“You’ll just stress me out. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She grinned and called out, “Puck!”
She had a fantastic smile, Ezra decided. It lit her face up—like the sun slipping out from behind the clouds. Embarrassed by the strangely fanciful turn of his thoughts, he turned away and studied the movies lining her shelves. She had a hell of a lot of movies, too.
“So, cop. If we do find anything in the woods, not that I’m expecting we will after all that rain, but if we do, what exactly do you plan to do?” Law asked as Lena put Puck outside.
“Depends on what we find,” Ezra said, glancing over his shoulder.
Lena remained by the door, waiting for Puck to finish up his business. While she waited, she angled her head toward Ezra. “You really think you can find anything?”
“No.” Ezra studied the leaden gray sky, wondered if the rest of the rain would hold off or end up drowning them while they were out tramping around under the trees. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t look.”
“Any idea what you’re looking for?”
“Ideally? I’m looking for a woman in distress who would have been screaming at approximately two A.M., two days ago.” Then he shrugged. “But that’s a lot to ask for. I’d settle for anything that just looks … out of place.”
What he found was wet, wet, and more wet.
The rain held off, but that didn’t mean it was anything close to dry under the trees. Rain dripped from the leaves, and water puddled on the ground. Thick columns of mist hung in the air, giving the entire forest a surreal, almost spooky look.
“Any idea how much area the trees cover?”
Lena shook her head. “I don’t. I only hike the area that borders my house. Too far back and there are cliffs. I don’t do cliffs without having somebody with me, which isn’t often around here.” A faint grin tugged at her cheek and she murmured, “Law doesn’t share my love for the great outdoors.”
“I’ve got no problem with the great outdoors. I just have problems with bug bites. Mosquitoes. Poison ivy. Snakes.” Law stopped in his tracks, staring around him, but Ezra had the feeling he wasn’t seeing the trees around him. He looked like he was rummaging through some unseen mental file.
Under his breath, he muttered, shook his head, squinted.
Lena paused, one hand lifted. Automatically, Ezra extended his. Their fingers brushed and she slid her hand up, tucked it into the crook of his elbow. “He talk to himself a lot?” Ezra asked, trying to distract himself. It was either that … or lean in and press his face against the curve of her neck. She smelled good, something light, almost citrusy, but not quite. Female, and sexy. Completely delicious.
Friends, he reminded himself. They were just going to be friends.
Fuck … that smell was killing him. He desperately wanted to find the source of it and just start licking it right off her skin.
“He’s thinking,” Lena said, tilting her head up and grinning. “He doesn’t think in silence well. Give him a minute. If he’s heard the figure, he’ll remember. Sooner or later.”
Law continued to mutter. He paused and shot a glance at Lena. “Who’s the guy who owns the property adjacent to yours? On the western side?”
“Ohlman.” Once Law went back to his muttering, Lena added a mutter of her own, under her breath. “Mean old bastard.”
“Huh?”
“Ohlman. The old man who owns the property along the western border of mine. Technically, I own about thirty percent of the woods. He owns the other seventy percent and he wasn’t happy when I moved in, either. Not that he really wanted anybody living here. He—”
“Five hundred acres,” Law announced, cutting into their conversation.
“Five hundred.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’d been reading up about land surveys and area history a few years ago. The Ohlman property was one I’d checked out—been in his family since before the Civil War.”
“Doesn’t sound like standard reading material for a thriller writer.”
“Was thinking about doing something a little different. Idea didn’t pan out.”
“Um, excuse me. Just one minute.” Lena’s brows winged up. “How did you know about Law’s writing? It took me more than a year to get that out of him,” she interjected.
“He did a run on me,” Law said, scowling.
Ezra snorted. “Hey, don’t look so disgusted. You went and checked up on me, too, remember?”
Now her jaw dropped. “A run? What in the hell …” Comprehension dawned and she snapped her mouth shut. A muscle twitch and for five seconds, she looked like she couldn’t decide if she was going to implode or explode.
Ezra winced as she went with explosion—he couldn’t say he was surprised. Why should she suffer the headache when they were the ones responsible? But man, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Although it would have slipped out sooner or later, right?
“Why in the hell are you two doing runs on each other?”
“I’m a cop,” Ezra said, shrugging. He tucked his hands into his pockets. “It’s just kind of what I do, especially when there’s something weird going on. You’re at the center of it—only makes sense to eliminate those around you. He is around you.”
Lena tugged her tinted lenses off and reached up, pinching the bridge of her nose. He caught a glimpse of pale, pale blue eyes. They sparked with temper and irritation. She might not see, but those eyes expressed emotion just fine, he decided. She slipped the glasses back on and then focused her attention on Law.
“What’s your damned excuse?”
“What, I need a reason to worry about a friend of mine? You go through something majorly fucked up, the local law enforcement doesn’t seem too concerned, but for some reason, some hotshot state cop seems to think there’s a problem? That doesn’t strike you at all strange? How in the hell was I to know he wasn’t the guy who was out there hurting that girl?”
Lena made an exasperated sound. “Oh, for crying out loud.” She turned around.
Behind her back, Law and Ezra exchanged glances.
He suspected they both wanted to come out with something equally mature, like … “See what you did?”
Instead, they just shrugged. Law crossed his arms over his chest.
Ezra hooked his hands in his back pockets and shifted his weight, trying to work some of the tension out of his right leg. Hiking was one thing he hadn’t done much of since his injury and he had a feeling he’d be paying for it later. Paying in a major way. He wondered how many pills were left in that prescription bottle.
Lena turned around. Although her face was smooth and expressionless, he could tell she was still pissed. She didn’t burn when she was angry—no, she went straight to ice. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Why in the hell did he find that so damned appealing?
“I’m trying to decide which I find more insulting … that a friend gets it into his head to use his connections to investigate somebody who is doing me a favor, or that a cop is investigating a friend of mine, just for being a friend of mine,” she said, her voice flat and level.
Law said nothing.
As Lena’s face angled toward his, Ezra scowled. “Hell, like you said, I’m a cop. If there’s something weird going on, then you’re damn straight, I’m going to nose around, and at this point, I’m curious enough that I’m going to nose around whether you want me to or not.”
Lena rubbed her hands together. Her head cocked, her gleaming red hair swept down to brush against her shoulder. “I’m curious, myself. Just why are you so curious, Ezra King? Why in the hell do you care if I heard screams or not? This is a little out of your … what’s the word … jurisdiction. And you’re on leave.”
“Doesn’t matter if I’m on leave or not.” Ezra sighed and rolled his shoulders. It didn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter if this was out of his jurisdiction. He saw a puzzle and he was going to get to the root of it. That was just how he worked. “I’m a cop. It’
s just how I am, Lena. Besides …”
He snapped his mouth shut before he could finish that thought. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to go there just yet.
“Besides what?”
She lifted a brow.
Blood rushed up, staining his cheeks red. Shit. Hunching his shoulders, he turned away, even though it didn’t do a damn bit of good. She couldn’t see him anyway—didn’t keep her from sensing how uncomfortable he was, he had a feeling. And Reilly, damn it, he’d already seen it, and would probably have a laugh or two about it later.
“Besides, what?” Lena persisted.
“This is a small town,” he said, hedging. He could talk his way around it. He didn’t need to get into discussing the fact that he’d already gone and developed a personal concern for her. Even as a friend, he was allowed to have a personal concern, right?
Of course, he knew his personal concern went deeper than friendship and it didn’t matter that they’d only been on one date, that they’d only known each other a few weeks, that they’d already decided to just be friends, right?
She already mattered to him. But he didn’t need to get into that.
No, no reason at all to go into that. “You know how small towns are. The minute you mentioned this to anybody, then everybody knew about it.”
“And your point is …?”
He turned back, watched her face. From the corner of his eye, he also watched Reilly’s face. He’d already figured it out, Ezra realized.
Lena hadn’t, though.
“If somebody was out there, hurting a woman, Lena, then you heard it. That makes you a witness … of sorts. Makes you a liability. And now the whole damn town knows about it. If whoever did it lives here, then he knows about you.”
She was naturally pale, the clear ivory complexion of a natural redhead, and it didn’t seem possible that she could get any paler.
Obviously, he was wrong.
He’d seen corpses with more color than her, and for about five seconds, he had to wonder if she was going to pass out. Through the tinted lenses of her glasses, he could just barely make out the shape of her eyes, could see the way her lashes fluttered, then lowered as she closed her eyes. She took a deep, steadying breath.
“Shit.”
“You hadn’t thought quite that far ahead,” Ezra said.
With a raw, humorless, laugh, Lena said, “You could say that.” Her hand swung out as she swept her skinny, flexible cane across the ground. It brushed against a tree and she made her way over to it, sagged against it as though she couldn’t entirely support her weight just another minute.
“No,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. And I don’t know why. Sergeant Jennings—the one investigating that night—he had mentioned an accident, but even when he said it, I knew that wasn’t it. There was something in her voice, something about the way she was crying for help. It wasn’t an accident. Whatever had been done to her—it had been done intentionally.”
“Accident victims can get pretty traumatized.”
Lena’s mouth twisted in a sad smile. “You probably think I’m being overly dramatic.” She sighed and pushed her glasses on top of her head, rubbed her fingers against her eyes. “Believe it or not, I’m not prone to drama. I’m just not. I’ll leave that to Law. There was just something … something in her voice. I can’t explain it. But it sounded like hell—hell on earth. And … I don’t think she was alone.”
“What do you mean?”
Lena lifted her cane, absently twisting it in her hands. “I keep thinking it through. Over and over. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I do have some latent drama-streak in me after all. But I think there was a second set of sounds. Her screaming, running through the woods. And a quieter sound. Somebody who walked … instead of running.”
“You could hear that?”
Lena pressed her fingertips to her eyes, sighed. “Yes. It’s quiet where I live, Ezra. Very quiet. I know the sounds. And like I’ve mentioned before … while my ears might not necessarily work better than yours, I listen to them better. I could be wrong. It’s entirely possible I am.”
“But you don’t think you are.”
She lifted her face to his. “No. I don’t think I am.”
“If there was another person in the woods, then maybe she had somebody trailing her,” Law suggested.
“Maybe.” And that was the conclusion Ezra had already come to—one he didn’t like much, at all. Slowly, he straightened and turned around, studying the uneven, ragged terrain around them. “Come on. Let’s see how much ground we can cover before the next downpour starts. Lena, try to get us close to the area where you think you heard the screams.”
She sighed. “We’re already there, the best I can tell. It wouldn’t have been much farther away than this.” She remained leaning against the tree, her ivory complexion drawn and tight, her sightless eyes staring off into the distance. She tugged on her lower lip with her teeth, an absent, nervous gesture that Ezra doubted she was even aware of. “I can’t be exactly sure of the direction, but if I had to guess, it would be around here.”
Ezra studied the terrain, searching for something, anything. Catching Law’s eyes, he said, “I’m going to take a little bit of a look around. Then we’ll shift around, maybe move to the north. Do the same thing.”
Law caught his unspoken signal and moved to join Lena.
Lena smirked as a branch broke under his feet. “You here to play babysitter?”
“No, I’m here to sit down. I didn’t come on this little jaunt to play Boy Scout. He wants to run through the woods, let him.”
“Nice cover. I even believe that’s half true,” she murmured.
Damn rain.
Anything he might have been able to find was likely gone now. Still, Ezra looked anyway, moving slowly, covering as much ground as he could.
There wasn’t much to see. Wet leaves, exposed tree roots. The occasional cigarette butt or beer bottle—people out on Lena’s land, hunting or goofing off, probably.
He combed through the woods carefully, but as he’d expected, he found nothing.
Nothing he could see anyway.
Nothing he could find.
But there was something there.
In his gut, he knew it.
He could all but feel it as he slowly made his way back to Lena.
He’d be back.
Maybe he wouldn’t find anything the next time, or the next time, but sooner or later …
“SO.” SHERIFF DWIGHT NIELSON FLIPPED THROUGH the pages of the report and then closed the file, tapping his fingers on it. Mondays were always a nuisance, but this one was proving worse than normal.
He had Pete Hamilton in lock-up for beating his wife. The bastard had secured a scum-sucking lawyer from Lexington who was trying to claim it was anything but spousal abuse, even though the daughter’s story was just about as solid as they came.
The daughter—if this went to trial, Remy Jennings was going to have to put a twelve-year-old girl on the stand. There wouldn’t be any way around it, and it turned Dwight’s stomach. He imagined Remy wasn’t feeling too hot about it, either.
But they wouldn’t have a choice, unless by some miracle Hamilton agreed to a plea.
Putting a child through that … shit.
The whole damn thing gave him one massive headache.
And then there was the story with Lena Riddle. A very strange, very curious story, and one Nielson would like to just ignore.
But duty wouldn’t let him, and as he skimmed through the report, he had a weird tingling sensation in his gut. He couldn’t ignore that either. Blowing out a sigh, he looked at Jennings. “About Riddle. What’s your call?”
“Well, she’s not lying.” Sergeant Keith Jennings sat in the chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. He’d been a soldier in the Army—did eight years and then came back home and joined the sheriff’s department. He hadn’t tried to play off the distant relationship with the mayor, or the DA, either. Nielson appre
ciated that; he respected it. “But that doesn’t mean things happened just as she says they happened, either.”
“Shit.” He smoothed a hand over his bald scalp. His hair had started to thin in his twenties and rather than fight the inevitable, he’d kept it cut close. For the past few years, he had been shaving it. Easier than messing with haircuts, in his opinion. He had a narrow face, and dark, intelligent eyes, and he had little tolerance for bullshit.
He didn’t much like having something muddy the waters in his quiet neck of the woods.
Lena Riddle’s report definitely muddied the waters. It didn’t fit.
“Why couldn’t it have been Deb Sparks?” he mused out loud.
“Because that would have been too easy.” Steven Mabry smiled over his cup of coffee. His deputy sheriff’s round face was serene and pleasant, and hid a mind that was as sharp as a steel trap.
Deb, their local gossip, busybody, and general pain in the ass, lived just a mile or two away from Lena Riddle. If it had been her …
Routinely, she made calls complaining of suspicious activity.
If it wasn’t a serial killer’s van patrolling the highways at night, then it was a meth lab or a Peeping Tom or white slavery rings. Also included, for variety, she’d accused a local kid of trying to poison her cat, a niece of trying to steal her dog, and three different times, she’d accused her mailman of tampering with her mail.
The complaints ranged from tedious to strange.
She liked attention, and Dwight gave each of her reports the needed attention to make sure there wasn’t any real danger, a little extra consideration for Deb, and then it was done. After that, she’d find something else to focus on for a while—something in town, usually, inappropriate books at the library, or a historical building that was going to be renovated in a way that would “harm the historical significance.”
It was always something with Deb, and because of that, if she had made the call, he figured he could send Jennings out there one more time just to be sure, then they could move on.
Lena Riddle was a different story altogether. Because Lena Riddle did not make calls.
If You Hear Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense Page 12
