Riverbend Road

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “We like it,” she said shortly. “Thanks for your call. You’ll hear from us.”

  She basically hung up on the man then stared into space. What was Andie mixed up in? And what did this Detective Robert Warren have to do with it?

  On impulse, she went to the first line of investigation and Googled him. From the first few links, she was able to get an image of a man younger than she might have expected, maybe late thirties. He appeared to be highly decorated, with several citations she found listed on an online bio.

  Maybe she was crazy to be on edge about the phone call and to think that he was somehow connected to Andrea’s edginess when she first came to Haven Point.

  There was a chance her instincts were totally out of whack. Maybe Andie had committed some heinous crime in Portland and was on the run here. She had a hard time reconciling that idea with the woman she had come to know, but it wasn’t the first time that day she had come to question her own judgments.

  She had to get the story from Andrea and figure out a way to talk to her friend when she couldn’t evade the questions.

  She closed the last file just as Cade came back. “Did you get things sorted at the marina?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Two brothers fighting over whose turn it was this week to drive the boat they went in on together. I’m guessing they’re now rethinking that particular business decision and will likely end up selling the thing.”

  He glanced down at her desk before she could hide the notebook where she’d jotted down information during her phone call. “Detective Robert Warren from the Portland PD. What did he need?”

  She couldn’t possibly tell him his neighbor across the street was a person of interest in an as-yet-undetermined investigation. Not until she had a chance to speak with Andie herself.

  “Just an ATL. When he sends me the particulars, I’ll pass it along.”

  To her relief, he took that at face value. “Okay. Keep me posted.”

  “I will.”

  “Anything else happen while I was gone?”

  The witness statement she had found was concealed beneath the thick file into her dad’s shooting. Cade, of all people, might be able to shed light on it. He had been there, the other responding officer. It had been his shot that had finally taken out Joseph Barlow during that last, terrible gunfight.

  “Something weird.” Her stomach was suddenly a tangle of nerves, just talking about that day two and a half years earlier. “I was organizing my desk and clearing things out when I found a form that hadn’t been filed under the corresponding case number.”

  He shrugged. “It happens, unfortunately, though things have gotten better since we computerized more paperwork in the last few years. Just put it in the right file.”

  She met his gaze. “It’s a witness report from the Joseph Barlow shooting.”

  He froze like a cougar on prey, his features going completely still. Sudden tension seemed to ripple through the room. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Ronnie Herrera. It’s the weirdest thing. I thought I knew that case inside and out. I read every detail of it. I never knew Ronnie was down at the marina, sleeping in his pickup truck after he and Elena had a fight.”

  He nodded, his mouth in a hard line. “Oh yeah. I’d forgotten that. Yeah. He was there.”

  So why hadn’t she ever read that in the case file?

  “According to his witness report, he says he woke up when he heard shouting and peered out his truck window just as Barlow was cornered at the lake’s edge. He claimed Barlow was the first one down.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WITH EVERY OUNCE of control he’d learned as a boy growing up as Walter Emmett’s son, Cade fought to hide his reaction to her words.

  He couldn’t let her see how rattled he was by her discovery of that witness report. His face felt hot and a slick ball of dread roiled around his insides.

  He wished to God he’d shredded the damn thing after the state police took Ronnie’s statement. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to do that. It was an official report. Instead, he had tucked it away and forgotten about it completely until this moment.

  What an idiot.

  For two and a half years, he had done his best to keep the truth from the Bailey family—or at least from Charlene and Wynona. Marshall knew. They’d talked in the hospital waiting room in the early hours of the morning after the shooting. He hadn’t wanted to but Marshall either suspected something or just knew him well enough to know he was hiding something about that night.

  Marshall reluctantly agreed with him, that nothing good would come of full disclosure, especially not when John was fighting for his life after taking a bullet to the brain.

  The truth would devastate everyone who loved John Bailey. Charlene, Wyn, Katrina, the whole town of Haven Point, who looked at him as a hero.

  Now Wyn was waiting for him to answer, her blue eyes trained on him like a sniper on a target.

  He swallowed hard. “You’ve read the ballistics report. You know it says the round that hit your dad came at him in an upward trajectory, when Barlow was on the ground. You also know your dad got off a wing shot in the firefight.”

  She pulled out the witness report and held it out to him. His gut clenched when he saw her fingers were trembling. “Ronnie Herrera said here that Barlow had his hands up and was just about ready to set his weapon down when the first shot was fired.”

  And there it was. The suspicion that haunted him, that kept him up nights, that made him question everything he thought he knew.

  He remembered one of his trainers at the police academy telling him that any cop who obsessed about choices he’d made—or hadn’t made—in the heat of the moment would eventually turn to booze or drugs or worse.

  He was able to close the file on most of the cases he’d worked over the last decade and a half but not this.

  Never this.

  That didn’t mean she needed to carry the burden too.

  At the same time, he couldn’t lie to her straight up. “Ronnie’s version of events didn’t match the evidence and since he had a blood alcohol level that was twice the legal limit, the state police investigators chose to disregard his statement.”

  He took the statement from her and pointed to the signature of the investigating officer. “See? Right there. They talked to Ronnie and concluded his testimony wasn’t pertinent to the investigation.”

  “Not pertinent.”

  “You know how unreliable eyewitnesses can be. Throw in a dark night and a guy who is drunk and despondent after a fight with his wife and you’re not going to get the straight story.”

  He saw her eyes cloud with doubt. Good.

  “You need to let this go, Wyn. That’s all I’m going to say. The state investigators did their job. And if I never have to talk about that night again, it will be too soon for me.”

  Hoping he’d convinced her, he grabbed the statement and carried it into his office, where he shut the door carefully and sat at his desk.

  John Bailey’s desk.

  The man Cade had loved and respected above all others.

  He closed his eyes, the memories of that night as fresh as if he had just lived them.

  The first call that the liquor store had just been robbed at gunpoint, then the report that someone had seen a possible suspect on foot, heading toward the marina. John had been closer and had a head start and called for Cade to back him up.

  Like most stories, though, that wasn’t the beginning. To see the full picture, one had to step back and see what had preceded that night.

  John had been behaving strangely for days leading up to the incident. Longer, if Cade really stopped to look at small details. He would forget where he left his keys, stop talking in the middle of a conversation to search for an easy word like sandwich, become dis
tracted by the strangest, most inconsequential things.

  Something was wrong. In another man, Cade might have blamed substance abuse but John abstained from all but a glass of wine at the holidays. He suspected a physical or mental condition—possibly early-onset dementia, though he would never be able to prove it.

  He only knew he had concerns her father wasn’t fit for duty—concerns he had done nothing about.

  That was the burden he would always carry.

  He hadn’t seen the actual shoot-out with Barlow so he couldn’t ever be sure what had actually happened. He only knew what he had heard.

  John yelling for Barlow to put down his weapon.

  Barlow responding, “Okay, okay. It’s going down. See?”

  Then a barrage of shots. By the time Cade rounded the corner seconds later, John was down. Cade had yelled at Barlow to put down his weapon but the man continued firing, leaving Cade no choice but to fire back and take him out.

  Had John truly fired on a man who was trying to surrender? Or had Barlow only been pretending to lay down his weapon, before he came up shooting? The only two men who knew the truth to that were both dead.

  Cade only knew that if he had witnessed the encounter from the beginning and if John had fired on a surrendering man, Cade wouldn’t have been truly surprised, given John’s poor decision-making in the days leading up to the shooting.

  He should never have been in uniform.

  Could he tell Wyn the truth? All of it? About John’s odd behavior, about his suspicions?

  She believed her father was the sort of larger-than-life lawman who would do no wrong. She believed John Bailey was a true hero who gave his life to protect his little town.

  How could he uproot that idea and plant seeds of doubt in its place? He couldn’t. Cade loved her too much to take that away from her.

  * * *

  HAVEN POINT WAS enjoying a beautiful evening—the warmest temperatures of the year so far. As Wynona drove home after her tumultuous day, it seemed everyone was enjoying the summer night except her. The lake seemed packed with watercraft of every sort—powerboats, kayaks, canoes, even stand-up paddleboards.

  This was the sort of evening the Lake Haven tourist bureau loved. She waved at her neighbors, Herm and Louise Jacobs, who were each walking with gelato cones from Carmela’s in one hand and holding hands with the other. She got a gelato-cone wave in return from each of them and she found it rather sweet that they didn’t want to drop hands even to wave back at her.

  Despite the tranquillity of the scene, her thoughts hadn’t stopped racing all afternoon. Between the phone call from the Portland detective about Andie and that puzzling, incongruous witness report she stumbled onto, she had plenty to stew about.

  Had Ronnie really been too loaded to be sure of what he saw? Yes, Cade was right. Eyewitness reports were the least reliable kind of evidence. She might have dismissed it completely, if not for Cade’s reaction when she’d shown it to him. He looked almost...guilty.

  What was he hiding?

  She had thought before that she didn’t know the entire story about what happened the night her father was shot. A piece of the puzzle was missing, she’d always believed so. Perhaps it had something to do with that witness report.

  She ought to swing by Ronnie’s place and ask him. He worked for the gas company and was probably off shift by now.

  Ronnie, she knew, lived in Sulfur Hollow, not far from the ramshackle house where Cade had grown up. She could be there in a second. She hit her turn signal and tapped her brake as she approached the road. At the last minute, she lifted her foot from the brake and thumbed the turn signal off.

  The past wasn’t going anywhere. It could wait.

  Meanwhile, she had problems to deal with in the now. She needed to talk to Andie about that unsettling phone call from Detective Warren first.

  As she turned onto Riverbend Road, she had to slow down for a couple of kids playing soccer in the street. Out of habit, she waved at them, then at another neighbor mowing his lawn.

  When she passed Andie’s house and saw her out front with her children, working in the flower garden, she waved but didn’t stop. Not yet. Some instinct urged her to think the conversation might go better if she changed out of her uniform into civilian clothes before asking about the phone call from the smarmy detective.

  They were friends. She didn’t want Andie believing she was visiting in an official capacity.

  She hated thinking she might be risking the ruin of their new friendship. She couldn’t help thinking about how skittish Andie had been that first day they met, especially after Wyn told her she was a police officer.

  She remembered the stark, white face, the fear in her eyes.

  Wyn didn’t want to do anything that might bring back that fear but she was very much afraid mentioning Robert Warren might do the trick.

  Cade wasn’t home yet, she saw across the street—at least his vehicle wasn’t in the driveway. That didn’t really surprise her, since he had been holed up in his office when she left, where he’d retreated after she’d asked him about that witness report.

  When she reached her house, Young Pete greeted her with all the energy of his misnomer.

  She smiled and scratched his ears. “How was your day? Did you keep all the nasty cats and squirrels out of the yard?”

  He barked an agreement and she had to smile, despite the craziness of her day. “That’s my good dude. You’re my hero.”

  She petted him for several moments, in dire need of the calm perspective he always provided.

  How would he adapt to living in Boise for the immediate future? Finding a rental close to campus that allowed dogs might be a struggle.

  She would figure it out. She was ready for the next stage of her life. Somehow it didn’t seem so overwhelming when she considered that at least she would have Pete along for the ride.

  After she changed quickly into a T-shirt and shorts, she grabbed the dog’s leash and her little pack filled with treats and balls off the hook by the door. Pete could be a good distraction for the children. They would enjoy a visit with him, which might give her a better chance to talk to Andrea.

  On impulse, she picked up her gardening gloves and shoved them in her pocket. She’d noticed before that when she worked alongside people, they were often more willing to open up to her—to ask her questions, confide secrets or simply to talk.

  Pete trotted outside, tongue lolling with eagerness. On their short walk down the street, he sniffed at every mailbox they passed, every crack in the sidewalk, every tuft of grass.

  Andie was still outside with her children but they had moved to another planting bed along the side of her house. Will was the first to notice her and her dog.

  “Pete!” he exclaimed, his adorable features lighting up with glee. With none of the apprehension he had shown earlier in their acquaintance, he hurried over to Pete and threw his arms around the dog’s neck.

  “Hi, Pete.” Chloe hurried over to get her own doggy hugs in.

  “Hey, you two. Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Andie said.

  “Nothing prettier than a Haven Point summer evening. I thought you might need some help.” She held up the gardening gloves.

  Andie shaded her eyes with her hand. “Are you kidding me? You must have known I was at the end of my rope. For every weed I pull, it seems like three more grow in its place.”

  “With both of us fighting them, we might stand a chance,” Wyn said, forcing a smile. “Where would you like me?”

  “I just started in this bed. If you work on that side and come this way, we can meet in the middle.”

  “Good plan. I forgot a trowel. Do you have an extra?”

  Andie produced one from the bucket nearby and for several moments, they worked in a companionable silence while the ch
ildren played fetch with an enthusiastic Pete. One good thing about a golden Lab—he never got tired of fetch.

  When she was sure the children were on the other side of the yard, she finally addressed the questions racing through her mind.

  “I didn’t actually come here to weed,” she confessed. “I needed to talk to you and I guess I was just looking for an excuse.”

  “You know you can talk to me anytime but I would be stupid to argue. Anytime you want to use weeding my flower gardens as an excuse, be my guest!”

  This was much harder than she expected. She didn’t know where to start, reluctant to take away Andie’s look of rare contentment.

  At the same time, the other woman might be in more trouble than she knew, if Robert Warren had narrowed her location down enough that he had known to call the Haven Point Police Department.

  She sighed and set down the trowel. “I got a phone call a few hours ago at the station. What we call an ATL—Attempt to Locate.”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with most of the police jargon. I helped Jason study for his POST training when we were dating.”

  Her husband, who had drowned trying to save another man’s life. Wynona drew in a breath, hating what she had to do.

  “The detective calling was a Robert Warren from Portland, looking for a person of interest in a case he’s working.”

  Andie stared at her for a full thirty seconds as every trace of color seeped away from her features, then she looked away, blinking rapidly.

  “Oh? What does that have to do with me?” She asked the question in a falsely casual tone, though she was hardly moving her mouth.

  “I think you know the answer to that, don’t you?” Wynona spoke gently.

  Andie started to tremble, so abruptly that the trowel fell from her hand to the dirt. She covered her face with her hands and sank down to the ground as if her body couldn’t support even a kneel.

  Little panicky breaths came out of her and for a moment, Wyn worried she was hyperventilating. She went to her and put an arm around Andie’s shaking shoulders.