wasn’t exactly sure what that feverish sensation flowing through her veins was, but Rosie was thinking that Max had been right about her. She wasn’t that quiet, demure, fragile woman by nature—that was a persona she’d taken on to survive her life with Richard and the terrible years that followed. Rosie had a redheaded temper firing through her blood.
She shifted the Chevy into Park and looked straight ahead at the gray-green water and whitecaps below. “Dr. Wells, I think you should know that I would never commit suicide. I’ve fought too hard to survive and to find happiness. No one will believe the story. There’ll be an investigation.”
She found Max’s questioning gaze in the mirror and darted her eyes twice to the right. I’ve got a plan. It’s a crazy one. But I’m not giving up without a fight.
Max nodded. “Hooah.” HUA.
Heard. Understood. Acknowledged.
Clutching his stomach, he sat up a little straighter. “I love you, Rosie.”
“I love you.”
“Isn’t that just sickeningly sweet,” Hillary sneered. “You know what to do. As soon as I get out, shift the car into Drive. I’ll make your boyfriend’s death as painless as possible—a shot to the head. Then you drive the car into the lake. Unless you’d rather me wait to put the gun in your hand after I shoot you, too?” The dark-haired woman laughed. “Personally, I’d choose drowning in this deep part of the lake. That way, at least, I’m giving you a sporting chance at surviving.”
Rosie took a deep breath and shifted the car while Hillary unbuckled her safety belt and reached for the door handle. “I know you love this car, Sergeant.”
His expression turned as grim as she’d ever seen it. “Do it!”
Rosie stomped on the accelerator as Hillary turned to shoot Max. The car jerked forward, toppling the woman off balance. When she tumbled back against the seat, Max surged forward with a feral roar, looping his handcuffs around Hillary’s neck as the gun fired.
“Max!” She heard his grunt of pain, saw the red circle appear on his shoulder and stain the front of his shirt.
His stranglehold on Dr. Wells went slack. “What are you doing? Stop!” she cried, struggling to free herself from the noose of Max’s arms.
There was nothing Rosie could do but hold on and pray as the Chevy leaped the top of the boat ramp and hit the old concrete and rocks farther down. The car bottomed out, threw its passengers up to the ceiling. The gun bounced out of Hillary’s hand and skittered along the floorboards. The other woman screamed as the car hit the water and plunged, nose first, in a slow-motion dive to the bottom of the lake.
The bruising wrench of the seat belt stunning Rosie quickly gave way to panic as the gray-green water rushed in. She was ankle-deep in the cool water before her brain kicked in. She quickly unhooked her seat belt and climbed up onto her knees to help Max escape.
“Max?” No answer. “Sergeant, can you hear me?” she shouted in a firmer voice. When his groggy eyes blinked open, she softened her command. “Can you unhook your seat belt?” She unlooped his arms from the headrest where he’d caught Hillary, then scrambled over the seat when the water rushed over his lap and his bound hands made it impossible to find the release.
Rosie spared a brief glance for the woman who’d tried to kill them, but at some point of impact, Hillary had struck her head and she was floating, unconscious, off her seat. Worrying more about the man she wanted desperately to save, Rosie took a breath and sank below the water that was pouring over the seat to release Max. When he, too, started to float, she pushed his body up to the ceiling where there was still air. “Breathe, honey. Take a deep breath.”
She took several breaths herself, filling her lungs as deeply as she could before the translucent water hit the corner of her mouth and she sputtered.
She tipped her mouth to the ceiling. “Let me do the work, okay? Just don’t fight me. You saved me, and now I’m going to save you.”
He nodded his understanding before his eyes closed and the water rushed over his head. After snatching one last breath from a pocket of air, Rosie dove beneath the water to unlock Max’s door and push it open. The changing water pressure made the car sink faster, but sucked them both out of the car when she grabbed onto his shirt and pulled him with her.
Then it was a series of kicks, a pull of her arm and ignoring the panicked need to breathe before she broke the surface of the water
. Refilling her lungs with reviving air, she pulled Max’s heavy body onto her hip and held his head above water as best she could while she fought the wind-tossed waves and swam in a sidestroke to shore. She was near exhaustion by the time she reached a shallow enough depth that she could stand.
“Stay with me, Max,” she urged, wiping the water from his face and hair and dragging him to shore.
She slipped a couple of times trying to push him up onto the dry ground between the rushes, grass and rocks. He was conscious, at least, thank God, because once he could get his legs beneath him, he helped push himself higher onto the bank. But then she lost her footing on the slick, mossy rocks and fell into the water again, swallowing a mouthful as she sank beneath the surface. When she pushed herself back up, a hand latched onto hers. Relief swept through her as she surfaced.
“Max...” Stunned, she would have fallen again, but the man who pulled her from the water didn’t release his grip. “You.”
When the young man with the glasses finally let go, she scrambled away, crawling over Max’s legs and kneeling in front of him to provide some sort of protection for her wounded hero. The young man who’d taken her picture at the prison that day picked up the suit jacket he’d tossed into the grass.
“You do good work, Miss March,” he said, shrugging into his jacket.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of a friend who’s looking out for you.” He turned his gaze out to the water where there weren’t even bubbles left to show where the car had sunk. “Dr. Wells was becoming a bit of a problem for us.”
Max’s big hand grazed her knee and held on, comforting her as some of his strength returned. “You’re Asher’s man.”
“No, Detective. I’m my own man.” Without any more explanation than that, the mysterious Glasses Guy climbed the hill toward a black Chrysler parked at the top. “I already called 9-1-1. An ambulance is en route. I surely hope you don’t bleed to death, Detective.” He climbed inside his car and started the engine. “Ma’am. I think you’ll understand that I’d rather not be here when the police arrive.”