by Kara Lennox
“Okay. Where’s your shirt?”
“Oh. The clean laundry never quite made it upstairs yesterday.” He walked around her into the living room, found a laundry basket filled with folded shirts and grabbed one at random. It was a long-sleeved knit shirt the soft gray of a mourning dove. Bree said a silent goodbye to that gorgeous naked torso—scar and all—as he dragged the shirt over his head.
“You can go get dressed if you want,” he said. “I’ve got breakfast handled. Unless you’d prefer something besides fruit, cheese and granola bars?”
“No, that’s fine.” She looked down at herself, grateful she was wearing a pair of perfectly respectable man-style pajamas, though she was braless underneath, and she was pretty sure her hard, tight nipples showed through the pink cotton. “Don’t forget the coffee.”
“Right. The most important part of breakfast for you.” He’d prepared the coffeemaker last night; all he had to do was push a button.
Bree had bought a few necessities before arriving here yesterday. Now she grabbed her shopping bag and retreated to the bathroom to change. She’d showered last night so she could get ready quickly this morning. A hasty teeth brushing, a splash of water on her face and a comb through her hair, and she was ready.
They tiptoed out of the house, and by five-thirty they were headed toward Tuckerville.
The weather had turned overnight; the temperature was a chilly thirty-eight degrees, which reminded Bree: “Thank you for covering me up last night. I hope you didn’t give me your only blanket.”
“I was fine.”
“Well, it was thoughtful of you. I really appreciate you taking me in.”
“Stay as long as you like. I’m sure Elena actually enjoys having another woman to talk to.”
“Yeah, well, she might like it okay now, but she won’t if it drags on.”
“Actually, Daniel has offered to provide you with a bodyguard.”
“A bodyguard? Really? Just because I’ve seen a strange car?”
“He takes that kind of thing very seriously. The guy who killed my wife and almost killed Elena—he started out following Travis around, painting graffiti threats. He escalated quickly, and it’s a lesson we all took to heart.”
A chill ran up Bree’s spine. Elena had told her in detail what had happened when MacKenzie’s foster father took issue with Travis stopping his attempt to adopt the little girl. John Stover had taken Elena hostage, planning to kill her as an act of revenge against Travis. Fortunately, Travis had shown up just in time to prevent that from happening.
It must have been incredibly terrifying for both of them.
“I’m glad my complaints about this stalker are being taken seriously. But a bodyguard? Does Daniel often make such generous offers?”
“Actually, he does. He says what’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t throw money around? Also, a trained bodyguard might be able to find out who your mystery stalker is—confront him, even.”
“I’ll think about it.” She didn’t really want some stranger watching her every move, sleeping in her apartment, shadowing her at work. But what choice did she have? Other than taking an indefinite leave of absence from work and hanging out at Eric’s for the rest of her life, and she didn’t think that was an option.
When they reached the intersection where Philomene’s car had been found, they discovered they weren’t the first to arrive, not by a long shot. More than a dozen cars were parked haphazardly along the side of the road, and twice that many people were milling around in the early-morning cold, their breath fogging. Men, women, even children had come to help look. Whether their volunteering was due to a genuine desire to help or a more prurient interest in finding a dead body, Bree didn’t care to know. She was just glad they were there.
Unfortunately, Sheriff DeVille was already there with his bullhorn, organizing the volunteers.
“Great,” Eric muttered as he got out of the car.
A clean-cut guy wearing creased khakis and a neat blue button-down strode toward them, hand outstretched. “Glad you could make it, Eric.”
“Of course. I wasn’t going to miss it. Joe Kinkaid, this is Bree Johnson.”
“Ah.” Bree shook the man’s hand; his grip was just short of bone crushing. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’ve taken this on.”
“I’m gonna do my best.” He lowered his voice. “Your local sheriff isn’t making it easy on me. He was very clear on the fact that this is his investigation, and if I start trouble, he’ll slap me with an obstruction-of-justice charge.”
“Of course he wants to control every aspect,” Bree said. “So he can hide any evidence that points to him.”
“Or he might just be a typical territorial cop. I saw it all the time when I was Secret Service, and I see it now, too. We have to be careful not to jump to any conclusions.”
Bree, for one, was going to let DeVille know she was involved and watching his every move—without clueing him in that he was a suspect. She walked brazenly to where he was organizing the volunteers into groups and explaining how a grid search worked.
“You’ll proceed in straight lines, one step at a time, so that every inch of these woods gets an eyeball on it,” he said through the bullhorn. “Don’t be in any hurry. You’re looking for anything that might indicate a human being was here recently, from a footprint to a piece of trash, a piece of clothing, a cigarette butt. You’re also looking for ground that appears to have been disturbed or like animals have been rooting or digging.”
Bree winced, hoping that if Philomene’s remains were nearby, the animals had left her alone.
“Now, if you do see something, do not touch it. Not even to get a better look at whatever it is. You wave to me or one of the deputies here.” Three uniformed deputies raised their hands. “If we aren’t close enough to signal, you send your partner to find one of us and bring us to you. Do not move away from the thing you saw until one of us in uniform has checked it out. Everybody get that? Do I need to say it again? Do. Not. Touch. Anything. Very important.”
Bree stood only a few feet away from him now. She did her best to adopt an eager I-want-to-be-of-service expression instead of an accusatory I’m-keeping-my-eye-on-you glare.
Finally he looked at her. “Bree. Glad you could join us.” He didn’t sound very glad at all. “Do you have a partner?”
Eric stepped up beside her. “I’m her partner.”
His words put an inappropriate warmth deep in her chest. Get a grip, Bree. He means search partner. Not any other kind.
“Okay. Deputy McClusky, the doctor and the lawyer will be joining your group.”
Deputy McClusky, the only woman on the sheriff’s staff, motioned for them to join her and a motley group of about fifteen people. “We’re gathering over here.”
Ted Gentry was a part of their group. He smiled a greeting at Bree. “I thought I’d see you here.” Bree could smell mint mouthwash on his breath. She recalled how he’d had trouble walking a straight line when she’d seen him at the café and wondered again if he had a drinking problem.
“Ted, you remember Eric?”
“Sure.” The two men shook hands. “Thanks for coming all the way out here. Long drive so early in the morning.”
“It’s kind of my job now.”
Bree explained. “Project Justice has taken on Kelly’s case. Finding his supposed victim is key to the case.”
“Of course, of course.” Ted nodded vigorously. “I’m hoping she’s still alive, though.”
“Me, too,” Bree said. “But the blood in her car trunk...”
“Oh, actually, I have some news about that. It hasn’t been released publicly, so keep it under your hat, but that blood? It’s not human.”
“Really?” Bree felt a ray of hope. “That’s encouraging.”
<
br /> “It’s still good we’re doing this search, though, even if it’s just to rule out that she was lured out here and murdered. Hey, you notice one person who’s conspicuously absent?”
Bree hadn’t taken inventory of every single person here, so no, she hadn’t. She shook her head.
“The boyfriend. You know, Jerrod Crowley. Maybe he knows what we’ll find. Or maybe she’s buried somewhere else and he’s not worried. Still, you’d think he would show up for appearance’s sake.”
Just then a pickup truck with a camper top came to a screeching stop, veering to the side of the road at the last minute. A young, solid-looking man hopped out, then ran to the back of his truck and opened it, releasing a lanky black Labrador retriever.
“Hey, hey, hey!” the sheriff objected, marching over to the newcomer. “I said no pets. You have any idea how much damage a dog can do to a crime scene?”
The young man looked confused. “I’m with Project Justice.” He made this announcement as if that explained everything, but apparently it didn’t to the sheriff.
“What part of ‘no pets’ did you not understand?”
Joe stepped between the two men before they came to blows. “Excuse me, sheriff, Ian is here at my invitation. And this dog—”
“She’s not a pet,” Ian said indignantly as he hunkered down to curl a hand around one of the dog’s floppy ears. “Violet here is the best damn cadaver dog you’ll ever run across. She’s found bodies for the FBI, the ATF and just about every major police department in the country.”
“That so? Well, she’s not gonna muck up my crime scene, if there is one, which I doubt.”
Bree couldn’t keep silent any longer. Why was the sheriff being such a lunkhead? She walked over to the group of men and tapped DeVille on the shoulder. “Sheriff, anyone who watches TV knows how helpful a properly trained dog can be when it comes to locating human remains. How can you turn down this man’s offer to help? Don’t you want to find Philomene?”
She had him in a corner and he knew it. He pressed his lips together in a thin line, then sighed. “All right.” He waved a forefinger in her face. “But if that mutt runs off with a leg bone or pees on a footprint, I’m holding you personally responsible, Dr. Johnson. You’re the one who brought all these outsiders to town with your crazy talk about Kelly Ralston being innocent. Sometimes I gotta wonder...what makes you so damn sure? Maybe when we’re done here, I’ll haul you in for a little interrogating.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“WHOA, WHAT WAS that about?” Ian asked as he attached a lead to Violet’s collar. He was a little older than he’d first appeared, with his baggy jeans and black hair flopping boyishly over his forehead.
“Sheriff’s a jerk, that’s all,” Bree said dismissively. She leaned down to pet Violet. “You ready to go to work, girl?”
“We got woods on this side,” Joe said to Ian, pointing, “and a farmer’s field with a stock tank over there. I talked to the farmer this morning. He’s not too keen about a bunch of trespassers on his land and even less excited about dragging the tank for a body. Plus, there’s cows everywhere. So I say start with the woods.”
Eric lightly touched Bree’s elbow. “We better get back to our group. Ian, let us know if Violet gets a hit.”
“Will do,” Ian said.
The actual process of searching was tedious—one step at a time, first through tall grass, then trees and brush. A couple of guys with machetes were cutting back the brush only as much as necessary for the searchers to pass, with the deputy watching closely to make sure they didn’t obliterate any evidence.
“I don’t think the murderer would have hiked through all this brush,” Bree said. “The farmer’s field makes more sense to me. The dirt is already disturbed from the farmer planting his broccoli. Late at night, maybe the cows were penned up, so they wouldn’t be a bother.” She stopped to peer at a rotting log, then stepped over it as their line of searchers moved forward another few inches. “I sure hope all the ticks are dead this time of year.”
“Ticks?” Eric’s brow furrowed.
“You’re such a city boy.”
“No, I’m not. I mean, yeah, I grew up in Houston, but I used to go camping and fishing and hunting. I just hate ticks.”
Bree shivered. “Me, too. In the summer people actually show up at the E.R. with ticks on them, expecting me to remove them. I’d rather stitch up a bloody gash any day of the week.”
As they made their painstaking progress across their assigned sector, they caught occasional glimpses of Ian and Violet whipping back and forth through the trees. Apparently they were working some sort of grid system, too, but not the one the sheriff had laid out. And they were covering ground a lot faster.
“Hey, look, there’s something.” Bree could see a flash of something bright yellow in the grass. She and Eric both leaned down to take a closer look. She got a whiff of his woodsy aftershave, and for a few seconds she was mesmerized by how handsome he was. The sun had just risen over the horizon, and it glinted off the blond streaks in his hair, making them look like burnished gold and throwing his face into chiseled relief.
“It looks like a little piece of drawstring from a plastic garbage bag,” Eric said. “And...is that duct tape stuck to it?”
Pulled back to the matter at hand, Bree bent closer still. “I think it is.”
They both straightened and raised one hand to alert Deputy McClusky, but she had already seen them and was on her way over.
“Got something?”
“Maybe.”
The deputy removed her hat and leaned down. “Good catch, y’all.” She whipped out a camera from her black canvas messenger bag and snapped a couple of pictures, then some wider-angle shots of a couple of landmarks—a tree, a telephone pole—to establish the position of the evidence. “You don’t have to stay here. You can move on. The rest of the line is getting ahead of you.”
Bree had been interested in watching how a real cop collected evidence, but she and Eric took the hint and moved on as McClusky put on her rubber gloves.
“Do you think it’ll turn out to be something important?” Bree asked as they continued their visual search.
“Hell if I know. Sites like this, the cops sometimes collect a ton of trash because they don’t know what’s going to end up helping solve the case or providing evidence to help convict someone. But garbage bags and duct tape are two things used when disposing of a body, and there’s not much other trash out here, so it could be significant.”
She shivered. “I don’t want to think about bodies in garbage bags and duct tape. It’s so horrible. How can people be so evil?”
“That’s why you became a healer instead of a criminal or a cop. People like you aren’t meant to have to deal with this kind of thing. I mean, not that you’re squeamish or fragile. I’m guessing you deal with some pretty horrific situations in your line of work. But—”
“But I help them before they die. I could never... I just don’t understand how anyone...” She stopped before she got choked up. She wasn’t close to Philomene—she’d only chatted with her a few times. But now that they were facing the very real possibility that she’d been murdered—that her body might be right here, within a few feet of where they stood—it got to her.
Eric slid an arm around her shoulders. He was so warm, so solid. “We’ll get through this, Bree. One step at a time.”
From somewhere not too far away they heard Violet barking.
Bree went on alert. “Does that mean anything? That she’s barking?” Up till now the dog hadn’t made a sound.
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Different dogs have different ways of alerting.”
Seconds later Eric’s phone rang. He dragged it out of his jeans pocket. “This is Eric.” He listened, nodded a couple of times. “Okay.” He hung up.
Bree waited for him to explain.
“That was Kinkaid. Violet was signaling. She seems to think there’s a body in the stock tank.”
“Can a dog really detect the scent of human remains under water?”
“I know, it seems beyond believability, but Ian’s very confident in her abilities.”
The rest of their group was still searching, so Bree and Eric kept at it, too, though Bree was dying to know what was going on at the stock tank.
“They’ll have to get a diver to go down and have a look,” Eric said. “It’ll take time to get someone here.”
“I bet Daniel Logan knows someone.”
“He does. Kinkaid already offered to bring the guy in, but the sheriff nixed it. He wants to use his guy, some dude who works out of a nearby county sheriff’s office.”
“Control freak,” Bree murmured. “Doesn’t he realize we’re all on the same team? Ultimately we all want the same thing—to find Philomene. To make sure guilty people pay for their crimes.”
“No. He’s interested in proving he was right all along. He’s an elected official. His whole career rides on his public image. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot.”
Bree could understand that, but the man had been elected to represent justice in Becker County. It seemed to her he should have some interest in doing what was right.
“Hey, what’s that?” Bree pointed to something yellow, but when she leaned closer, she shook her head. “Never mind. Leaf.”
“We’ll continue to that fence line,” Deputy McClusky announced. “Then we’ll meet back at the staging area and see if the sheriff has another area he wants us to work.”
“Thank God,” Bree murmured. This work was tedious and her back hurt. She’d have never made it as a cop or a CSI-type person. She had actually briefly considered being a lab scientist if she hadn’t been accepted at medical school. But she probably wouldn’t have liked it. She was much better with real live people than test tubes and petri dishes.
When they returned to the intersection where everyone had parked, the sheriff was sending people home.
