No Way Home

by Annette Dashofy

  “I like her. They’ve been boarding their horses at my barn—” She caught the slip. “I mean the Krolls’ barn. Anyhow, they’ve been keeping Cisco and Domino there since they moved from Brunswick over a year ago. They bought property about two miles from the farm and are building a barn. Until it’s finished, they’re boarding with us.”

  “I saw their place. I went there to notify her about her husband.”

  An outburst in the meeting hall drew their attention. The man in the fluorescent sweatshirt was on his feet once more, calling Bodine a liar.

  “Who is that guy?” Zoe asked.

  “I’m not sure. But I intend to find out.”

  “He’s probably not Dale’s killer. Cody Bodine might need to worry about him though.”

  Pete didn’t answer, but his expression told Zoe he wasn’t writing the guy off, no matter what side he was on.

  Howard regained control of the meeting and promised to have the anti-drilling man escorted from the premises if he didn’t sit down and shut up. Pete took a step through the open door as if punctuating Howard’s threat.

  Once Bodine continued his presentation, Pete eased back into the relative quiet of the kitchen. “What else can you tell me about Mrs. Springfield?” he asked.

  Zoe considered the question. “She’s a good rider. Better than Dale was. But I doubt that’s what you have in mind.”

  “How did she and Dale get along?”

  “Okay, I guess. They didn’t argue except for the usual barn stuff.”

  “What’s ‘the usual barn stuff’?”

  Zoe laughed. “Money. She’d buy a new saddle blanket because it was her favorite color. Dale would say her old one was perfectly fine. He would pay the farrier for new horseshoes for Cisco when Hope would argue they could’ve gotten another reset out of the old ones. That sort of thing.”

  “So the money battles were split between them?”

  “Yeah. She liked to spend it on her horse, and he liked to spend it on his. Every married couple I know who both have horses is the same way.”

  “Anything recent?”

  “No.” Zoe studied Pete, who was wearing his poker face. “Do you really suspect Hope?”

  “Like you said. Spouse of the deceased. Can you think of anyone else around the barn who might have had a beef with Dale?”

  Zoe hated to think of having a killer that close to home. Again. “Not as far as I know. He was a great guy. Always making everyone laugh. Sorry.” If she weren’t heading to the airport in the morning, she’d ask around.

  Bodine continued to stress the stringent safety regulations that Federated Petroleum Resources adhered to in order to protect the land, water, and air from contamination. Half of the audience nodded in approval. Half wore skeptical scowls.

  “This is gonna go on a while,” Zoe said. “I think I’ll head home and get some sleep while I can. Our flight leaves at five thirty.”

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  They stepped through the VFW’s doors into the crisp night air.

  Pete turned to her. “Where is ‘home’ tonight? I know you’ve been bunking at the ambulance garage even when you’re off duty.”

  “I’m staying at Rose’s since we’re heading to the airport so early.” Her breath hung in a frosty fog between them. “I figure as long as my cats are still at Earl’s house and I don’t touch that blasted dishwasher, I shouldn’t stir up any trouble.”

  The light on the outside of the building threw Pete’s face into shadow. Zoe wished she could see his expression.

  He lifted a hand and brushed her cheek with his fingertips, tracing her lower lip with his thumb. For a moment, her breath caught in her throat as he bent down to press a fleeting kiss to her lips.

  This was it. Goodbye. For how long? Tomorrow, she’d be more than halfway across the country from him, in totally unfamiliar territory, facing God knows what. Fear of the unknown sent a surge of panic through her. She leaned into him, holding on as if he were her lifeline about to be ripped away.

  Pete wrapped her up in an embrace, and she suspected he was thinking the same thing. She closed her eyes, breathed in his scent, and wished time would stop for just a few minutes.

  Behind them, the VFW door opened. “Oh. Excuse me,” someone said.

  They both stepped apart. Zoe caught a glimpse of a man who seemed torn between joining them on the sidewalk and ducking inside. She turned away, hiding the flush that had to be reddening her cheeks.

  “Um, Chief Adams?” the man said. “I wanted to talk to you a minute before you leave.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Pete told him.

  “Great. Thanks.” The man backpedaled through the doors, leaving them alone.

  Keeping the distance between them, Zoe again faced Pete, glad to be cast in his shadow. Glad he couldn’t see the tears—or the fear—in her eyes. She swallowed and willed her voice to be steady. “Go do your job.”

  “Call me when you land.”

  “Okay.”

  He headed for the door, but stopped with his hand on the latch. He half turned and gazed at her. “I love you, Zoe.”

  Her face warmed even in the chilly November night. “I love you too.”

  With that, he yanked the door open, letting out a discordant rumble before disappearing inside.

  She inhaled deeply, letting the wintry air cool the burn in her heart and her brain.

  Seven

  “What can I do for you?” Pete directed the man into the VFW’s kitchen. The same place he’d stood a few minutes earlier with Zoe. He tried to quash his annoyance with the guy for interrupting their goodbyes.

  “My name’s John Nelson. I live in one of the houses up at Scenic Hilltop Estates.”

  Pete knew the place, if not all its residents. A housing plan of sorts, intended at one point to be a grandiose development of upscale homes, Scenic Hilltop Estates instead became a cluster of five houses, six if you counted the one which had been destroyed in an explosion last summer. “Mr. Nelson. What did you want to see me about?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but you know that one house in the Estates, the one with the big fence around it?”

  The one they’d dubbed “the Fort” had been vacant for months. “What about it?”

  “There’s someone new living there. Keeps to himself. I mean, the rest of us rarely see him and he doesn’t attempt to be at all neighborly.”

  Neither had the previous resident. Hence the fence. “Being antisocial isn’t against the law.”

  “Oh, I know that. And he isn’t what I’d call antisocial. He has people coming and going all the time. No one seems to stay very long. I realize having a lot of company isn’t against the law, but my other neighbors and I are getting nervous about all this traffic and all these…strangers around. The place was pretty quiet, for the most part at least, until this guy moved in.”

  The muscles in Pete’s jaw tightened more with each word Nelson spoke. The scenario the man described was all too familiar to Pete. Not here in Vance Township, but years ago in his days with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. “Do you happen to know your neighbor’s name?”

  “No. Like I said, he doesn’t talk to us. I haven’t even gotten a good look at him. I can tell you he drives a black SUV with tinted windows.”

  Pete made a note. “That’s fine, Mr. Nelson. I can find out who he is.”

  The man brightened. “Should I try to get license numbers of the cars that stop over there?”

  Pete smiled. “I appreciate the offer, but I have officers to do that kind of thing.”

  Nelson seemed disappointed. “But I thought maybe it would be better if—you know—I worked—” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Undercover.”

  Pete patted him on the shoulder. “No, thank you. I wouldn’t want you putting yourself in harm’s way. That’s my
job.”

  The idea of being in danger damped Nelson’s enthusiasm. “I understand.”

  Pete’s phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen. Baronick. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” Pete told Nelson, who took the hint and excused himself. Pete answered the call. “Did you find anything?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Baronick sounded uncharacteristically stoic. “We have another OD.”

  Another dead kid in Monongahela County. Another drug overdose. This one, though, was a mile or two over the line in Mt. Prospect Township. Not Pete’s jurisdiction. But he responded anyway.

  Instead of a mobile home, this time the body was found in a boarded-up single-story house, which was currently crawling with law enforcement and crime scene techs. The house stunk like an unflushed toilet. The same sort of paraphernalia littered the floor as at the earlier OD. Just like before, Franklin Marshall knelt next to the body, doing his preliminary exam. Instead of a girl, the new victim was a boy.

  Pete doubted he was more than sixteen. “Any identification?”

  Baronick clicked through the photos he’d snapped, squinting at each image on the camera’s screen. “Nothing on him. No wallet, no money, no driver’s license.” He looked up at Pete. “Don’t suppose you can help us out and ID him like you did the Vincenti kid?”

  “Sorry.” Pete studied the kid’s blue-tinged face, the same pinkish froth on his lips as the girl. “He doesn’t look old enough to drive.”

  The detective grunted in agreement. He put the camera down. “I’m starting to hate my job.”

  The coroner climbed to his feet. “Me too.”

  “Find anything interesting?” Baronick asked.

  “It’s all too similar to the girl I autopsied this morning, except the track marks are limited to his arms. I doubt he’s been using as long as she had been.” Marshall waved a hand toward the debris strewn near the body—a pop can folded in half to create a makeshift pipe, a disposable lighter, some crumpled plastic baggy corners. “Looks like we have another heroin addict sampling meth.”

  “But which is killing them?” Pete asked, knowing he wasn’t going to get a real answer. Not yet.

  “Could be a bad batch of heroin,” Baronick said. “The meth might not have anything to do with it.”

  Marshall waved to his assistant to bring the body bag and stretcher. “Or it could be the combination. Heroin slows the heart down. Meth speeds it up.”

  Baronick grunted again. “Drug-induced cardiac whiplash.”

  The coroner stepped aside to make room for the stretcher. “I’ll prod the lab to rush the toxicology reports. Both this one and the one on the Vincenti girl. Until we get those, we’re only guessing.”

  Pete and the detective backed out of the way. “I would love to know where they’re getting the meth. If they’re cooking it locally, we sure haven’t caught wind of it,” Baronick said. He snorted. “Literally. You’ve smelled that stuff.”

  “Yeah.” A few times in the city. It was an odor he wasn’t likely to forget. “I may have a lead.”

  Baronick’s eyebrows shot up. “On where they’re cooking meth?”

  Pete thought of John Nelson and the fenced house at Scenic Hilltop Estates. He hadn’t mentioned an odor, and Pete felt pretty certain the man would have noticed—and reported—that particular detail. “Probably not. But I may have a dealer in my township.” The thought curdled his stomach.

  “Where?”

  Pete held up a hand, stopping the overeager detective. “Let me do some investigating first.” The new guy in town might simply have a lot of friends. Not likely, but Pete wasn’t ready to send in the Emergency Response Team’s tank just yet. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

  Baronick glared at him. “You know I hate when you do that.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Zoe stood next to the open passenger door of the car Rose had just rented and shrugged out of her winter jacket. The temperature had been hovering at freezing when they took off from the Pittsburgh International Airport. It was in the mid-fifties when they landed. She gazed across the Durango, Colorado airport parking lot at the vivid blue sky and snow-capped mountains in the distance. “Wow.”

  Rose tossed her suitcase in the trunk and slammed it. “You’ve said that three times already.”

  Despite the anxiety and dread about this trip, the sight of jagged peaks unleashed a swell of reverence deep inside Zoe’s chest. “I’ve never seen real mountains before.” The lush rolling Laurel Highlands an hour to the east of Vance Township didn’t come close to this.

  Rose opened the driver’s door and managed a tight smile. “I know. They took my breath away the first time I saw them too.” She paused, and Zoe noticed her shift her gaze toward the view. “Still do.”

  Zoe resisted an urge to say wow for a fourth time, and instead slid into the seat. “Let’s go.”

  “Yeah.” Rose climbed in behind the wheel, clicked her seatbelt, and reached for the ignition with a trembling hand.

  “You okay to drive?”

  “I’m not okay about anything.”

  “Want me to—”

  “No,” Rose snapped. She shook her wrists as if working out kinks. “I’m sorry. I’m a little edgy.”

  “No kidding.” Zoe gave her friend what she hoped was a comforting smile. “Seriously, I can drive.”

  “Thanks, but I think it’s better if I had something to concentrate on. Like the road. And not getting us lost between here and Aztec.”

  “Fine.”

  Rose reached for the gearshift and froze. She looked at Zoe, panic in her eyes. “What did I do with Logan’s dental records?”

  “You gave them to me, remember? They’re in my carry-on in the trunk.”

  “Right. Right.”

  Zoe had seen Rose in maternal meltdown mode before, but not quite to this level. “You sure you don’t want me to drive?”

  “I’m good.” She shifted into gear and eased out of the lot.

  Thirty minutes later, as they cruised south on Route 550, Zoe chatted about the landscape, hoping to distract her friend.

  “You do realize I lived here,” Rose said. “I’ve seen those rocks and those horses before. Lots of times.”

  So much for distracting her. Zoe turned toward the passenger window, resting her forehead against the glass. The terrain wasn’t what she’d expected. Minimal grass. No tall trees edged the road, blocking the view. No rolling hills. The land seemed to stretch out flat and brown until colliding with a wall of rock in the distance. This was nothing like her home turf. She might as well have landed on the moon.

  But the openness stirred something deep within her, and she remembered Allison talking about feeling free out here. Free. That was it.

  Then their reason for flying into Colorado and driving into New Mexico slammed back into her, and the foreignness of the Land of Enchantment closed off the feeling of freedom.

  A few miles farther south, Zoe spotted the Welcome to Aztec sign. “This is it?”

  “Yep.” Rose eased to a stop at a red light and aimed a thumb at the road to their left. “Our hotel is that way.”

  Except they weren’t in the turning lane. “Okay. So where are we going?”

  “The Sheriff’s Office.”

  Zoe looked down at her travel clothes. With a three-hour flight from Pittsburgh to Denver on a cramped plane, then another hour to Durango in a smaller, even more cramped plane, she’d intentionally dressed for comfort—yoga pants and a faded thrift-shop sweatshirt. “Wouldn’t we look more professional if we cleaned up first?”

  “Professional, my ass. I wanna know if they found out anything about my son.”

  Zoe clamped her mouth shut. Rose was right, of course. But Zoe wasn’t too sure she wanted to hear what the local law enforcement had to tell them. At the moment
, she was blissfully ignorant of Logan’s circumstances and could convince herself everything was fine.

  She had a nagging fear that the reality of the situation wasn’t going to give her—or Rose—any comfort.

  Scenic Hilltop Estates did indeed sit atop a scenic hilltop, offering a sprawling view of farmlands and woods. The third word in the housing development’s name, however, was a little misleading. Pete would hardly call the five cookie-cutter two-story brick and siding homes “estates.”

  He parked one house up from the “Fort” and waited.

  A check of property records had revealed the new owners of the property were an older couple from Michigan. A little more digging revealed that while they planned to move to Pennsylvania to be closer to family, they were still in Lansing, trying to sell their current property. They stated they had no idea who might be squatting in their new house.

  The house earned its nickname because of the tall plank privacy fence surrounding the yard. The original owner had been a pain in the ass, constantly calling the police to complain about the noises and smells of the farm next to the development. Pete never understood why a city dweller would move to the country when he so obviously disliked everything the rural life had to offer.

  Pete suspected this squatter had another use for the fence—hiding his illegal activities. Such as drug transactions.

  At the moment, the gate was padlocked, and without evidence to justify a search warrant, Pete waited.

  His cell phone rang, and Zoe’s name lit the screen. He answered, “Where are you?”

  “Pulling into the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office parking lot.”

  He checked his dashboard clock and did some quick math. They couldn’t have been on the ground more than an hour. “How’s Rose holding up?”

  “Ha. Yeah.”

  Not an answer. Zoe didn’t want to say anything with Rose right next to her. Translation—Rose was not holding up. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not yet. I may call you once we talk to whoever’s in charge of the case. Is there anything new on Dale’s murder?”