Witness Protection Unraveled (Protected Identities Book 3)

by Maggie K. Black

  “It’s okay,” Jess said. “Travis will take care of it.” She stood back and watched as Travis strode over to Chief Peters.

  Travis was in plain clothes, with a gurgling Dominic strapped to his chest, and the chief was in his dark blue-black uniform. But in her eyes, there was no doubting which one carried more authority.

  “What is this?” Travis asked. “What’s going on here?”

  “Travis,” the chief said. “There’s been a break-in at Patricia’s store.”

  “So I’ve heard!” Travis waved a hand toward the store. “But that doesn’t explain why my friend is sitting there in handcuffs.”

  Seth’s eyebrows flinched. Jess suspected it was only the seriousness of the moment that was keeping him from making some cute comment about the fact that Travis had just called him a friend.

  Chief Peters frowned. He had that posture she hated, that of an arrogant man who was convinced he was right. And seeing him step up to a man like Travis, who’d taken down more criminal operations and stopped more vile offenders than Chief Peters could even imagine, galled something inside her. Then a new thought hit her straight between the eyes. The old Travis she’d worked with and known wouldn’t have stood for being disrespected. He’d have gotten into Chief Peters’s face. He’d have seethed. He’d have let his irritation show. But this Travis, standing there with a baby, was calm, his expression showing nothing more than a polite and clearly exasperated smile.

  “Again,” Travis said, “why is my buddy in handcuffs?”

  “He was walking around inside the store,” Chief Peters said. “At the very least, he was aware of an active crime scene and made no attempt to call the police.”

  “I gave him a key,” Travis said.

  “I don’t think he used a key,” Chief Peters said.

  “Because the door was already ajar,” Seth said, “as somebody else had already broken in.” He glanced at Travis. “I quickly ran through to assess what had happened before calling you. For the record, the store’s been trashed, but your apartment wasn’t broken into.”

  Because whatever the intruder was looking for wasn’t there? Jess wondered.

  “Then this guy showed up,” Seth said. “I told him I was your friend, but he practically already had one cuff on me before he let me call you.”

  Travis shook his head. “Come on, you know this isn’t necessary. I can vouch for him.”

  “I ran his file.” Chief Peters went for his handcuffs, slowly. “At least someone knows how to stay within the limits and keep himself out of trouble.”

  Travis wasn’t sure what kind of false identity witness protection had created for Seth, but the idea the hacker’s file was squeaky clean was funny.

  “And I know what’s in yours, just so we’re clear,” the chief added, a bite to his tone. Jess didn’t know what he meant, but Travis had said the chief liked to remind him of that. “Rumor has it this guy’s sister left you at the altar.”

  “Well, you know how it is with gossip,” Travis said. “Most of it is hogwash.”

  Jess stepped away and left the men to argue as Chief Peters removed Seth’s handcuffs. She had no doubt that Travis was about to win the argument, once the district police chief had done as much posturing as he felt he could get away with. The question was why the tension between the two men existed in the first place. But for whatever reason, Willow definitely didn’t need to hear it.

  She glanced through the store window. Seth hadn’t been joking when he’s said it was trashed. It looked like someone had yanked every single book off every shelf, display and surface, until the floor was nothing but a mound of paperbacks. Furniture had been knocked over and even the sweets and coffee counter looked like it had been riffled through. It would take hours to put everything back on the shelves.

  Instinctively, she swung Willow around and moved her away from the window. But even as she did so, she knew she was too late.

  “Jess.” Willow’s voice was in her ear in a horrified whisper. “Somebody threw all the books on the floor.”

  “I know, kiddo,” Jess said.

  The little girl’s eyes grew wide. “Who would do such a thing?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “Books are very special,” Willow said. “My teacher tol’ me so.” Then suddenly Jess felt her try to wriggle from her grasp. “Seth!”

  Jess barely had time to set her down before she took off running toward Seth as he ambled handcuff-free toward them. The hacker scooped her up into his arms and hugged her. Jess backed even further away from the crowd and then into the side alley between the bookstore and bakery where hopefully no one could hear them.

  “Well, that was fun,” Seth said. “I can’t believe he actually ran me through the system. Thankfully, whoever at RCMP created my file did a bang-up job and that was even before I enhanced it. Now, here’s the interesting part. I got a hit on the address where our s-h-i-n-y friend had his supplies delivered. No owner listed on the property, but it’s only about thirty minutes from here.”

  She thanked God. They actually had a break.

  “Don’t do spelling!” Willow said sternly. “I don’t like it.” She frowned. “I need to go to school.”

  A door slammed at the end of the alley. Jess spun back. The slender form of Cleo Mitchell was walking toward them. The baker’s daughter’s shoulders were hunched, her arms wrapped protectively around her body.

  Jess had worked enough investigations to read the woman in a glance. Cleo was terrified, with that specific type of fear that meant she at least partially blamed herself for whatever frightened her. And while Jess’s detective brain knew the young woman was a potential witness to last night’s Shiny Man attack, something lurched in Jess’s chest to remember what Travis had told her about how Cleo’s ex-boyfriend had terrorized her.

  Jess smiled warmly and stretched out her hand.

  “You’re Cleo, right?” she asked. “I saw you getting into the ambulance with Patricia yesterday. I’m Travis’s friend, Jess, and this is my brother Seth.”

  Cleo took her hand awkwardly and, due to the angle of their arms, Jess ended up just squeezing her fingers before dropping her hand.

  “I saw you at the store last night, right?” Cleo asked. “My dad said that somebody broke in and trashed the place.”

  Well, that hadn’t been the reason Jess had been there in the middle of the night, but both facts were true. “Yes,” Jess said. “Did you see someone on the fire escape last night?”

  Cleo nodded. “Did he scare you? Or attack you?”

  “He did,” Jess admitted. “But I was okay. Why? Did he hurt you, too?”

  Cleo’s shoulders shook.

  “I know who it was,” she said softly. “It was my ex-boyfriend. Braden Garrett.”

  * * *

  Moments later Jess stood with Travis, Cleo and the police chief in the alley between the stores while Seth watched the kids a discrete distance away.

  “Braden has been trying to get me to talk to him,” Cleo said. “He contacted me on all my social media sites, texted me and keeps calling and calling me until I give up and answer.”

  “What does he want?” Travis asked gently.

  Jess noticed the chief’s back stiffen slightly. She found herself checking the police chief’s wrists for injury but couldn’t see them under the uniform.

  “Sometimes he tells me he’s not a bad guy,” Cleo said. “He gets really angry at everyone he thinks wronged him and says that he’s going to make them pay. He mentioned Patricia especially, because he’s still mad she pulled a gun on him that one time and told him to leave me alone.”

  Jess met Travis’s eyes and watched as his brows rose.

  “He misses me and wants me back,” Cleo added. “He’s says going to come into some money soon. He also said he’d do something really bad if I didn’t ta
ke him back.”

  “Like what?” Travis asked.

  This time Peters sent Travis a warning glance. And Jess fought the urge to remind Travis it was no longer his job to question witnesses.

  “It’s okay, Cleo,” the police chief said gently before Cleo could answer Travis. “We can talk about this down at the station and I’ll get you a Victims Services counselor to talk to if you want. You can file a report against Braden, we’ll put out a warrant for his arrest and we can get a protective order against him.”

  Otherwise known as a restraining order. While definitely an important tool in protecting people against harassment, somehow Jess doubted this situation was as simple as an old boyfriend stalking an ex. She took a deep breath. The Shiny Man had explicitly told Jess not to go to police. But isn’t that what a normal and scared non-cop civilian would do if she discovered another woman was being stalked by the same man who’d frightened her?

  “Tell him about the man in the mask we saw on the fire escape last night,” Jess blurted.

  Chief Peters’s eyes spun toward her just like she knew they would. “What man?”

  “I saw a man in a construction worker’s outfit and mask watching me,” Cleo said. “Just standing outside between the bakery and bookstore, like he was stalking me. It had to be Braden. He said he’d been watching me.”

  “We both saw him on the bookstore fire escape last night,” Jess interjected quickly. “He had this really scary mask on that made him look like a bug-man.”

  “It’s a ventilation mask they use in building to protect against fumes,” Cleo explained. “Braden used to work construction.”

  “He startled me when I was walking in the woods last night outside Patricia’s home, too, and demanded to know who I was,” Jess said. “Guess he figured I was a friend of hers. He ran off when he heard Travis coming. He told me not to tell police.”

  “Stop.” Chief Peters stepped between them and held up his hands. “Not another word about this. You have to stop comparing stories. Otherwise you’ll risk muddying each other’s statements.” He turned to her. “Miss... Jess... I am sorry you went through this, I would be very happy to talk to you down at the station, if you want to file a report and see about getting any help you need. But I have to talk to you and Cleo separately.” He glanced at Travis and the look in his eyes grew firmer. “I need to ask you to respect me on that and not try to get involved in this.”

  Jess watched as something sharpened in Travis’s stance. A frown crossed his face and spread to his eyes. Her old partner wanted to dig his heels in and argue. He wanted to question Cleo, and she didn’t blame him. Jess slid her hand onto his arm and tugged gently. For a briefest moment, he didn’t move, then Travis followed her away from the chief of police and Cleo.

  “We’re running a parallel investigation,” Jess said softly as soon as she was sure they were out of anyone’s earshot, “and not interfering with local police. I want to question Cleo, too. But we have to let Chief Peters help her now and it’s a good sign he’s suggesting a protective order. Meanwhile, Seth has discovered a potential lead on an address outside the city where the Shiny Man could’ve gotten his equipment delivered. Seth’s also having a duplicate of everything the Shiny Man ordered couriered to him.”

  Travis let out a long breath, but the tension in his body didn’t abate any. “I don’t know how we’re going to figure out what’s going on, while still maintaining our covers and protecting the kids.”

  She knew the feeling. And while the idea that the baker’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend was stalking those who’d wronged him definitely made a lot of sense, Jess still felt like there were still some major pieces of the puzzle she was missing.

  “Our top priority has to be getting the kids away from all this and somewhere safe,” she said. “We can’t be investigating Shiny Man or hanging around crime scenes with them. Seth’s run the schematic on Kilpatrick’s civic center and it’s as safe a place as we’re going to get. What if Seth stays there and watches the kids while we go check out the location?”

  She waited a moment while she watched Travis close his eyes and pray.

  “I don’t like it,” he said finally. “But I think it’s the best of all the bad ideas.”

  When they joined Seth and Willow back at the truck, the little girl’s anxiety dropped immediately when Travis told her he was taking her and Dominic to school.

  Kilpatrick Public School only went up to grade six and was housed in a wing of the city center that also included a library, municipal offices, a recreational center, hockey rink and small auditorium. There were guards on the main door, metal detectors, a buzz-in system that meant everyone entering the building had to check in at the front desk, and a wealth of internal security cameras. Not the kind of place anyone could smuggle a gun or even a flashlight into easily.

  Dominic’s preschool nursery and Willow’s kindergarten classes were part of a large open-concept area attached to an atrium, with benches, tables, chairs and large, leafy plants. Most important, there were huge glass windows that looked into both kids’ rooms, so that parents who worked in the building could easily pop by to check on their kids without disrupting class.

  Seth positioned himself at a round table that faced both rooms at once, while Travis dropped off the kids. He also confirmed with internal security that no one was to pick up the kids, under any circumstances, but him, Jess or Seth.

  “Right,” the hacker said when Travis got back to the table and filled them in. “I’ve run all the people you gave me. Braden Garrett’s definitely a bad apple. He’s got a wonderful string of arrests to his name, mostly for petty crimes, theft and making an unpleasant nuisance of himself. No proof he’s the Shiny Man, though, but nothing that rules him out. Cleo has one citation for minor drugs, a couple of years ago, that she claimed were Braden’s.”

  “Interesting,” Jess said.

  “Tracking down all of the major arrests Patricia’s family members made is taking some time,” Seth added, “but I’ll get there. Harris Mitchell has a temper. He was charged with punching man in a bar when he was younger. Now he just makes a lot of complaints to the city’s bylaw office that go nowhere and threatens a lot of lawsuits he doesn’t file. Chief Peters has a couple of marks on his early career for sloppy police work, but nothing in well over a decade.”

  Travis’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been busy.”

  “It’s what I do.” Seth grinned. “I’ve also run both kindergarten teachers, the three preschool teachers and all four teacher’s aids. All are clean and all are long-term Kilpatrick residents. Except our kindergarten teacher, Alvin Walker. The only crime he’s committed is being way too whiny on social media about the fact that he couldn’t afford the tuition to take this fancy master’s degree program he was accepted into at Queen’s University...

  “Now, here’s the cool thing.” Seth held up his phone. A white map and a beige map shared the screen. A small red dot blinked on one map and a small blue dot blinked on the other.

  “Willow and Dominic are wearing GPS-tracker anklets inside their socks and shoes,” Seth continued. “Very discreet and pretty impossible to remove if you don’t know how the fastening system works. It automatically sends me an alert if the child suffers any sudden jolt, like being grabbed or falling. And it means that there’s no way either child is moving without my knowing exactly where they’re going.”

  Seth took a deep breath and let it out theatrically.

  “Finally,” he said, “I’ve got Liam on standby, monitoring all the same things I am. He’s also confirmed that he’s now got a man undercover at the hospital with eyes on Patricia, and another undercover buddy nearby on call in case we need emergency backup.”

  Jess was thankful for Liam’s help.

  “Everything is as covered as it can be.” Seth glanced at Travis. “Look, I know you hate leaving the kids anywhere. But as the guy who’
s guarding them, I can say with a hundred percent confidence that they’re safer and better monitored here than they would be anywhere else in Kilpatrick.”

  “Thanks,” Travis said.

  Jess could practically see his heartstrings tearing.

  She reached over and squeezed his fingers. “Hey,” she said. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll be back before you know it.”

  “And nothing will make me happier than just sitting here and mucking about online until you return,” Seth said. “Trust me. You have no idea how much I’ve missed just sitting in front of a screen.”

  They started for the front door but hadn’t made it ten steps before the sound of a voice calling them made them stop and turn.

  “Hey!” Alvin was striding toward them across the atrium. “I’m glad I caught you. Willow said somebody broke into the bookstore and threw all the books on the floor?”

  Jess pressed his lips together as her mind spun through every conversation she’d had with the little girl or in front of her, praying that none of them had accidentally leaked anything important she could repeat.

  “There was a break-in at the bookstore,” Travis said. “Chief Peters is working on it.”

  “Have you talked to Cleo today?” Jess asked.

  Alvin glanced at her, his eyes lingering on her face for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, I saw you yesterday in all the chaos, and know who you are, but I don’t think we’ve ever properly met.” The teacher stretched out his hand for Jess’s. She took it and they shook hands. “And no, I haven’t talked to Cleo today. She sent me a few texts, but I haven’t checked them yet because I was at work. We’re not really...” He ran his hand through his hair. “I know people in this town think that Cleo and I are an item. But it’s not serious. I went through a rough breakup recently, and I’m not really in a place right now where I’m ready to give my heart away until I’m sure it’s right. Why? Is she okay?”

  Jess could almost feel the air temperature drop as Travis took in a sharp breath. But all she said was, “I think you should call her.” They turned to go. “It was nice to meet you.”