“Rook?” Lorenzo used the nickname for the partner who hadn’t been a true rookie in several months, since he’d marked a year on the force. “You want to check him?”
Lorenzo helped Tate pull the guy to his feet, and they watched as Nate patted him down. A minute later, he handed Tate a wallet and a cell phone.
Scowling at the guy who might have gotten his weapon if Sitka hadn’t leaped in at the right moment, Tate opened the wallet and pulled out a driver’s license. “Mario McKeever.” His scowl deepened as he saw the state. “From New York.”
“Let’s get him processed,” Lorenzo suggested, taking the guy by the crook of the arm as if he worried Tate would start an interrogation out in the street.
This was Sabrina’s stalker. A good four inches shorter than Tate’s six feet, with flexing biceps that suggested he spent a lot of time at the gym, he wore a snarl that made him look even more intimidating. His face wasn’t all that memorable, with small features partly hidden by a thick layer of scruff. Still, now that Tate had a better view than the grainy picture they’d taken in the park, he knew for sure. He didn’t recognize Mario from the social-media images he’d been poring over. How far on the outskirts of Sabrina’s life had he been?
As Lorenzo and Tate led the suspect around the corner and toward the police station, with Nate and Sitka trailing slightly behind, Tate tried to keep his mouth shut. It was something he was good at; more than once, his old chief had asked him to stand in the room or help out with an interrogation of a challenging suspect because Tate wouldn’t lose his cool.
But right now, thinking of the fear on Sabrina’s face as she’d been trying to slip away at dawn, he couldn’t help himself. “Why can’t you just leave her alone?”
“Tate,” Lorenzo warned.
Tate took a deep breath, then clamped his jaw shut.
Mario looked back and forth between them, then snapped, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I ran because you and your attack dog started chasing me for no reason. You let me go now and I won’t sue you. Look at my arm!”
He tried to pull it forward, but between the cuffs and Lorenzo’s grip, he couldn’t. He didn’t need to move it for Tate to see the damage. Mario’s forearm was bleeding, the bite wounds obvious.
Instead of telling him that Sitka wouldn’t have knocked him down if he hadn’t been a threat, Tate followed protocol this time and didn’t engage. He managed to keep his silence all the way back to the station, where the new police chief was waiting.
“Let’s get him fingerprinted,” Chief Griffith said.
Mario jerked back so quickly that Tate and the chief shared a look as Lorenzo yanked him forward again. The guy had a record.
“I need a doctor,” Mario insisted, his eyes wide as he kept trying to pull away from Lorenzo.
“No problem,” the chief said calmly. “We’re going to get you some first aid right now, and then we’ll take you to the hospital.”
Tate ground his teeth together, trying to hold in his frustration. It was protocol. And with the guy in custody, Sabrina was out of danger. But he wanted more answers now—like how Mario had managed to track her all the way from New York.
The guy relaxed as another officer came in, snapped on a pair of gloves and wrapped up the wound. Then the chief took Mario’s arm, pulling him farther into the station.
“What are you doing?” Mario demanded. “I’ve got rights! I want to see a doctor.”
“And we’re taking you to one,” the chief replied. “But first we’re going to have to get your prints.”
Mario planted his feet, and his muscles bulged as he resisted the chief’s tugs.
Showing a lot more calm than Tate felt, the chief just smiled and nodded at Officer Max Becker, who grinned and came over with the portable fingerprint system, pressing the suspect’s thumb against it before he knew what was happening.
“Hey!” Mario yelled, yanking his hand away.
“Got it,” Max said, backing away from Mario’s swinging arms.
Mario’s snarl returned, and every officer in the front of the station tensed at once, ready to react to an attack.
His gaze swept them, then he seemed to realize he was outmanned, and his head fell forward. The chief pulled him toward processing.
“Mario McKeever,” Max announced. “We’ve got two stalking charges within the past decade. Resulted in a short stint in jail and a couple of restraining orders. And—” Max snorted as he looked back at Mario “—the reason he ran. He’s wanted in a sexual-assault case back in New York.”
“From when?” Tate asked.
“Four months ago.”
“And then he came here,” Tate said. “Lucky coincidence, or did he already know Sabrina was here?”
Mario twisted in the chief’s grip. “I don’t know a Sabrina. And I ran because I was framed.”
He continued to protest as the chief frowned and called to Lorenzo. “Can you and Nate manage the hospital transport?”
“Sure,” Lorenzo said, and the chief turned to Tate.
“Step outside with me.”
As soon as they were out the door, Tate insisted, “I can go along. I’ll be careful what I ask.”
“Tate, it’s not him,” the chief said.
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t Sabrina’s stalker.”
“Come on,” Tate insisted. “He was taking pictures of her. He’s got a history of stalking. And he’s from New York!”
“Coincidences, but not proof. This guy has a known stalking problem, and Sabrina isn’t the only woman here he’s taken pictures of.” Before Tate could continue arguing, the chief said, “He’s in the national database. He’s wanted in New York. That means he would have popped for police in the murder of Dylan Westwood. But he didn’t.”
Tate swore under his breath. The chief was right. It was someone else’s prints that had shown up in Sabrina’s boyfriend’s house. Someone without a record.
Was he wrong? Was Mario just a general creep and not specifically the creep harassing Sabrina?
What about the New York connection? He must have come here within the past few months—and then Sabrina’s stalker had suddenly restarted contact. Was it all coincidence?
“Maybe Mario hired someone to make the hit on Westwood. Or maybe the murder wasn’t actually committed by her stalker,” Tate said. “Maybe he just capitalized on it, sent that note to Sabrina to make her think he had more power than he actually did.”
The chief nodded slowly. “Yeah, both of those things are possible. We’ll question Mario thoroughly. In the meantime, you and Sitka should take the rest of the day. Fill out your incident report and then head home. Take a break and get your head clear. We’ll update you.”
Tate shook his head, shocked that the chief thought he wasn’t fit to be working. “Chief—”
“You’re too invested. And while I’m not worried about you crossing a line, I also know Lorenzo and Nate can get the job done. I’ll be watching the interrogation, too. But you were knocked to the ground today, and technically, you need to get checked out. I’ll trust you to handle that. But I don’t want you back on duty for twenty-four hours. Rest, have a doctor look at you, and I’ll update you. Okay?”
Frowning, Tate nodded. It was protocol, especially since the world had gone black on him when he hit the ground. The chief didn’t know that, but he was being cautious.
Even though Tate wanted to be the one questioning Mario, the closest hospital was one town over. That meant going up and down a mountain, an hour each way. And that didn’t include time spent being checked out by a doctor.
That was time Tate could use to return to Sabrina’s social media, see if he could find Mario McKeever somewhere on the platforms.
“Okay,” he agreed.
The chief’s eyes narrowed slightly at his ready agreement, but he
didn’t say anything as Tate opened the door to the station and called Sitka.
She came bounding out, and he led her to his personal vehicle. As he opened the door for her, she looked up at him questioningly, as if to ask Why aren’t we staying at work?
“We have some things to do at home,” he told her, as Lorenzo and Nate exited the police station and pulled Mario toward their police vehicle.
The criminal’s eyes met his briefly, and then he scowled and looked away.
If this guy was Sabrina’s stalker, Tate vowed to find the connection before Mario was back at the station for his interrogation.
But two hours later, as Tate checked the time yet again and Sitka whined at his feet, he had nothing. He’d been following every thread he could find from Sabrina’s social media, through her brother, through friends and even friends of friends. He’d blown images up threefold, staring into the background, searching for Mario’s unremarkable face or his nasty sneer.
How much time did he have left before Lorenzo and Nate brought Mario back to the station for questioning? Finding a link between Mario and Sabrina that they could show the suspect early in the process was likely to be far more effective than if they did it later, after he’d lawyered up and some of the initial shock of being caught had faded.
Rubbing a hand over his head, which was throbbing from two hours of staring at his computer screen and the bump to the back of his head earlier, Tate clicked back to one of Sabrina’s friends who posted the most publicly available pictures. She and Sabrina didn’t appear to be especially close, but he’d found Sabrina in the background of several of her older pictures. Maybe he needed to go back even further. Maybe Mario had fixated on her long before he’d started writing to her.
He opened a photo from three years ago on the woman’s feed and found Sabrina, laughing in the background. The lighting was crap, the surroundings some dimly lit bar. She was surrounded by a couple of people he recognized from hours of looking through feeds as work colleagues. Beyond that were more people who seemed to be part of the same crowd.
His shoulders dropped. It had seemed like a real long shot, but he was still disappointed that none of them were Mario McKeever.
Then his pulse shot up, and he leaned in close to the screen as a familiar face in the background caught his attention.
Beside him, Sitka got to her feet, whining as she caught his mood.
“No way,” he muttered, blowing the picture up. It got grainier as the size increased, but he wasn’t wrong. The guy standing two rows behind Sabrina—maybe part of the group, maybe not—had his gaze solidly fixed on her.
It wasn’t Mario McKeever. It was worse.
It was a man Sabrina trusted, one of the few people in Desparre she seemed to consider a friend. It was a man who’d been in the forefront of the photo in the park with Mario. He’d been talking to Sabrina, completely overlooked as a threat because he’d supposedly moved here after his wife had died.
It was Adam Lassiter.
Chapter Thirteen
“Adam.” Sabrina heard the surprise in her own voice as she opened the door to her cabin.
Her friend was standing on the front stoop slightly hunched forward, hands shoved in his pockets. “Hey, Sabrina. I’m sorry to stop by unannounced, but I...” He blew out a breath, then gave a self-conscious smile. “I just needed a friend, and since you lived kind of nearby...”
Sabrina glanced around at the vast expanse of woods surrounding her cabin, the enclosure that had felt like a protective barrier when she’d first arrived. Now it felt like a place for a stalker to hide. Even standing in her open doorway felt too exposed.
She hadn’t invited anyone except Tate and Sitka inside in two long years. Adam might be her friend, but the idea of letting anyone too close still made anxiety knot her stomach.
“I should have called,” Adam said, stepping back. “It’s just—I didn’t have your number. But Lora told me where you lived, and I was passing near here, so I thought maybe... I’m sorry.”
Her gaze snapped back up to him. They didn’t really have the sort of friendship where you just showed up unannounced. She wasn’t even sure how Lora had known where she lived to be able to tell him, but it didn’t really surprise her that she knew it. Lora seemed to know everything about everyone.
As her attention refocused on Adam instead of the vast expanses where someone could be hiding behind him, she realized he looked worse than usual. There were deep circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. A downward tilt to his mouth as if he’d been frowning all day.
“I’m sorry,” she told Adam, trying to shake off her unease. She almost hadn’t opened the door, even after seeing through the peephole that it was just him. “It’s been a tough week.”
“For me, too.” His words were soft as his gaze lifted from the ground back up to her. “Today would have been my wife’s birthday.” He took another step backward, shaking his head, his back and shoulders sloped inward. “I was going to go for a walk, clear my head. And then I realized I didn’t want to be all alone. But it’s an imposition. I’m sorry. I—”
“No,” Sabrina cut him off as guilt bubbled up that she’d made him feel like he couldn’t reach out to her.
In the few months she’d tried to venture out more, Adam and Lora had made her feel like she could have friends here. Even if she couldn’t tell them the truth about who she was, she’d always thought Adam had sensed she’d also experienced a recent loss. It was in the way his gaze sometimes cut to her when he mentioned his grief, as if he expected her to share her own loss.
She never had. She’d been tempted once or twice to talk about it, to be vague enough that she wouldn’t get tripped up on her real past. But something had always stopped her, a voice in the back of her head that sounded like the PI saying not to take any risks she might regret. Not to give in to the desire for connection at the expense of safety.
So right now, instead of inviting him inside, she grabbed her keys off the table in her entryway and stepped outside. Her fingers fluttered briefly up to the emergency button hidden underneath her T-shirt as she locked the door behind her. Then she mustered up a smile and said, “Lead the way.”
An answering smile trembled on his face, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thanks.”
He walked down her drive, out to the dirt road. Then, instead of heading toward town, he moved in the other direction, where the woods started slowly thinning out as the road tilted upward. “There’s a great view about a mile from here. A good place to clear your head,” he said, keeping a brisk pace.
He was about four inches taller than her and Sabrina had to increase her pace to keep up with his long strides. She struggled with the appropriate thing to say, but words evaded her. She had no idea how his wife had passed, but she was pretty sure he was only a few years older than her, in his early to midthirties. Young to have lost a spouse.
He was probably here because he thought she knew that same kind of grief. But although the horror of Dylan’s death would probably always be with her, it was different. They’d only been dating for three months before he was murdered. It had been the beginning of something, but where it would lead she’d never know. She couldn’t begin to guess the grief he was experiencing.
He kept hurrying along, slightly ahead of her, and unease pricked as he moved off the road and onto a path with a steeper incline. Her thoughts went immediately to the bear and cubs Tate and Sitka had run into behind her house.
“Adam?” she huffed. She’d been in good shape back in New York, often choosing a long walk instead of public transportation. But since going into hiding, she’d been afraid to go running alone. She always felt safer behind the locked door of a vehicle or a hotel room.
He glanced back at her, slowing slightly. “Sorry. I hike a lot.”
“No, it’s not that. There are bears in the woods.”
He laughed, although it sounded a little forced. “Nah. I’ve come this way plenty of times. We’ll be fine. Trust me, the view will be worth it. You wouldn’t think so, but there’s a big drop-off this way. It’s an amazing place to look out onto the valley below. You just can’t get too close to the edge.” He laughed again, a little chortle that sounded like he was trying too hard to be cheerful for her sake. “And anyway, I have bear spray.” He patted the pocket of his cargo pants as he kept moving up the path.
Sabrina hesitated, glancing back down the empty road, then into the forest. The trees were thinner here than by her house, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a great place for bears to wander.
Up ahead, Adam was still pressing forward, not realizing she wasn’t right behind him. Since they’d left her house, he hadn’t said a word about his wife. Maybe he’d just needed silent, understanding company. Or maybe he wanted to wait until they reached this peaceful view he’d mentioned. But something about the way he’d shown up and then just plowed forward was making discomfort creep in.
Was she being paranoid? Adam was her friend. One of her only friends.
But she’d learned a long time ago that her stalker wasn’t the only threat. That sometimes, danger came in the guise of a friend. Like the coworker who’d walked her out to her car, joking about women sticking together, then nodded at someone hiding in the shadows. That guy had rushed for her, only charging the other way when one of the cooks happened to pop open the back door for a smoke. She’d left that place behind like so many others, but she thought she’d carried the lesson with her.
Sabrina’s hand reached for the alert button without conscious intent.
Then, Adam glanced back and called, “Come on!”
At some point, she had to be able to trust her own judgment again. At some point, her life couldn’t be all about fear.
She lowered her hand, hurrying to catch up.
Yes, her stalker was here. But so was Tate, who’d dedicated himself to helping her, who represented a possibility even greater. So were Adam and Lora, people who’d befriended her despite how closed off she was. Who’d given her a chance when they could have walked away. Maybe she needed to do the same.
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