Battle Tested

by Janie Crouch

  Did she need more food than that? Was she taking care of herself? Had she been seeing a doctor throughout her pregnancy to make sure everything was okay?

  Was the baby honestly his? They had used protection. But he knew accidents still happened.

  He wanted to believe her when she’d said yes. She’d taken off her jacket and he could more clearly see the outline of her stomach under the T-shirt she wore. There was very definitely a baby bump. Not one that had her waddling or anything like that, but very definitely pregnant. Someone as petite as Rosalyn couldn’t hide it.

  He wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about her pregnancy but had so many other questions to ask that those got pushed to the back burner.

  Steve sorted through important information for a living, made decisions on where Omega’s Critical Response team would go and what they would do, based on his reading of a situation. Knowing what questions to ask to get the information he needed was his job. And lives depended on his ability to do it well.

  But damned if he knew where to start with Rosalyn.

  The dead body seemed the most reasonable place.

  “So the woman I identified in the morgue—”

  “Like I said, my identical twin, Lindsey Rose Mellinger. My mom—in a fit of soberness—thought it was quite clever.”

  Rosalyn and Lindsey Rose. “The reversal of each other. Well, almost.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. And it ended up being true in just about everything. We were twins, but we were complete opposites. Very different from each other except for how we looked.”

  “When was the last time you saw your sister alive?”

  Tears came to Rosalyn’s eyes, but she brushed them away. “At least a year and a half ago. We’ve never been close but grew even further apart as adults. Lindsey was in and out of drug rehab all the time. She still lived in Mobile.”

  “And that’s where you’re from?” Steve already knew the answer to that but wondered if she would lie.

  “Yes, but I haven’t lived there for nearly a year.”

  Steve wondered where she’d been for the past six months, but he’d get to that.

  “Do you know anything about your sister’s death?”

  She shook her head. “No, but she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  This time the tears overflowed before Rosalyn could wipe them away. “Lindsey was in Pensacola because I asked her to meet me. We were supposed to meet at a restaurant a few blocks from here two days ago, but she never showed up.”

  She gave him the name and address of a local café. Lindsey’s body had been found inside her car very close to that area.

  “Lindsey’s pretty flighty,” Rosalyn continued. “I thought she’d just gotten the day or time wrong. Or that she was high again. I didn’t know she was dead until a waiter showed me a tiny section of the local paper that stated the police were looking for information about a deceased Jane Doe who looked exactly like me.”

  Rosalyn stood up and grabbed a tissue from the box on the small desk. “I was coming by this afternoon to identify the body when I saw you.”

  “You said she did drugs a lot, so what makes you think she was murdered? Don’t you think it’s more likely something happened with her drug abuse?”

  “Normally, yes.” She sat back down. “But I suspect foul play because she was meeting me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Rosalyn’s blue eyes bore into him. “You saw her body, right?”

  Steve nodded.

  “I’ll answer your questions, I promise. But first please tell me, was she murdered?”

  Steve couldn’t see any good in lying to her. “Yes, I’m sorry. She was strangled in her car.”

  Rosalyn began to cry quietly, holding her face in her hands. Steve moved to sit next to her. No matter what had happened between the two of them, he would never deny comfort to someone who had lost a family member.

  “I had hoped you would tell me something different. That it was related to drugs,” she finally said.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t think it would’ve been.” In Steve’s experience, when regular people heard a family member had died, they did not assume it was murder. And if Lindsey had been involved in illegal drugs, Steve didn’t know why Rosalyn didn’t assume the murder wasn’t centered around that.

  Because Rosalyn knew something. Something she wasn’t telling him.

  “Rosalyn.” He tilted a finger under her chin so she was looking directly at him. “Tell me. Whatever is going on, I need you to tell me.”

  She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her.

  “I can’t.” Another tear slid silently down her cheek. “I can’t risk you too.”

  Steve stared at the tiny woman—tiny, pregnant woman—determined to protect him. Why would she care about him if he was just someone she had scammed and robbed? Either way, he was getting to the bottom of all this.

  “I can take care of myself, Rosalyn. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  At first he didn’t think she was going to answer, but finally she did.

  “For the past year someone has been stalking me.”

  Steve sat up straighter. “Stalking you how?”

  “Mostly he leaves notes. Ones he slides under my door while I’m sleeping at night.” She shuddered. “Although on occasion he has emailed, texted or called me.”

  He’d been in law enforcement long enough to take stalkers very seriously. Especially ones who were close enough to leave notes under doors. That meant they were close and probably deadly. “What types of messages?”

  “Never anything threatening. Not even ‘We’ll be together forever’ stuff. Usually just little comments about something that has happened in my day.”

  Odd for a stalker, making it about her rather than about him. Stalkers were usually caught up in their own fantasy world and tried to make their victims a part of that.

  “And you reported it?”

  “Yes. I told my family first about a year ago. They just accused me of wanting attention. I decided to move across town, just to get rid of the weirdo, hoping that would stop it all.”

  “But it didn’t?”

  “The first night I moved into my new apartment, someone slid a note under my door.”

  Steve frowned. The guy had been following her closely. “Did you go to the local police?”

  “Yes, I talked to them in Mobile, but I had thrown a lot of the letters away, so they didn’t believe it was anyone wishing to do me harm.”

  It was easy to be frustrated with the Mobile police for doing nothing to help Rosalyn, but the truth was, funds were always limited in local departments. If the notes weren’t threatening Rosalyn in any way, it would be easy to not give them or her much attention.

  She stood up and began walking back and forth.

  “It got so bad that after about a month I chose to just leave town. I had a pretty big savings account, so I quit my job and decided to go somewhere different. Anywhere different. I didn’t have a moving truck, didn’t grab a bunch of suitcases—I just got in my car one morning and left.”

  She stopped walking for a minute.

  “I ended up in Dallas. Thought it would be a cool town to vacation in while I was losing my annoying little follower. Thought I had done it too, until the second night. Another note under my door mentioning the crème brûlée I had eaten at dinner.”

  She wasn’t looking at him, but he could hear the fear in her voice.

  “I left just minutes later. Drove all around to make sure no one was following me. Ended up in Shreveport. I went straight to the police station.”

  It wasn’t the best of plans, since nothing had happened in their jurisdiction, but Steve didn’t tell Ros
alyn that. She would’ve been better off going to the Dallas police.

  But a note that mentioned a dessert probably wouldn’t have been taken seriously there either.

  “Nobody wanted to listen to me, but this one detective, Johnson, offered to meet me after he got off his shift. I told him everything, and he helped me. Or he tried.”

  “What did he do?”

  She began rubbing her hands on her legs, a nervous gesture he didn’t think she was aware of.

  “I showed him what notes I had kept. He told me to keep them all, and any I got from now on, in a box. And he gave me a notebook and showed me how to keep track of everything that the Watcher did.”

  He reached over and grabbed her hands so she would stop the rubbing. “The Watcher?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I call him. I’ve kept everything since Detective Johnson showed me what to do.”

  “And did he do anything with it? Did it go any further?”

  “Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack the next day.”

  Steve’s head snapped up. “Was he old?”

  “Maybe fifty. And in pretty good shape.”

  “That’s a damn unfortunate coincidence.” And probably a devastating blow for Rosalyn, to have found someone who wanted to help, then died.

  “I thought so too until I got an anonymous email the next day about a drug that caused heart attacks.”

  “What?”

  “The Watcher killed Detective Johnson. He’s killed everyone I’ve told about him. I’m afraid you’ll be next.”

  Chapter Seven

  Steve didn’t believe her.

  He wasn’t overt in his disbelief, didn’t mock her or anything like that. But she could tell he didn’t think the Watcher was actually a credible threat. He thought Detective Johnson, a fifty-year-old policeman, had died of a heart attack.

  It certainly happened all the time. Police work was stressful.

  Her sister was also dead, but she’d been a drug addict. That happened all the time too.

  She didn’t tell him about Shawn, the mechanic, who’d also died after she’d told him about the Watcher. Because she could already tell Steve thought she was exaggerating.

  She’d recognized the placating look. The attempt to figure out how to convince her of reason without offending her. He didn’t want to add to her stress, but he also didn’t think there was anything sinister to her story.

  Not to mention he was still pretty shocked about her reappearance and pregnancy. So she should probably cut him a little slack.

  She hadn’t planned to drag him into this. Because whether he wanted to believe her or not, she knew it was true: the Watcher would try to kill him next.

  Rosalyn wanted to run, to try to keep Steve safe. But she couldn’t anymore. She had to face the fact that soon it wouldn’t just be her. She’d have the baby. She couldn’t go back on the run with a child in tow.

  She’d had six months of relative peace. Although she’d lived in fear every single night of the Watcher contacting her, he hadn’t. Rosalyn didn’t know why. She’d thought he’d given up, decided to leave her alone.

  She’d made a huge error, she realized now, contacting her sister. It had not only cost Lindsey her life, but put Rosalyn back on the Watcher’s radar.

  She knew she wouldn’t escape him again. Not without help.

  Steve turned to her. “Look, let’s just sleep on everything tonight. We can discuss this more in the morning.”

  She nodded. Maybe if she showed him the notes, he’d take her more seriously. Plus, she knew the questioning was nowhere near done on either side.

  He was a cop and had deliberately withheld that information from her. She wasn’t mad, but it changed some things. Maybe he could help protect her from the Watcher.

  Of course, Detective Johnson had been in law enforcement too, and the Watcher had killed him. But that had been before she had realized how far the Watcher would go. Until Johnson’s death Rosalyn had assumed only she would be his victim. She knew better now. When they met tomorrow, she would have to make sure Steve understood the danger he was in.

  “Okay, what time do you want to meet tomorrow?”

  Steve looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “I’m not leaving you here. You’re coming with me.”

  She hadn’t been expecting that. “Why?”

  “Multiple reasons. One, I don’t trust that you’re not going to be gone again in the morning.”

  Rosalyn felt her face heat but didn’t say anything.

  “Two, by your very own account you have a stalker and possibly a murderer after you. I’m not sure what all the facts are in this case, but I intend to find out. You can believe I won’t be leaving you alone as I do it, especially not if you’re carrying my child.”

  Rosalyn felt relief wash through her. Steve might not believe her completely but at least he was willing to look into it. And help protect her and the baby.

  “Now, I will stay in this fleabag motel if you really insist on remaining here. But I would prefer we go to my hotel.” He glanced around in distaste, then looked straight at her. “Either way, you can plan on spending tonight—every night until we figure out this stalker situation and the baby is born—with me.”

  He obviously didn’t necessarily believe the baby was his, but at least he was willing to try to keep Rosalyn safe until he knew for sure. She wasn’t sure whether to be thankful or offended.

  But to stay here when he had a nicer place would just be foolish.

  “Okay. Just let me get my stuff.”

  He took her duffel bag and walked her to her car. He took the key from her and put her bag in the trunk. “Have you been going from town to town for the last six months?”

  Rosalyn bit her lip. Telling him the truth, that the Watcher hadn’t contacted her since she’d last been in Pensacola, wasn’t going to help him believe her about how dangerous her stalker was.

  She didn’t know why the Watcher hadn’t contacted her while she’d been hidden at the Ammonses’ home in Georgia, had lived in constant fear that he would, but she’d been thankful for the reprieve.

  “Let me go pay for the room. You stay here,” he said.

  “No, I’ll pay. I can afford it.”

  One of his eyebrows raised. “I don’t even want to know how you got the money.”

  “I didn’t steal it, all right? That was a one-time thing and only because I was desperate.”

  He still didn’t look like he believed it.

  “You stay here with the car and I’ll go pay.” She gave him the evilest glare she could.

  Which only made him smile. “Fine, you pay. I’ll be here.”

  The motel office was at the other end of the parking lot, close to the main street. Rosalyn was aware she was marching off in a huff and had neither the size nor stature to pull that off with any authority, especially when she looked like she’d swallowed half a basketball. She knew Steve was probably laughing at her, but she didn’t care.

  At least if he was laughing at her, he wasn’t threatening to arrest her. Not that she really thought he planned to.

  She went inside and paid her bill, a little mad that they still charged her for two nights even though she’d stayed only one. Regardless, she wasn’t going to let Steve pay. At least the extra cost didn’t cause her the panic it once would have, since she now had some money saved up from being able to work the last six months. She signed the paperwork, paid her bill and walked back out the door toward her car.

  “I’ll pay you back all that money, you know,” she called out, moving directly toward him.

  He walked toward her. “It’s not necessary to pay me back. You can—”

  Rosalyn heard the roar of an engine and turned. A car, headlights off, was screeching toward her, swervi
ng back and forth.

  “Hey, look out!” someone yelled from a second-floor walkway.

  Rosalyn couldn’t figure out which way to move to get out of the car’s oncoming path. All she knew was that it was going to hit her.

  She was still frozen in place, certain of her own demise, when a huge force hit her from the side.

  Steve.

  He pulled her to his chest and continued their momentum out of the car’s direct path, somehow managing to spin them so he took the weight of the fall.

  Both of them covered her belly with their arms.

  They were on the ground for only a split second before Steve jumped back up to his feet. He pulled his gun from the holster and pointed it at the car.

  But the driver put the car in Reverse and began speeding at Steve. The vehicle hit him and knocked him backward.

  “Steve!” Rosalyn screamed from where she lay on the ground.

  He sat up and got one shot off, but when the car sped toward him again, he had to stop and roll to the side out of the way. He began firing again.

  Rosalyn scooted herself back, unsure what the car would do. But thankfully, it sped off.

  Steve ran over to her and placed his hands over hers on her stomach. “Are you okay? I’m sorry I hit you so hard.”

  Her heart was still racing but she didn’t think she was injured. “Better you than the car. I’m fine. And I’m pretty sure the baby is okay. You took the brunt of the fall.”

  The manager ran out of the office. “Oh my gosh, are you guys all right? I just called 911. That guy had to have been drunk.”

  Two other people ran out from the building. “We saw the whole thing. Did anybody get the license plate?”

  They all began to talk over each other.

  Rosalyn tuned them out and started to stand up, but Steve’s hands kept her gently on the ground. “Just stay there, okay? There’s an ambulance coming. Let’s just be safe and wait.”