by Dana R. Lynn
He pursed his lips. Lizzy sensed that he wanted to ask more questions. For whatever reason, he did not ask. Maybe he didn’t want to scare her off. Or maybe he wanted to see what they found before he got more information from her. Whatever his reasoning, she was glad that he restrained himself. She didn’t have any more information, and right now, she was feeling close to screaming.
When he reached out to turn the heat up, his hand accidentally brushed against hers. She jumped and jerked her hand away. Heat crawled up her cheeks as he frowned, his brows furrowed. No doubt he was wondering at her extreme reaction.
This was why she would never get married. Even the most innocent interactions with men set her on edge. To have a normal conversation with a man who came to court her...nee, it would not happen. Lizzy had long ago resigned herself to the fact that what Chad Weller had done to her had left her with too many emotional scars to ever consider courting and later marrying any man. She just did not have the ability to get past her fears.
It was likely she never would.
The car turned. Lizzy became aware that they were entering the parking lot that she had fled less than two hours earlier. The building came into view as they drove into the lot. The broken windows. The whole forlorn look of the place. When she had first seen the building, she had thought it looked pitiful and broken. Now, seeing it through the eyes of the horrible situation, she thought she could detect a menacing feel to the structure and the empty lot.
She shuddered.
“Are you all right?” Isaac’s concerned voice broke through the thoughts. She had almost forgotten that she wasn’t alone.
“Jah. I am well,” she whispered, even though she felt far from well. A man had died before her eyes. How was she supposed to feel?
The other officer pulled in and parked next to Isaac.
Lizzy got out when the men did. Her plain boots made a crunching sound. She flicked a glance down. She was stepping on glass.
“I think this is the glass from Bill’s car window. It shattered when the other man shot at me as I was leaving.”
Immediately, Isaac took a picture of the glass with his phone, then carefully picked up a shard and put it in a plastic bag with a zip seal top.
“Hopefully, we can match this to the car you were in. Although glass is pretty similar.”
She shrugged, not familiar with any of the technology.
Dread started to build inside her as they moved toward the back of the building. She didn’t want to see Bill’s body. The thought of how he would look dead was enough to make her ill.
She turned the corner and blinked.
“Where did Bill fall?” Isaac asked, glancing around with a frown.
She pointed her finger at the spot ahead of her.
The body was gone.
THREE
Isaac walked forward to where the body should have been. It was hard to tell if a body had been there. The black pavement was slick, and the rain had probably washed most of the traces of blood away. His gut instinct told him that there had been a body here, that Lizzy really had witnessed someone getting shot.
“Maybe Bill wasn’t killed?” There was a lilt in Lizzy’s voice that spoke of hope. “Maybe he is hiding from the man who shot him.”
He hated to dampen her hope, but he refused to downplay the danger she could be in. “Lizzy, I doubt he survived. How close were they standing when Bill was shot?”
The hope drained from her face. She sighed, a sound that seemed to be dragged up from the depth of her soul. “They were only a couple of feet apart. Maybe from me to where the other officer is standing.”
About three feet, then.
“This other officer is Officer Ryder Howard.” Isaac indicated his friend and colleague. “At that close range, I don’t think he would miss.”
“Bill is dead.” The lilt was gone and her voice was a flat statement.
“Most likely.”
“Are you sure that this is the place?” Ryder asked, his face skeptical.
Lizzy flushed. Isaac would have thought she was embarrassed except he had seen the way her eyes had flashed. She did not like being questioned like that. No wonder. Ryder hadn’t meant anything by it, but his voice did have a sarcastic edge to it. Lizzy had no way of knowing, but Ryder’s voice always sounded that way. He doubted if the man even realized how harsh his tone was. It was just the way he talked.
“Jah!” Lizzy replied, lifting her chin, her own voice cold. “This is the place. I did not make up a story about my driver getting shot.”
Ryder’s eyes widened. Too late the man seemed to realize that his question had been taken the wrong way. “Oh! Hey! I didn’t mean that to sound like I thought you were lying. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a mistake.”
He threw Isaac a “Help me, buddy” glance.
“It’s okay, Lizzy. We’ll keep looking. Maybe we will find some other signs of what happened here.”
Ryder grunted, his head bobbing once. Isaac held back a smirk. His friend had gotten himself into trouble on more than one occasion for attitude. The man had a good heart. He just had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Isaac knew that he had had a very rough time growing up with alcoholic parents. Although he had never asked, wanting to respect his friend’s privacy, he had always figured there was some sort of abuse or neglect that went along with it. Ryder had developed a veneer to keep people at bay.
Isaac could not fault the man for it. Not when he had his own past to overcome.
“Lizzy, we are going to have a look around to see if we can find any evidence of what happened. I need you to either stay there or wait in the car.” He zeroed his gaze in on her oval face. “I mean it. If you walk around, you might trample on something. Ryder and I have done this enough to know what we are doing.”
“I will wait right here.” She pointed down at her feet.
He smiled. Something about her earnestness touched him, despite the terrifying situation she was in.
“Okay, then.” Turning to his friend, he gestured to the right. “Why don’t you search from here toward the property line, and I will go toward the building.”
“Sounds like a plan.” All amusement faded as he and Ryder both focused on the job before them.
The men set off in their separate directions, alert for any clue that a murder took place in the parking lot. Every once in a while, Isaac cast a concerned glance at Lizzy. Her arms were tight across her middle, and he could clearly see that she was shivering. April in Ohio was capricious. On this particular day, the temperature hadn’t risen much higher than sixty and the rain was cold. He was wet clear through after a quarter of an hour. She’d been out in the weather several times that morning. And though he knew that one did not catch a cold from being wet, it was still a miserable feeling.
At one point, he had gone over to her to suggest that she wait in the car. “I can turn the heat up. There’s a blanket in the trunk. It would not be much, but it might warm you up a bit.”
Lizzy had looked at him for a moment. Her lips had curled at the corners in a small smile. Her eyes, though, those deep blue eyes, had remained haunted. “Denke, Isaac. I appreciate it. But I would not feel as safe so far away. I might be cold here, but I have two police officers close by. No one would try to harm me here.”
How did one argue with that? Isaac jogged back to continue searching. In his mind, though, her words played over and over again. If he had any doubts about her telling the truth, which he hadn’t, they fled. No one would stand out in the cold to feel safer if it weren’t the truth, he reasoned. Plus, her eyes held far too much knowledge of the dark side of the world.
Ten minutes later, he found his first proof of the shooter’s presence. A bullet had lodged in the side of the building. He ran back to his car and grabbed some tools from his trunk. Carefully, he dug the bullet out and put it in an evidence bag.<
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Encouraged by what he found, he continued his search, meticulously scouring every inch for any sign of disturbance.
“Yo! Isaac! Got something!” Ryder shouted across the parking lot.
Isaac hurried over, careful not to step on anything useful.
“What do you have, Ryder?”
Ryder indicated the gravel at his feet. “Something was definitely pulled through here. Something big.”
Like a body. Isaac narrowed his glance at the ground. Ryder was correct. Something had been dragged through. He looked closer.
“Ryder, look here.” He pointed at a spot on the ground. “I think we have blood.”
Grabbing evidence bags and their phones, they went to work taking pictures and collecting samples of both the gravel and the blood. They might not be able to use them. They didn’t have the fastest DNA lab available to them. Nor was DNA always reliable.
It might not have been much. Unfortunately, it was all the evidence they had.
As they were walking back toward the cars, Isaac noticed something that had escaped their notice earlier. Under the bushes, lying on the ground, was a black baseball cap.
Lizzy gasped. “That looks like the hat that Bill was wearing when he picked me up this morning.”
They carefully extracted the hat from the bushes and added it to their evidence. There was an unusual design on the front. It was only partially there, though. It looked like someone had tried to rip it off, but missed some of it. Unfortunately, the part that remained was not part of any logo that he recognized.
“I can’t even tell what logo this is supposed to be. Can you tell?” Isaac frowned as he pointed it out.
The other cop shook his head. “No. Not with so much of it gone. Maybe it’s the logo for the place where he works. Or maybe a sports team of some kind. It’s possible someone will recognize it, although I’m not sure if there’s enough for that.” He snapped a picture of it.
“We’ll have to ask around, see if we can find anyone who recognizes it. Right now, I am going to take Lizzy into the station to see if she can identify our shooter. As long as I’m heading in that direction, I’ll take this stuff back to the station.”
Ryder gave him a thumbs-up. “I will start seeing if anyone recognizes this logo.”
In the car, Isaac turned the heat on and handed Lizzy a blanket. “I apologize that this is taking so long. As soon as I can, I will get you to your family’s house.”
“I understand. If I had thought about it, I would have asked to grab my bag from the trunk before the car was towed away.” She was silent for a moment. “Do you think that maybe this guy will forget about me?”
He did not want to answer that question, mainly because he didn’t like the answer that he knew he had to give. However, Isaac would never lie. He despised dishonesty.
“I don’t think he will forget about you, Lizzy.” She turned her pale face to him. “Right now, you are the one person who can identify him. He won’t forget that.”
Nor was he likely to let her go.
* * *
Lizzy regretted asking the question the minute the words left her mouth. It was too late to call them back. One look at Isaac’s face, though, and she knew what the answer would be. Had known it before she’d asked.
Once again, she was a target. For no other reason than that she had been in the wrong place. She was trapped in a weird nightmare and had no choice but to let it play out before she could be free from it.
The trip to the Waylan Grove station was silent. At some point, she dozed lightly, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the car. A hand on her shoulder startled her awake.
She sat up with a shriek, her fist flying out to defend herself.
Belatedly, she realized where she was. When she saw Isaac rubbing the side of his head, she felt guilty.
“Sorry.” She had never been so mortified.
“Don’t worry about it.” He dropped his hand and smiled. “I should have known better than to jostle you awake like that.”
“That’s no excuse. I tend to startle easy.”
He nodded. “I will keep that in mind.”
Isaac left his side of the car, loping around to open her door. “Let’s get this done.”
The Waylan Grove Police Department was bigger than the LaMar Pond one, but not by much. The open desk area where the officers sat was similar, as well. They entered, and the conversation softened to a low buzz. Isaac led her past the desks and into a room near the back. He left briefly to talk with one of the other officers, then he returned. He flipped on a switch and indicated that she could hang up her cloak on the rack in the corner.
“I doubt it will dry by the time you leave, but maybe it will a little.”
It was sweet of him to be so concerned about her.
A few minutes later, a female cop walked in. Lizzy looked at the bag she was carrying.
“My bag!”
The woman laughed. “Isaac said you had left it in the trunk. The chief okayed us to get it out and bring it to you. There’s a bathroom across the hall. Go ahead and change into something dry.”
Not waiting to hear more, Lizzy rushed over and grabbed her bag. “Denke. It will be good to be warm again.”
Isaac and the woman laughed softly. Hurrying to the bathroom, she searched through the bag, quickly locating the items she needed. She even found a clean kapp to put on her head. Never again would she take dry clothes, or being warm, for granted.
When she returned to the room, Isaac pulled out a chair for her. She sat, then looked up at him expectantly.
He sighed. “Okay. I want to know if you would be willing to look through the images we have to see if you can identify the man you saw. If you can, we’ll try to arrest him. Soon as that’s done, you could be on your way home to your family in no time.”
“I hope so. I will look at your pictures.”
What she hadn’t counted on was the sheer volume of pictures. It took her nearly two hours to go through each and every picture. And still, she did not find an image that matched.
“Are you sure you would recognize him if you saw him?” Isaac stood to pace the room.
“I would recognize him. I will probably have nightmares of his face for years to come. His picture is not here.”
Moving back to the table, Isaac turned and leaned against it. “I believe you. I had hoped his picture would be in the database.”
“Jah, me, too. Did I look at all the pictures?”
“Yup. That was all of them.”
“What do we do? I didn’t see him.” She crossed her arms and rubbed her hands up and down them, shivering slightly, although not from being cold.
“The visual artist will be in tomorrow morning. You will have to come back and give her a description, so she can make a copy of his image to circulate.”
“What about going to my family?”
Isaac did not answer right away, which meant she was not going to like his answer. “Here’s the deal, Lizzy. I want to take you there, but I also want to offer you police protection.”
“That will not happen, Isaac. My uncle will never agree to that.”
Irritation flashed across his face and then vanished. Had she imagined it? She didn’t think so. Something she had said had bothered him. A lot.
“What was that expression for?”
Rubbing his hand through his hair, he avoided her eyes for a few seconds.
“Isaac?”
Finally, he answered. “I’m sorry, Lizzy. Your safety is important. So is that of your family. I really think you should stay in town tonight where we can guard you. I can have someone go to your relatives’ house and explain where you are.”
That was not what she wanted. Part of her wanted to stubbornly insist he drive her out to Addie’s house. But she would never forgive herself if her cousin or
her other relatives were injured because of her.
“Jah. I would appreciate that.”
His jaw dropped open. “I was sure you’d argue with me.”
The shock on his face amused her. She huffed out a quiet laugh. Her amusement didn’t last. “I have been in a similar situation before, Isaac. I know that sometimes it is best to work with the police.”
He went still. Why had she said anything? She never talked about what had happened.
Ryder entered the room a minute later, putting their conversation on hold. Lizzy took one look at his face and knew that the news had just gone from bad to worse. Isaac straightened away from the wall and faced his coworker.
“What’s the bad news?” Isaac said.
Ryder sat down at the table and stretched his long legs out in front of him.
“The bad news is that I wasn’t able to get any identification on the logo. The shooter, however, might have been a different story. Did he have a scar on his forehead?” Ryder used his finger to imitate the jagged shape of the scar on his own forehead.
Lizzy started. She had forgotten about that. “Jah. He had a scar. It was red still, as if it were recent.”
He nodded. “My sources said the shooter could be a young man by the name of Zave. No last name. He has a rep for being a drug dealer, and a vicious one at that. Apparently, Zave has a nasty temper.”
“Zave? That’s unusual,” Isaac mused. “Anything else?”
Ryder shook his head. “No one wanted to talk. I was astonished to get this much. Whatever he looks like, he has people scared. The word on the street is that his enemies, those who get in his way, they tend to disappear.”
“A drug dealer!” Lizzy covered her mouth with her hand, horrified. The idea had never occurred to her.
Both men shot glances her way.
“It makes sense.”
“What does?” she asked Isaac, even as Ryder nodded in agreement.
Isaac met her gaze squarely. “It makes sense that Zave would be a drug dealer. I think we’ll find that Bill was one of his customers.”
