by Edwin Dasso
Also by Kevin Tumlinson
Dan Kotler:
The Coelho Medallion
The Atlantis Riddle
The Devil's Interval
The Girl in the Mayan Tomb
The Antarctic Forgery
The Stepping Maze
The God Extinction
The Spanish Papers
The Hidden Persuaders
The Sleeper’s War
The God Resurrection
Dan Kotler Short Fiction:
The Brass Hall - A Dan Kotler Story
The Jani Sigil
Dan Kotler Box Sets:
The Book of Lost Things: Dan Kotler, Books 1-3
The Book of Betrayals: Dan Kotler, Books 4-6
The Book of Gods and Kings: Dan Kotler, Books 7-9
Quake Runner: Alex Kayne:
Shaken
Triggered
Evergreen:
Evergreen
Citadel:
Citadel: First Colony
Citadel: Paths in Darkness
Citadel: Children of Light
Citadel: The Value of War
Colony Girl: A Citadel Universe Story
Sawyer Jackson:
Sawyer Jackson and the Long Land
Sawyer Jackson and the Shadow Strait
Sawyer Jackson and the White Room
Think Tank:
Karner Blue
Zero Tolerance
Nomad
The Lucid — Co-authored with Nick Thacker:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Shorts & Novellas:
Getting Gone
Teresa's Monster
The Three Reasons to Avoid Being Punched in the Face
Tin Man
Two Blocks East
Edge
Zero
Collections & Anthologies:
Citadel: Omnibus
Uncanny Divide — With Nick Thacker & Will Flora
Light Years — The Complete Science Fiction Library
Dead of Winter: A Christmas Anthology — With Nick Thacker, Jim Heskett, David Berens, M.P. MacDougall, R.A. McGee, Dusty Sharp & Steven Moore
YA & Middle Grade:
Secret of the Diamond Sword — An Alex Kotler Mystery
Wordslinger (Non-Fiction):
30-Day Author: Develop a Daily Writing Habit and Write Your Book In 30 Days (Or Less)
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KevinTumlinson.com
Find Her
A Novel
By
Chris Patchell
Contents
Author’s Content advisory
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part III
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About the Author
Also By Chris Patchell
Author’s Content advisory
Find Her
Language intensity
Stronger profanity, with up to 5 uses of the f-word
Sexuality intensity
Possible sexual references with no details
Violence intensity
Mild violence, fairly detailed with some blood
Part I
1
Sadie Gibbons knew trouble when she saw it, and it was right there in aisle four. Born and bred in Sweet Home, Oregon, she knew all nine thousand eight hundred and fifteen souls in town, and the man standing in front of the hammers wasn’t from around here. She did know that he’d been standing there way too long. Professional carpenters who treated their hammers with the same reverence that her second husband, Jimmy, lavished on his prized jigsaw didn’t take this long to make a decision. There were only four models to choose from for god’s sake.
But that wasn’t all. There was something about the way he acted that made the fine hairs on the back of Sadie’s neck rise. He stood there like a zombie, totally zoned out, as her grandkids would say. It just wasn’t right.
Oh, he was pretty enough. The oversized sweatshirt, ball cap, and sunglasses he wore couldn’t hide the fact that he was a good-looking man. Hell, her first husband had been pretty too, and he was a sneaky sonofabitch, god rest his poor departed soul. Like this guy. He avoided eye contact at all costs. And what was worse, he moved like he knew where the security cameras were placed and avoided them.
This wasn’t one of those fancy Home Depot’s where there were more security cameras than potted plants. That said, they weren’t entirely without eyes. Half a dozen cameras were placed at high traffic points providing a bird’s eye view of the store because in this day and age, you couldn’t trust anyone. Especially strangers. Why just a few months ago they caught a guy stealing a chainsaw. A goddamned chain saw. Not exactly the kind of thing you could hide under one of them hoodies.
Sadie kept her eyes pinned on the stranger, not wanting to miss a single thing. But then the telephone rang. She heaved a heavy sigh. The phone was on the other side of the counter, and she couldn’t very well answer it and still keep the hammer guy in her sights. Where the hell was Jimmy? Probably out for a smoke or fooling around in the paint aisle. Never in her life had she met a man more obsessed with paint.
A few rings in, it became obvious that Jimmy wasn’t gonna answer. Swearing under her breath, Sadie crossed to the end of the counter and picked it up. Apparently, her old bones didn’t move fast enough. By the time she answered, the caller had hung up. What was wrong with people anyway? Always in a rush. Like she didn’t have better things to do than stand by the phone waiting for a call.
Slamming the phone down, Sadie hurried back to her post, where she’d spent the last fifteen minutes watching the hammer guy only to find that she was too late. He was gone. Her gaze ricocheted off the mirrors perched in the corners of the store, checking the aisles to see if she could catch sight of him, but as her father would have said, he disappeared like spit in the wind.
Dammit.
Sadie hustled her bulk around the corner of the counter and down the aisle where they kept the carpentry tools. Sure enough, a hammer was missing—one of the twenty-ounce Eastwing rip hammer jobbies with the leather grips. Just yesterday morning, she had refreshed stock in this aisle and knew that since then, not a single one had been sold.
“Jimmy!”
Where in the blazes was that man?
“Hold your horses, woman,” Jimmy groused.
Sadie shook her head impatiently. With a stir stick in one hand and paint swatches in the other, Jimmy emerged from the rows of paint cans.
“Jimmy, the guy in aisle four.”
“Who?”
Jimmy craned his head around toward the front of the store. The white strands in his caterpillar eyebrows caught the light, and Sadie huffed out a breath. He was clueless. The hammer guy was long gone.
Frustration rose from the pit of Sadie’s belly and clawed its way up her throat. She let Jimmy have it.
“He walked right by you. Didn’t you see him?”
Jimmy lifted his ball cap and scratched at the stubborn tufts of white hair that clung to his freckled crown. That man was useless. Worse than useless. If it weren’t for her, she didn’t kno
w what would come of him or the store. Jaw clenched; Sadie marched down the aisle as fast as her arthritic knees would carry her. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911.
“What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“We’ve been robbed.”
Sadie tersely relayed the details to the 911 operator and slammed the phone down, wondering how long it would take the local yokels to arrive. Jimmy wagged his head at her, as if she’d lost her mind.
“Woman, you’ve been watching too many true crime shows. You think everyone is the Son of Sam.”
“That guy didn’t look any more like David Berkowitz than I do, and I sure as hell didn’t need any barking dogs to tell me that he was a thief. Besides, I placed an order for those hammers just last week. There were three of them in Monday’s order and now, there’s only two. I may not have graduated high school, but I sure as hell can count.”
For once, Jimmy didn’t argue.
2
As luck would have it, officer Lacey James was five blocks away when she heard the call. A burglary at the hardware store. Crazy Sadie had called it in. Lacey thumbed the button on her radio, grateful for something to do.
“Copy that. On my way.”
A suspected burglary wasn’t enough to warrant full lights and sirens, but Lacey picked up the pace. She shot west on Juniper Street and cut north onto 35th, scanning the area for the suspect.
At the intersection of 35th and Long, just past the elementary school, she caught a glimpse of a guy jaywalking. Lacey’s pulse ticked up a notch. Male. Medium height and build. Black hoodie. Ball cap. He fit the description all right. Lacey pumped the brakes and executed a fast turn down Long Street, giving chase.
Lacey had just passed the elementary school, when a shaggy black dog bounded from between two parked cars and ran into the street with its master in tow. A little boy with close-cropped dark hair, clung to the end of the leash, desperately trying to keep up. Panic flashed in his dark eyes at the sight of the police cruiser bearing down. Dropping the leash, he froze. The dog took off.
Lacey slammed on the brakes. The scream of rubber on asphalt caused every head in a two-block radius to turn.
“Gabriel!”
The scream came from a harried-looking blonde woman rushing toward them with a baby cradled against her chest. She ran out between the parked cars into the middle of the street. Scooping the boy up in her free arm, she held him tight. The boy buried his face in her neck and burst into sobs.
Lacey’s heart pounded as she rolled the window down. Images of her own children flashed before her eyes. Flynn, her youngest, was a few years older than this boy. Lacey still remembered what it was like to have little ones, and how terrified she would have felt had she been in this mother’s shoes.
“You okay?” she called out.
Both the boy and the baby were crying now. The young mother nodded.
“Sorry, Officer. It’s the first time I’ve let Gabriel walk the dog alone. Scout’s usually pretty docile, but he caught sight of a squirrel and took off.”
“He’s a little young to go it alone,” Lacey said.
The woman nodded. Still cradling the baby, she set Gabriel down. She grabbed hold of his hand and led him back to the sidewalk, where a kindly pedestrian waited with the dog. Lacey eased off the brakes and continued down the street, but the suspect was no longer in sight. She drove down the block and onto the next, but there was no sign of him anywhere.
Lacey cruised past the church parking lot on her way to the hardware store when she noticed an olive-green Subaru Outback parked at the back of the lot. Lacey knew the Outback didn’t belong to the pastor. He drove a brand-new Dodge Dart. Fire engine red. A little flashy for a pastor if you asked her, but who was she to judge? Even pastors could have a mid-life crisis she supposed.
Operating on a hunch, Lacey wheeled into the church parking lot and approached the vehicle. The Outback’s tailgate was open, blocking her view. Lacey screeched to a halt. The suspect peered around the edge of the Subaru. One look at the cruiser, and he took off. There was barely time to call for backup as Lacey jumped out of the car and gave chase.
Trees whipped past and panicked birds fled their perches as Lacey ran. It was just her luck he’d gotten a head start. The woods behind the businesses had grown thick. A few of the homeless folks had pitched tents and were camping out behind the Food Distribution Center. The church folks wanted the homeless camp cleared out, but there was nowhere for them to go.
Are you lost?
The question her husband, Caleb, had once asked her when she’d been lost in the woods gave Lacey pause. She was running with no sense of direction. It was the trigger she needed to remind herself to stop, reevaluate, and come up with a better plan.
A quarter mile from the church parking lot, her chest heaving and sweat running down her face, Lacey gave up. She was ten years older and twenty pounds heavier than the track star she used to be, and with no idea what direction the suspect was heading, she was running blind.
At least they still had the car. She circled back to the church parking lot where she’d parked her cruiser. By the time Lacey emerged from the trees, officer Spencer Clark had arrived, and was pulling on a pair of Latex gloves.
The Sweet Home police department had a handful of good veteran cops, but Spencer wasn’t one of them. A few years out of the academy, he was neither the best nor the brightest, but he was the mayor’s nephew—just another shiny example of small-town nepotism at work.
Lacey wiped the sweat from her forehead and struggled to catch her breath, embarrassed that she’d let herself get so badly out of shape. Between her job, the two kids, and her husband who was stationed two thousand miles away at an Army base in Texas, working out had not surprisingly fallen to the bottom of her priority list.
Spencer straightened away from the car as Lacey approached, his eyes never quite making it past her chest. Perv. Her cousin, Amber, called it sexual harassment and had urged Lacey to report him to the chief. Amber wasn’t wrong, but as the only woman on the small-town police force, Lacey didn’t want to be labelled a problem.
Spencer shook his head. “He was swapping the plates.”
The rear license plate hung from one screw as Lacey rounded the vehicle. Standing beside Spencer, she took in the contents of the cargo hold.
“Well, there’s Crazy Sadie’s brand-new hammer. It’s still got the tag. Let’s check the UPC codes to verify it’s a match.”
Spencer nodded. “And what do we have here?”
Wearing the self-satisfied expression of the cat who swallowed the canary, Spencer nudged a neatly folded tarp aside. Hidden beneath, Lacey saw a length of rope, some gloves, a few black garbage bags, along with one other thing.
A handgun.
3
“Dammit Jimmy, I told you that man was up to no good.” Sadie jabbed a gnarled finger toward her husband’s sunken chest. Jimmy hung his head like a chastised dog. “You’re always saying I read too much into the actions of others, but this time I was right.”
Lacey couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. She’d seen her share of domestic skirmishes and knew that in abusive relationships, the woman wasn’t always the victim. In fact, Crazy Sadie had a history. Her first husband had gone missing—left on his fishing boat and never returned. The Coast Guard managed to locate the boat, abandoned.
By all accounts, the first husband was no saint. A womanizer. A drinker. The two were known for their epic fights, which had earned Crazy Sadie her moniker. The small-town rumor mill was quick to speculate that his disappearance was no accident. But without evidence, there was no case, and years later Sadie’s husband was declared dead.
As if she was starring in an episode of Dateline, Sadie faithfully recited every detail of the burglary, from the moment the suspect had entered the store to the moment he had fled. Lacey took copious notes but, in the end, there wasn’t much to tell. A check of the UPC codes showed a match, fully backing up Sadie’s story. The theft
of a hammer costing less than forty bucks hardly constituted a full-on sting operation, but Lacey couldn’t deny that the contents of the trunk were troubling, as were the stolen plates.
Whoever this guy was, he was taking pains to conceal his identity. Why would he steal a hammer in the first place? It was a lot of risk for something so mundane.
“I’ll call the station. We’ll impound the car,” Spencer said, taking the lead.
Sadie bobbed her head in agreement. “Grand theft auto. No tellin’ what other things he’s done.”
“While I agree that impounding the car makes sense,” Lacey said, careful not to chuck her fellow officer under the bus—a courtesy she was quite sure he wouldn’t extend to her, had the situation been reversed. “I’d be more inclined to leave the vehicle where it is.”
