Dark Skies: A Fox County Forensics Lesbian Romantic Suspense

by Malone, Cara

  And at least Cal didn’t know about Noah yet. It would come out during the trial, Elizabeth was sure of it. But for now, she desperately needed him to be on her side. Even if she was still furious with him for having a baby with that other woman.

  “Cal, please help me,” she begged.

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I’m listening.”

  Things had been tense between them for the last few weeks, ever since the tornado. Elizabeth knew Cal didn’t like relying on other people, and he wasn’t her sister’s number one fan either. But he wasn’t what Detective Logan said he was—he couldn’t have done what he said Cal did to that woman. And he always came through for Elizabeth when she needed him.

  She thought for a moment. How was she going to ask for what she needed without immediately alerting the police?

  “Since I’m stuck in here, there’s something I need you to take care of. I told the insurance assessor I’d go out to the house this afternoon to take pictures, but clearly I can’t go,” she said, speaking slowly and praying Cal would get her drift.

  “When did you talk to the assessor? I’ve been dealing with the insurance.”

  “Cal, it’s important to get those pictures this afternoon,” she said. “And I need you to pay special attention to the fireplace. The surround is an antique and I’d like to know if there’s anything inside the fireplace that we can salvage.”

  “Babe, the whole house is rubble,” Cal said. “I know you like that cast iron surround, but it’s not safe to go down there. Besides, that surround is probably totaled like everything else.”

  Oh Lord… Cal never was good at charades, but Elizabeth couldn’t stop thinking about what she overheard Detective Logan saying about the gun that girl brought into her house. The cops needed it—he’d mentioned it twice, once in the interrogation room and once in the bullpen.

  If Elizabeth wanted to get out of here, that gun needed to disappear for good. It was already a miracle that the house had been in such shambles that the police hadn’t been able to find it on their initial search of the property. And now she was relying on her worthless husband to not only pick up on her hints, but also to follow through.

  Lord help me.

  “Cal,” she tried again, “The police are gunning for me and I’m going to be in jail all night. I need you to go to the house for me.”

  “Elizabeth, I’ve been the one dealing with…” He trailed off and she held her breath, hoping he’d finally connected the dots.

  She really couldn’t speak in any more explicit terms than she already had, and even then, she was pushing it. But there was one more thing she had to say. “I love you, Cal. I never meant for any of this to happen, but it was all for our family. When you see Noah, hug him for me, okay? I know he’s sixteen and he thinks he’s too old for that, but do it anyway, please. He’s our miracle baby, after all.”

  Especially considering she’d spent the last sixteen years thinking that Cal was sterile. But now was no time to get bitter.

  She ended the call and knocked on the door, and the police officer led her down another hall to a row of holding cells. Each one had a hard steel bench, a toilet in one corner, and absolutely no privacy. If there was anything to be grateful for, it was that, at least for the moment, they were all empty.

  He opened the door to the first cell and Elizabeth went inside. She jumped when the door rolled shut behind her, and her heart climbed into her throat. She sat down on the bench and tried to control her breathing—tried not to think of the fact that this would be her life for God knew how long if Cal hadn’t understood what she was trying to tell him on the phone.

  Or if he understood, but chose not to help her.

  What if he found out about Noah before he did this one last thing for her?

  She closed her eyes and breathed deep, the air filling her lungs in jagged inhales. She was here because she wanted the best life possible for her son. She was here because her husband raped some poor woman and his bastard daughter had showed up on their doorstep, wanting to know what kind of monster she’d come from.

  25

  Cal

  Thirty minutes later, Cal was climbing through the rubble of his ruined home with his cell phone out, pretending to take insurance pictures just in case anyone asked what he was doing. Not that the story would have held much water—the insurance assessor had taken his own pictures weeks ago.

  The journey down into the basement was precarious, with sharp splinters of wood sticking up all over the place, ready to impale Cal if he tripped. Not to mention all the nails and other bits of rusty metal waiting to give him tetanus. And Cal didn’t even know if he’d understood Elizabeth correctly. He thought she wanted him to come down here and find the gun in the fireplace, but wasn’t that one of the first places the cops would have looked for it?

  And why, exactly, was he sticking his neck out for her? He slept with some college chick twenty years ago and had a baby he didn’t even know about, and for that, his wife had been furious with him, giving him the silent treatment ever since he got home from the precinct last night.

  But he’d told her about the rape allegation and she hadn’t hesitated to take his side. Elizabeth believed him when he said they’d both been drunk, and consent was a whole different animal back then. Right or wrong, she was on his side. She was his wife. And he owed it to her to at least try to find this gun.

  Besides, how was he going to raise a teenager with her behind bars?

  The only luck he’d had all day was the fact that the chimney had remained relatively untouched during the tornado, and there wasn’t a ton of debris stacked up in front of the fireplace. He’d been bracing himself to come out here and find the house completely impassable. But in reality, it was slow going but relatively easy to navigate.

  He crouched down and shuffled a few broken boards and crumbling bricks aside, then reached into the back of the fireplace. It was pitch-black inside, and all he could see was ashes.

  “Damn it, Elizabeth,” he grumbled as he stuck his hand inside.

  There was nothing inside the flue, or on the smoke shelf where he’d guessed she’d hidden the gun. He climbed all the way onto the hearth and moved aside the grate at the very back of the fireplace, then probed his hand inside the ash pit beneath the hearth.

  The ash was cool and oddly fluffy, and he had to reach in a few inches past his wrist before his fingertips touched metal. He closed his hand around the butt of the gun and as soon as he’d pulled it out he cursed himself for using his bare hand. Now the fucking thing had his prints on it as well as his wife’s.

  For a split second, he wondered if that was what she was after all along. What if she didn’t want him to dispose of the gun for her? What if she wanted him to incriminate himself? She was more pissed at him over the girl than she’d ever been in their marriage. And he’d just gone along with her plan like an idiot.

  Well, what’s done is done, he thought, shaking ash from the gun and sticking it in the pocket of his sweatshirt. If his prints were on it, that was all the more motivation to get rid of it.

  Cal started the arduous process of climbing back out of the rubble. He made it halfway up what remained of the stairs when he heard the creaking noise of footsteps over loose floorboards. The whole damn house was loose boards now, but he was pretty sure the sound was coming from what remained of the ground floor, right in his path.

  Fuck, what now?

  He froze on the stairs, wondering if the police had decoded his phone conversation with Elizabeth already and were here to arrest him as an accomplice.

  Cal wasn’t cut out for life in prison, and he hated the idea of Noah being stuck with Trudy if both his parents were incarcerated. He stayed still and listened hard as the floorboards creaked overhead. Then he noticed a shaft of light coming through the floor and realized he could see into the kitchen.

  There was only one of them, not a whole SWAT team. And it was a petite-looking woman.

  Cal’s pulse was r
acing and his fight-or-flight instinct kicked in. He chose flight, deciding to bum-rush her and get the hell out of here. If he moved fast enough and blindsided her, she wouldn’t get a good look at him and she wouldn’t be able to identify him. No one would ever have to know he was here.

  He took the gun out of his pocket just in case. He’d never fired one before and he didn’t even know how to check if the safety was off, but he felt a little more confident with his plan once it was in his palm.

  He broke into a sprint, running up the basement stairs, but the minute he stepped around the corner, the woman screamed and he froze again, raising the gun instinctively.

  She was a blonde in plainclothes, and her eyes were wide with terror. She cried, “Please, don’t shoot!”

  26

  Simone

  Simone was crouched behind a trash can at the curb when she heard Amelia’s voice, high and wavering, begging for her life. It sent an electric jolt through Simone’s spine, and flooded her veins with adrenaline. Suddenly she was hyper focused, alert, tensed to act just like she always felt right before she ran into a burning building.

  Someone needed her help, and this time, it was the woman she loved.

  Simone tightened her grip on the hydrant wrench in her hand. She’d come to retrieve it before work, just like she’d planned, only when she got here, she recognized Cal Thomas’s car parked on the sidewalk. That alone wouldn’t have been unusual—this was his neighborhood, after all. But he’d parked it way down the street, not near his house at all, and it had given Simone a bad feeling in her gut.

  So she’d retrieved the wrench and then found a vantage point from which she could observe and figure out what Cal was up to. He’d been in the house—what was left of it—for about five minutes when Simone heard Amelia scream and her blood ran icy in her veins.

  She hadn’t noticed Amelia arriving, and she definitely wouldn’t have allowed her to go into that house if she’d seen her. What the hell was she doing here?

  Simone ran as quietly as she could across the lawn, then crept around one wall of the house—one of only two still standing. She paused at a window with spiderwebbed glass, probably cracked from the pressure and movement when the rest of the house came down. It provided decent cover, making it difficult for someone on the inside of the house to see her.

  Simone crouched low and peeked into the kitchen. The first thing she saw was Amelia standing stock still in the doorway, her hands up defensively.

  The next thing she noticed was Cal Thomas standing about ten feet from Amelia in the basement doorway, pointing a gun at her. Cal looked nervous, and clearly Amelia was too.

  The neighborhood was pretty quiet at this hour—it was still early afternoon, so most people were at work, and the Thomas house was surrounded on two sides by other houses that had been decimated by the tornado. That meant there were no immediate neighbors to get help from, and Simone would never forgive herself if something happened to Amelia while she sat around, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for the police to arrive. She was going to have to get her out of there herself.

  Simone turned and crept as quickly and silently as she could back around the corner of the house. On the way, she tried to formulate a plan, but her mind was a blank but for one repeating mantra: save Amelia.

  She reached the edge of the wall, what should have been the corner of the house if the rest of it was still standing. She was at Cal’s back, just a few steps away from the kitchen door that Megan Hunter must have come through on the day she died.

  As soon as Simone stepped out from behind the wall, Amelia would see her behind Cal and that might give her away. So Simone had to be ready to act.

  She looked down at the hydrant wrench in her hand. It was about a foot and a half long, heavy, with a brass spanner head at one end that could do some serious damage. The idea of hitting Cal Thomas with it made Simone’s stomach turn, but he had a gun pointed at Amelia. Given a choice between her and anyone else in the world, Simone wouldn’t hesitate to save Amelia.

  Tightening her grip, she stepped around the wall. Amelia’s eyes immediately went to her, and Cal whirled around. Simone brought the wrench down as hard as she could across his wrist, hoping to knock the gun from his hand.

  It fired. Amelia screamed, and so did Cal. Simone’s heart was pounding so hard she could feel it against her rib cage.

  Cal was on his knees, cradling one hand to his chest, the gun lying on the floor. Simone kicked it away as Amelia rushed over to her. Apparently, doctor mode had kicked in for her just like firefighter mode had kicked in for Simone a few minutes ago, because she was asking, “Is everyone okay? Anyone shot?”

  “I’m fine,” Simone said. “Are you?”

  “I’m okay,” Amelia answered.

  “She broke my fucking wrist!” Cal bawled.

  “That’s what you get for pointing guns at people,” Simone said, grabbing Amelia’s hand. “Come on, we all need to get out of here—this house isn’t safe.”

  Cal wasn’t moving, far too absorbed in his pain, so she hooked a hand under his arm.

  “Come on, it’s not your legs that are broken,” she said, urging him to stand.

  “Where’s the gun?” Amelia asked.

  “I kicked it away,” Simone said. “I think it fell down the stairs.”

  “I wasn’t really going to shoot you, I swear,” Cal told Amelia, still cradling his hand. He told Simone, “You didn’t have to hit me.”

  “That’s not how I saw it at the time,” Simone answered gruffly. “Come on.”

  With Amelia’s help, Simone got Cal to his feet and the three of them made it out to the lawn, a safe distance away in case that bullet hit something structural and caused the house to collapse further. They sat Cal down on the curb, and just as Simone was reaching for her phone to call him an ambulance, she noticed red police flashers at the far end of the street.

  “Who called the cops?” Simone asked.

  “I did,” Amelia said. “Tom got a confession out of Elizabeth Thomas this afternoon, and he mentioned the fact that nobody ever recovered the gun. I knew you were coming here to look for your wrench, and I just got a really bad feeling that something was going to happen. I tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up so I just came.”

  “Told you this neighborhood has shit reception,” Cal said.

  “Quiet,” Simone warned him. He was ruining the moment. She turned back to Amelia. “You came to rescue me?”

  Amelia nodded. “And you ended up rescuing me.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t gonna shoot you,” Cal interrupted.

  “You can tell that to the police,” Simone told him.

  The one responding to the scene turned out to be none other than Tom Logan in his unmarked SUV, an emergency bubble light flashing on his dashboard. He hopped out of the vehicle, seeming a little more spry than he had just a month ago, and asked, “Everybody okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Amelia answered. “You knew that Mrs. Thomas was going to tell her husband where the gun was, didn’t you?”

  “I was hoping,” Tom admitted. “Didn’t expect you to go all vigilante and come out here by yourself, though.”

  Amelia turned to Simone with a smile. “I had to save my girlfriend.”

  Simone beamed. “I like the sound of that.”

  They took turns explaining what happened to Tom, and Simone told him where the gun was. He asked her to get her crew out here to safely retrieve it, then he told Cal, “Stand up and turn around. You’re under arrest for evidence tampering and assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “I wasn’t going to shoot her!” Cal shouted, but Tom just grabbed him by the shoulders of his shirt and hauled him to his feet.

  “Turn around,” he repeated.

  Cal screamed as soon as Tom touched his wrist with a handcuff, and Simone figured it really was broken. She’d hit him as hard as she could, knowing she was only going to get one opportunity to catch him off guard. Whether he’d planned to shoot Ame
lia or not, Simone didn’t regret playing it safe.

  “Dr. Trace, will you go to my trunk and get the first aid kit there?” Tom asked. “There’s an inflatable splint in it.”

  She did as he asked, jogging over while Tom Mirandized Cal, and coming back with something that looked like a clear plastic water wing for in the pool. She helped Tom slide it over Cal’s wrist and inflate it, stabilizing his injury. Then Tom got creative with the cuffs, securing both hands behind Cal’s back.

  “Let’s go,” he said, guiding Cal toward the car. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get booked into the cell right next to your wife.”

  He stuffed Cal into the back of his SUV, then drove off the way he’d come. Simone would need to call the firehouse and ask a couple of the more experienced guys to come out and retrieve the gun. But first, she wanted a moment alone with Amelia.

  She took both her hands, kissing her knuckles before wrapping her arms around Amelia’s waist. “I was so scared when I heard you scream. I thought I was going to lose you.”

  “I was scared when I realized what Tom was up to,” Amelia said. “I kept picturing you out here looking for your wrench, and Mr. Thomas with that gun…”

  “I love you,” Simone said.

  Amelia met her gaze. “You do?”

  “Yes, with my whole heart,” Simone told her. “I know it’s fast, but I also know it’s the real deal. I want to be with you, Amelia, even if we’re both busy as hell and we only ever get to see each other a few times a week—or even a few times a month. I want any amount of time that I can get with you, and I promise, I’ll do my best not to make you worry.”

  Amelia smiled, and smacked Simone’s shoulder. “You’re not doing a very good job of it lately.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll work on it.”

  “You better,” Amelia said. “Because I love you too.”