“Gotcha. Aside from Amy, anyone else he might count among his friends?”
“Jed Martin. Bob Redmond. Richie Mack. Chuck Hemming. I can’t say whether he’s close to any of them, but he and Amy used to double date with Jed Martin and whichever girl he was currently sporting on his arm.”
Ethan added these names to the list and circled Jed Martin’s a couple of times, frustrated by his neophyte status in the town. His first suspect in a relatively small crime maintained a years-long friendship with his first suspect in a murder. Coincidence? Fact of life in a small town? Or more? And the other men on TJ’s list belonged to Jed Martin’s crew, too. In fact, two of them had apparently been playing poker with him the night Renee Josephs had been murdered.
Bob Redmond owned Redmond’s Hardware and Housewares and came across as a decent enough sort of guy, if a bit brusque. You could get him going if you asked about plumbing supplies or do-it-yourself projects, but he didn’t have a truly social bone in his body. His wife, Sally, took care of the housewares half of the business and smoothed any feathers her husband’s attitude might have ruffled. A vibrant, happy creature, she seemed a peculiar mate for the sober Bob.
Richie Mack, on the other hand, was a tweaker. Ethan couldn’t prove the man sold meth, but he knew it to be true. He’d been arrested twice for possession, had lost his license after a DUI, and now hung around Rosalita’s, playing pool and drinking, and occasionally working for Brad at the Gas ’n’ Go either cleaning up the shop or filling in behind the counter in the snack shop. Ethan circled his name, too. Ethan didn’t imagine Richie would go within a hundred feet of a snake, but addicts had peculiar ideas.
Ethan had vaguely recognized Chuck Hemming’s name when Jed had mentioned him, but he hadn’t had a chance to question him yet, so he asked TJ what she knew.
“Chuck’s a manager over at the plant. He lives in Palestine these days, but we all went to school together, and he’s still buds with Jed and Eric.”
“Gotcha.”
The plant again. He wondered whether Lucy’s fancy program would be able to link the plant to anyone else, and whether—given how many people it employed—there would be any significance to the connection.
Which, of course, brought him back to thinking about Lucy and the memory of their shared kiss and the softness of her body against his in the hospital bed. So she had trouble coming to grips with her emotions. He’d been called stubborn more than once; he was willing to wait her out.
• • •
LUCY WOKE WHEN her computer fell from her lap with a thud. Damn. Instead of working, she’d fallen asleep on the couch. The punctures in her leg pulled slightly when she stretched, but the pain had diminished a great deal while she slept.
She made a pot of coffee and settled on the couch with the biggest mug she could find to clear her head of the painkillers so she could finish entering all the information she’d gathered the day before. She hadn’t had time or energy at the hospital, and she hadn’t wanted to show Ethan the things she was writing about him. Most of the information she had now wasn’t relevant to the case in any way she could tell, but it would end up helping her with the book. After all, she planned to write about her mother’s life, not just her death, and the stories Gina Malloy Woodward had told revealed sides to Cecile Lucy had never imagined.
When she looked up from making notes, it was almost two in the afternoon. Maybe she’d take a cab down to the police station and see whether Ethan had the consultant’s forms for her to sign. He hadn’t called, but perhaps he’d been too busy.
Back in her bedroom, she carefully covered the snake bite with the two-inch-square waterproof bandage they’d given her at the hospital to keep the wound dry while showering. She dressed in a khaki skort, a white T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes, then swapped out the waterproof bandage for a breathable one. If she paid a tad more attention than usual to her makeup, it was only because she looked so pale from the long night in the hospital, not because she wanted to impress anyone in particular. She’d already put her notebook and the novel she was reading into her satchel and set the crutches by the front door when she remembered she’d promised to call Ethan to let him know if she left the house.
He answered on the first ring.
“I’ll be back in the office in about an hour,” he said. “How are you planning on getting to town?”
“Cab.”
“I’ll send TJ for you.”
“No, Ethan.” His name on her tongue tasted dark and sweet with intimacy and just using it sent a shiver through her. How had she come to this? “Really, I’m not the department charity. You have work to do. I’ll call a cab.”
“Yeah, okay. That should be safe enough. Stay inside until they get there, though, okay?”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“Can’t help it. But we’ll leave that for later.”
• • •
WHEN LUCY ARRIVED at the station, Ethan wasn’t in. Marge Bollingham, the dispatcher, had the consultant papers ready for Lucy to sign, and she did, noticing that the department had indemnified themselves against any injury she might suffer as a result of her position. She was signing the final page, with Marge witnessing, when her cell rang. It was her personal cell, not the prepaid one, and the caller ID read “Ethan.” She’d programmed his numbers in before leaving for Palo Pinto, though she hadn’t bothered to examine the impulse too closely.
“Where are you?” he asked when she picked up.
“At the station, signing the release forms.”
“Great. If you wait there for me, I’ll pick you up. I’m picking up your car now.”
“I can have it back already? That’s great! I expected I’d have to rent one.”
“Nope. Unfortunately, we didn’t find anything. Your fingerprints, Brad’s—from when I had him change your tires—and an unknown set that’s probably Tim’s, since it appears all over both the passenger and driver’s side. There’s nothing unusual in the pattern of prints, nothing that shows where someone might have put the snake in. The lock was popped with a slim jim.”
“Lovely.” Lucy could only imagine how long it was going to take to get all the fingerprint powder out of the Rover.
“I’ll be there in five,” Ethan said. “Go on in and use my office if you want to. There are files in there I’d like you to take a look at anyway. If TJ’s there, she can show them to you.”
“She just got here.”
“Excellent. See you in a few.”
When Ethan entered the office, where she and TJ were sifting through files, Lucy had to twist her hands together to stop herself from reaching out to brush away the lines of weariness in his face.
“Long day?”
“You could say that. I ran over to Palestine for a conversation with a family whose nineteen-year-old daughter went missing a couple years ago.” He pulled out a file and laid it on the desk. “And while I was there, I had a little conversation with Jed Martin about snakes, his memories of high school, and his buddy Eric Allenby.
“No sooner did I leave the car lot than I got a call from His Honor the mayor, wondering what the fuck I was doing out of town harassing upstanding citizens when we had problems right here at home with a dead woman who might ruin his son’s political aspirations if I didn’t get in gear and solve her murder.”
“Joy,” said TJ.
“What were you saying about this not being his own private fiefdom?”
“I didn’t say he was aware of that fact.”
The comment startled a laugh out of Lucy. “Touché.”
“So, I copied the files for you to start with.” He laid a hand on the stack on his desk. “You can take this stuff home if you like. I’ll stop by later on and see how it’s going. For the moment, I want to wait for Keith. He called in and should be back soon with more on the two Freestone victims.”
&nb
sp; Lucy packed the papers he had for her into her tote, and he walked her out front where he’d parked her Range Rover in one of the reserved slots. It sparkled in the sun, and through the window she could see the leather seats gleaming.
“What did you do?”
“Had it detailed. Only way to get rid of the fingerprint powder, I’m afraid. Otherwise, you’d have been tracking the stuff around for weeks. Believe me, I know.”
Her throat tightened at the unexpected kindness. “I could’ve done that. But I appreciate it.”
“Sure thing. Now go home and get the weight off that leg.”
With a quick nod, Lucy climbed carefully into her car and drove off.
• • •
JED SPUN AROUND in the ergonomic chair in the glass cage of his office. What the hell had Eric been thinking? True, Jed hadn’t bothered to tell him about the paper the cops had found in the woods. He should have searched the girl before he brought her out to play. But even without knowledge of the evidence, Eric should have avoided anything that would bring scrutiny to bear on them. And that snake, it was vintage Eric. Not that Ethan Donovan should recognize such a thing—one of the purposes of hiring an outsider was to keep him an outsider.
Not everyone had been pleased when Dobbs had hired Donovan, but Jed had a great deal of respect for the mayor’s foresight. Rather than promoting the likes of Ellen Wilson’s nephew, Johnny—chief deputy with the Adams County Sheriff’s Department, who’d grown up in the Hollow—Dobbs had chosen a city boy who would likely never get a handle on the slippery relationships between locals. Jed only wished he knew what Dobbs had to hide, because he’d love to tap that well. He lived nicely on what he made from the dealership and his other activities, but a little backup never hurt.
On the showroom floor, one of the salesmen was showing off an F-250 to a guy who wouldn’t buy it. If he bought anything at all, it would be a used piece of crap Jed would hardly make a dime on. The economy was in the toilet.
In frustration, he locked the door to the office from his desk with his favorite new toy, a remote control lock, and pulled a disposable cell from under the false bottom of a desk drawer.
Eric picked up on the third ring.
“We need to talk,” Jed said. “Is it safe?”
“Would I even be answering if it wasn’t?”
“Yeah, okay. It’s about Chuck and Richie.”
“Richie’s a problem. All fucking tweakers are problems. Too bad you can’t run a business without them.”
“Yeah, but he’s been buying elsewhere, which means his loyalty’s no longer guaranteed.”
“I have an idea about that. Might kill a couple of birds with one stone.” Eric laughed, and the sound sent a chill up Jed’s spine. Shit. He’d always known his partner was half-insane.
“What’s up with Chuck? He can’t have figured anything out. If the man had a single live brain cell, it died of loneliness years ago.”
“He’s still stewing over that incident in high school when we drove out to Cecile’s house.” And hadn’t that been fun. She’d mocked them, told them to take their spare change and their tiny cocks and run home to their mommas. Jed had wanted to kill her that night, but too many people knew where they were and what they were doing.
But once Cecile was dead, she’d ceased to matter. Jed had always assumed the others felt the same way.
“He’s getting increasingly impatient to have what he sees as his revenge on Lucy, and since he thinks of us as bonded over the incident, he’s becoming a flat-out nuisance.”
“If we do it right, we can use him as a scapegoat. He has no social life. Every night he goes home after work and drinks until he passes out. He won’t have an alibi.”
“An alibi for what?”
Eric told him.
• • •
AT SEVEN, ETHAN gave up trying to concentrate on the files on the desk in front of him. His head ached and his knee throbbed. And his stomach rumbled. Time to go see what Lucy’s fancy program had come up with, because nothing in the files seemed clear to him. Keith had gotten nothing new from his trip to Freestone. Two women gone, just disappeared, and one barely more than a child.
He drove to his favorite Mexican restaurant, picked up burritos, queso, and guacamole, and headed over to Lucy’s, figuring she wouldn’t have eaten, either. When he got there, he pulled his truck around the back. No need for the gossips to make something out of nothing. And if what he felt wasn’t precisely nothing, well, he wasn’t sure precisely what it was, either. He rang the doorbell by the back door and waited under the glare of the security lights for Lucy to let him in.
“That smells heavenly,” she said when she let him in. “How did you know I hadn’t eaten?”
“Wild guess.”
Her slow smile smoothed his aches, and he caught himself wondering what it would be like to have that expression greet him at the end of every day. He shut the thought away before it could show on his face.
“I’m afraid the kitchen table is my work area at the moment,” she said, gesturing to the stacks of papers covering the surface, “so we’ll have to eat in the living room. Can I get you a beer to go with that, or are you technically still on duty?”
“Nope, I’m free. And I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
Lucy pulled a couple of Modelos out of the fridge and led the way into the living room. He had to force himself not to chastise her for ignoring her crutches, and once she’d sunk onto the couch, he couldn’t refrain from asking about them.
“My leg hardly hurts at all, actually. The doctor said it would heal fairly quickly. I have to keep taking the antibiotics all week, but I think I’m done with the crutches.”
He plunked down next to her and parceled out the burritos, chips, guacamole, and salsa he’d brought. “Just don’t be a hero.”
“Yes, sir.” She gave him a mock salute, and he laughed.
• • •
ETHAN’S LAUGHTER WARMED her more than the scent of spicy food or the rich fizz of the Mexican beer, and Lucy felt herself relaxing, the stress she habitually carried draining out of her muscles, only to be replaced by tension of an entirely different kind. Unsure of herself, she concentrated on eating. When the food was gone and she could ignore him no longer, she glanced up.
“Thank you,” she said. “The car, the food, the files . . .” Most men would have waved away her gratitude, but Ethan did not. He merely caught her eyes with his own, which seemed to grow darker as he held her gaze. She could not look away, and when he leaned toward her, she met him halfway.
His lips were hot, but surprisingly soft on her own. They teased and tempted, incited and seduced, and Lucy’s entire awareness narrowed to the single spot at which she and Ethan were joined. She moved closer, cradling his rough, stubbled jaw in her hands, and expected him to follow suit. Craved the feeling of his palms against her skin.
But he did not, and after a moment, Lucy pulled away, only to find his hands fisted in the cushions of the couch.
“I didn’t want to frighten you,” he said, following the direction of her glance. “Last time . . . last time, I got the feeling things moved too fast. I was trying to slow down.”
Lucy’s eyes stung, and she blinked away the tears trying to form there.
“I’m not afraid of you, Ethan.”
“No?”
She shook her head, and he grinned at her. “Thank God.” He reached for her, and she practically threw herself into his arms, but before he could kiss her again his phone rang.
He dropped his head back and banged it twice on the back of the sofa. “I have to get that. I’m not on duty, but with this case I’m never really off, either.”
“I know. Next time.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Lucy almost didn’t recognize the little thrill that went through her at the promise. J
oy. How long had it been since she’d felt that tingle of anticipation, that indescribable tickle of elation? Certainly, no man had ever inspired it in her before. No, it had been reserved for book contracts and graduations. For a moment, the strength and unexpectedness of it actually did scare her.
Especially with this man, who still held secrets. Of course, she had her own. It was time to share them if she expected him to trust her as she’d learned to trust him.
“I have to go in,” Ethan said when he hung up. “They caught the Archer Apartments peeper. I doubt he’s connected to the murder, but I want to be the one to interview him. Besides, patrol brought him in, and the only other detective I have is Keith, and he just got off duty, too.”
“I understand.” And she did. Didn’t mean she wasn’t fiercely disappointed, or a little tiny bit relieved. She walked him to the door, where he pulled her close for another brief, mind-numbing kiss before letting her go.
• • •
JIM RANDOLPH’S MOTHER caught Ethan the moment he entered the station.
“Chief Donovan, there has to be some mistake,” she said before he could even greet her. “I promise you, Jim’s a good boy. He’s never been in any trouble at all.”
Right. Ethan knew sexual predators as well as any cop. If her good boy was peeping into windows at nineteen, he’d likely be committing sexual assault by the time he was legal to drink. But he couldn’t very well tell that to the kid’s mother.
“Mrs. Randolph, why don’t you sit with Officer Wilkes and go over everything you remember happening tonight while I have a little chat with Jim. Is that all right?”
The woman nodded, sniffing back tears, and Cal Wilkes led her away.
Ethan slipped into the interview room where Scott Allenby was questioning the boy.
Jim had the physique of a health nut but the flitting eyes of a habitual drug user. And, at nineteen, he still had bad acne. Possibly, he suffered from a genetic curse of overactive sebaceous glands. More likely, he used steroids.
“Has he been informed of his rights?” Ethan asked Scott.
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