by Cindi Myers
“Your friend got a problem with cops?” Travis asked.
“He’s not comfortable with new people,” Wade said. “He did four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has trouble sometimes with PTSD.”
Travis nodded. Maybe that explained the hostility he had felt from the guy. Or maybe Travis was more suspicious than most people. A hazard of the job, he supposed. “I doubt you’ll have any more trouble from your shoplifter,” he said to Wade and Brock. “You probably scared him off. But I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Thanks.”
Travis returned to his SUV and climbed in. He started the vehicle and was about to pull out of his parking spot when he glanced over at the passenger seat and slammed on the brakes. The box and the rock that had been thrown through Lacy’s window were gone.
Chapter Three
“Why would someone steal the rock?” Lacy folded her arms over her chest and took a step back from Travis. He had shown up at her house this morning—supposedly to “check on” her and her family. But then he had come out with this crazy story about someone taking the rock that had been thrown through her window. “Do you think I took it or something?”
“No!” He put up his hands, as if he wanted to reach for her, then put them down. “I wanted you to know because you’re the victim in this case, and you have a right to know what’s going on.”
She unfolded her arms, relaxing a little. She had insisted on talking with him on the front porch—mainly so her parents wouldn’t overhear. Her mom and dad meant well, but they tended to hover now that she was back home. “So someone just opened the door of your sheriff’s department vehicle and took the evidence box?” she asked. “How does that happen? Wasn’t your door locked?”
“No one locks their car doors around here.” He looked sheepish—an endearing expression, really—and she didn’t want to feel anything like that for him. “Besides, it’s a cop car. Who breaks into a cop car? And to steal a rock?”
“Maybe they didn’t know what was in the box?” she said. “Or maybe somebody is pranking you—wants to give you a hard time.”
“Maybe.” He put one booted foot up on a metal footlocker her mom used as a side table on the porch, and she tried not to notice the way the khaki fabric stretched over his muscular thigh. She didn’t like being around Travis, but apparently her body couldn’t ignore the fact that he was the sexiest guy she’d been near in three years. “Or maybe whoever threw the rock took it because they thought I could use it somehow to link them to the crime,” he added.
She forced her mind away from ogling the sheriff’s hot body to what was surely a more important matter. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Would a rock have fingerprints on it or something?”
“The surface was too rough to give good latent prints, and it looked like a common enough rock.”
“What about DNA?” she asked.
He laughed. “No offense, but no one does DNA testing for an act of vandalism. It’s expensive, and the results take a while to come back.”
She lowered herself to the cushioned rattan love seat. Her mother had made the cushions out of flowered chintz, faded now by the summer sun, but all the more comfortable and homey for it. “If the person who threw the rock stole it out of your SUV, that means they knew you had it. They must have been watching and seen you come to the house to get it.”
Travis sat beside her, the cushion dipping under his weight. She caught the scent of soap and starch and clean man, and fought to keep from leaning toward him. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they knew your family would call my office to report the threat, they saw my SUV and decided to take a look inside.”
“Either way, I’m completely creeped out.” She gripped the edge of the love seat. She had thought when she walked out of prison that she would feel free again, but she still felt trapped. Watched.
“I talked to Brenda Stenson yesterday,” Travis said. “She’s okay with us going through Andy’s files.”
Lacy nodded. “I’m not looking forward to that, you know.”
“I understand. But I’m hoping coming at the files cold after a few years away, you’ll spot something or remember something that didn’t seem relevant before.”
“What about the other evidence from the crime scene?” she asked. “Wasn’t there anything that pointed to someone besides me as the murderer? Or did you conveniently overlook that?” She didn’t even try to keep the sharp edge from her voice.
“I guess I deserved that,” Travis said. “But no—there wasn’t anything. Wade Tomlinson reported seeing a woman who looked like you near the office shortly before Andy would have died. Obviously, that wasn’t you. It might help if we could find this woman, but we don’t have much to go on—Wade admitted he only saw her from the back, and only for a few seconds, before she entered the office. I’ll question him again, but I doubt he’ll have anything useful to add.”
“Right. Who remembers anything very clearly that happened three years ago?” Lacy sighed.
“I think Andy’s files are the best place for us to start,” Travis said.
“Andy hadn’t been in practice very long,” Lacy said. “Still, he had a couple of big cabinets full of files. Everything was backed up on the computer, too, but he had been trained by a man who liked to keep paper copies of everything, and Andy was the same way. It will take a while to go through everything.”
“We can do a couple of boxes at a time. You could even bring them back here to look through.”
“Do you trust me to look through them by myself?” she asked.
“It would look better in court if we went through them together,” Travis said. “Otherwise, a good defense attorney would point out that you had a strong motive to make people believe someone else murdered Andy. They could suggest you planted evidence in the files.”
She fought against her inclination to bristle at what sounded to her ears like an accusation. After all, she knew all too well how attorneys could twist the most mundane events to make someone look guilty to a jury. “I guess you’re right,” she admitted. She stretched her legs out in front of her. “So how do you want to do this?”
“I’ll get together with Brenda this afternoon and go over to the storage unit with her. I’ll select a couple of boxes to go through first, seal them in her presence, get her to sign off on them, then bring them here. We’ll open them together and start going through the contents. Maybe I’ll even video everything, just in case there’s any question.”
“You’re very thorough.”
“I’m determined not to make any mistakes this time.”
And I’m determined not to let you, she thought.
* * *
ANDY STENSON’S STORAGE unit was located in a long metal shed at the end of Fireline Road on the edge of town. Weedy fields extended beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the shed on all sides, the land sloping upward from there toward Dakota Ridge and the mountains beyond. With no traffic and no neighbors, the location was peaceful, even beautiful, with the first summer wildflowers blooming in the fields and a china blue sky arching overhead. But there wasn’t anything beautiful about Travis’s errand here today.
Brenda agreed to meet him, and when he pulled into the rutted drive, he found her waiting at the far end, key in hand. “You open it,” she said, pushing the key at him. “I haven’t been in here since before Andy died. I paid a cleaning company to move all his stuff out here.”
“Are you okay being here now?” Travis asked, studying her face. Tension lines fanned out from her mouth, but she didn’t look on the verge of a breakdown.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to get this over with.”
He unfastened the padlock and rolled up the metal door of the unit. Sunlight illuminated jumbled stacks of file boxes. Furniture filled one corner of the unit—several filing cabinets and some chairs and Andy’s desk, scarred
and dusty. The chair he had been sitting in when he died, stained with his blood, was in a police storage unit, logged as evidence.
Brenda traced a finger across the dust on the desktop. Was she thinking about her young husband, who had been taken from her when they were still practically newlyweds? She squared her shoulders and turned to study the file boxes. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” she said. “Do you know what you want?”
“I want to look at his case files.” Travis studied the labels on the boxes, then removed the lid from one with the notation Clients, A through C. “I know you said you didn’t know much about his work, but who would you say was his biggest client at the time he died?”
“That one’s easy enough. Hake Development.” She pointed to a box on the bottom of the pile, with the single word HAKE scrawled on the end. “Andy couldn’t believe his luck when Henry Hake hired him instead of one of the big-city firms. Mr. Hake said he wanted to support local business.” She chuckled. “He did that, all right. Hake Development accounted for a big percentage of Andy’s income that year.” Her voice trailed away at these last words, as if she was remembering once more the reason the good fortune had ended.
“All right, I’ll start with this one.” Travis moved aside the stack of boxes to retrieve the Hake files, and found a second box, also marked Hake, behind it.
He set the boxes on the desk, then went to his car and retrieved the evidence tape and seals. “You’re verifying that I haven’t opened the boxes or tampered with them in any way,” he said.
“I am.” He ran a strip of wide tape horizontally and vertically across each box, sealing the tops in place, then asked Brenda to write her name across each piece of tape.
“I’ll video opening the boxes,” he said. “With Lacy’s parents as witnesses. That ought to satisfy any court that we aren’t up to anything underhanded.”
Brenda watched him, arms folded across her chest. “I hope you find something useful in there,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine what.”
“What was Andy doing for Hake, do you know?” Travis asked.
“Just the legal paperwork for the mining claims Henry Hake had bought and planned to develop as a vacation resort. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that environmental group got an injunction against the development and Andy was fighting that.”
“I remember a little about that,” Travis said. “They had a Ute Indian chief speak at a council meeting or something like that?”
“He wasn’t a chief, just a tribal representative—a friend of Paige Riddell’s. She was president of the group, I believe.”
“Maybe someone who didn’t want the development thought taking out Hake’s lawyer would stop the threat of the injunction being overturned,” Travis said.
“If they thought that, they were wrong. Hake hired another firm to represent him—someone out of Denver this time. I don’t know what happened after that, though I guess he hasn’t done anything with the property yet.”
“Wouldn’t hurt to check it out,” Travis said.
He picked up the first box as his phone beeped. Setting it down, he answered the call. “A car just crashed through the front window of the Cake Walk Café.” Adelaide sounded out of breath with excitement. “Gage is headed there. Dwight and Roberta are in training today. I can call someone from another shift in if you want me to. The ambulance is en route from Junction.”
“I’ll handle it. I’m on my way.” Travis hung up the phone and studied the boxes. He could take them with him, but after what happened yesterday, he didn’t want to risk someone trying to get hold of them. He returned the keys to Brenda. “Lock up after I’ve left. I’ll have to send someone to retrieve these later.”
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Apparently, someone crashed into the café.”
Brenda covered her mouth with her hand. “I hope no one was hurt.”
“Me, too.”
In the car, he called Lacy. “I picked out two boxes of files from Andy’s storage and got them sealed, but now I have to go on a call. It will be a while before I can get back to them.”
“I can pick them up,” she said. “If they’re already sealed, it shouldn’t make any difference, should it?”
He debated as he guided his SUV down the rutted dirt road leading away from the storage facility. “Ride out here with Brenda and have her deliver you and the boxes back to your house.” Before she could protest, he added, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t want to give any lawyers the opportunity to object.”
“All right. I’d like to visit with Brenda, anyway.”
“I’ll get back with you to set a time for the two of us to get together,” he said, and ended the call. As much as he wanted to find the person who had killed Andy Stenson, his job wouldn’t allow him to focus all his attention on one case. Right now he had a mess to clean up at the café.
* * *
LACY ENDED THE call from Travis and looked out the front window. The glass company had been out this morning to replace the broken pane and she had a clear view of the street. The car she had noticed earlier was still there—a faded blue sedan that had been parked in front of a vacation cottage three doors down and across the street from her parents’ house. The cottage had a For Sale sign in front, but Lacy was pretty sure no potential buyer had been inside the cottage all this time.
She retrieved her mother’s bird-watching binoculars from the bookcase by the door and returned to the window, training the glasses on the car. A man sat behind the wheel, head bent, attention on the phone in his hand. He was middle-aged, with light brown hair and narrow shoulders. He didn’t look particularly threatening, but then again, looks could be deceiving. And it wasn’t as if it would have taken that much brawn to throw that rock through the window yesterday afternoon.
She shifted the binoculars to the license plate on the car. BRH575. She’d remember the number and think about asking Travis to check it out. He owed her more than a few favors, didn’t he? She had almost mentioned the car to him while they were talking just now, but she didn’t want to give him the idea that she needed him for anything. She didn’t like to think of herself as hardened, but three years in prison had taught her to look out for herself.
She brought the glasses up to the man in the car and gasped as it registered that he had raised his own pair of binoculars and was focused on her. She took two steps back, fairly certain that he couldn’t see her inside the house, but unwilling to take chances. What was he doing out there, watching the house? Watching her? She replaced the binoculars on the shelf and headed toward the back of the house. As she passed her mother’s home office, Jeanette looked up from her computer. A former teacher, she now worked as an online tutor. “Who was that on the phone?” she asked.
Lacy started to lie, but couldn’t think of one that sounded convincing enough. “Travis canceled our meeting to go over Andy’s files,” she said. “He had to go on a call.”
“I hope everything’s all right.” Jeanette swiveled her chair around to face her daughter. “You’re okay, working with Travis?” she asked. “I know you don’t have the warmest feelings toward him, and I’ll admit, I had my doubts, too. But when I saw how hard he worked to clear your name...” She compressed her lips, struggling for control. “I really don’t think you’d be standing here right now if it wasn’t for him.”
“I wouldn’t have been in prison in the first place if it wasn’t for him, either,” Lacy said.
Jeanette said nothing, merely gave Lacy a pleading look.
“I’m okay working with him,” Lacy said. “I don’t know how much good going through those old files will do, but I’m willing to help.” She turned away again.
“Where are you going?” her mother asked.
“I thought I’d take a walk.”
“That’s nice.”
Lacy didn’t wait
for more, but hurried toward the back door. All the houses on this street backed up to the river, and a public trail ran along the bank. She let herself out the back gate and followed this trail up past four houses, then slipped alongside the fourth house, crossed the street behind the blue sedan, and walked up to the passenger side of the vehicle. The driver had lowered the front windows a few inches, so Lacy leaned in and said, loudly, “What do you think you’re doing, spying on me?”
The man juggled his phone, then dropped it. “You—you startled me!” he gasped.
“I saw you watching me,” Lacy said. “I want to know why.”
“I didn’t want to intrude. I was merely trying to get a feel for the neighborhood, and see how you were doing.”
“Who are you, and why do you care how I’m doing?” She was getting more annoyed with this guy by the second.
“I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. Alvin Exeter. I’m a writer. I specialize in true-crime stories.” He leaned across the seat and extended his hand toward her.
She ignored the outstretched hand. “I didn’t commit a crime,” she said. “Or don’t you read the papers?”
“No, of course. And that’s what I want to write about,” he said. “I’m planning a book on your wrongful conviction and its aftermath.”
“And you were planning to write about me without telling me?”
“No, no, of course not. I would love to interview you for the book, get your side of the story. I was merely looking for the right opportunity to approach you.”
“Get lost, Mr. Exeter,” she said. “And if you try to write about me, I’ll sue.”
“You could try,” he said. “But you’re a public figure now. I have every right to tell your story, based on court documents, news articles and interviews with anyone associated with you. Though, of course, the story will be more complete if you agree to cooperate with me.”
“No one I know will talk to you,” she said. Though how could she be sure of that, really?
