She thought she could make out a hoodie on the driver, but maybe he just had long hair. Suddenly, she turned left on Doral Avenue without signaling and watched in her mirror as the car followed suit.
One more turn, she thought. One more turn and I’ve got you.
She took the next right and the next, speeding up after each turn, then squealing a bit as she went around the third turn. By all rights, the third turn should have brought her in behind the white car which had been following her. It didn’t.
Chapter 6
Rachel looked frantically at her rear view, then out each window, then scanned the road ahead. The car was nowhere to be found, which meant that he had realized that she’d made him and had taken off.
With a heavy sigh, she made her way back to her original route, keeping an eye out for the car all the while. Her heart was still pounding and now her head had begun to hurt from the disappointment of losing the guy.
Who was it anyway? Could it have been Mike?
Or were the police following her to make sure she made good on her promises to the sheriff? She didn’t think that was the case, though. Dooley would never pull an officer off patrol and put him on a tail. It didn’t make sense.
By the time she pulled the car into the mall lot, she had nearly calmed down. But her stomach had begun to rumble and so she made a promise to herself to go to the tiny food court and grab a burger or something. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d eaten. It was a good thing that Rick wasn’t there. Otherwise he’d have been mad at her for so many reasons.
There were only a few people milling around the mall that morning. It had only been open for half an hour, so the only people immediately visible were the two elderly women out for their daily mall-walk and the guy who delivered the local paper to the news stand. She smiled a greeting at each of them and kept on her way.
The mall was L-shaped and as she made the turn, she realized why no one else was around. They were having an art show at the end of that ell and the crowds had clustered there. The town was so starved for activities that, when an event actually occurred, people flocked to it like vultures to roadkill.
It was a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd as she made her way into the fray. People stood gawking and commenting. A few were even purchasing some of the artworks on display. She had to admit, for the most part, that most of them were pretty good. They ran the gamut from watercolors to sculpture to fiber art and each displayed a level of skill that Rachel could never hope to possess. It made her smile. Culture. Right there in tiny Laurel Falls.
Someone bumped into her violently then, knocking her backward a step and spinning her a bit. By luck or by design, it had been her good shoulder which had been struck, so she was spared the embarrassing scream of agony that would have otherwise resulted. She turned to glare at the bumper and perhaps say something nasty to him, but he had continued along his path without hesitation. Immediately, she checked her purse and made sure that he hadn’t tried to rob her. It was a small town, but sometimes crooks followed the art shows and such from town to town, knowing that the pickings would be good. But everything was in its place, so she discounted that possibility.
It had been a man, though not a large one. He had been wearing sneakers, jeans, and a dark hoodie just like…just like the man who had been in the car following her. And just like Mike when he had robbed the bank.
Rachel spun, searching the crowd for him. She caught sight of the top of his hoodie as he melted into the crowd and turned the corner, breaking away from them to head for the exit. Indecision rooted her feet to the spot. If it was Mike, she might finally find out why he had abandoned Diane and why he had robbed the bank. But if it wasn’t Mike, she might be putting herself in danger.
“Screw it!” she growled to herself and took off at a dead run.
She flew through the crowd, managing not to collide with anyone, and dodged around the corner. The door was just drifting closed and she barreled toward it, legs pumping, heart hammering. She hurdled the bench in true Parkour style, then flew out the door after the man.
By the time she reached the sidewalk, the man was gone. He was so completely gone that not even a hint of him existed. No echoing footsteps, no stirring breeze. She had never had a chance at catching him. As she turned to go back inside the mall, a white two-door car drove past with a slight man at the wheel. He was wearing a hoodie.
Rachel arrived home tired, down-hearted, and still hungry. Every single thing she had done for the past two days had been a dismal failure. She was no closer to knowing Mike’s story, no closer to solving the mystery of the cemetery or Horace’s murder. In fact, she couldn’t even say who had followed her on the way to the mall or who had accosted her in the mall.
Furious, she slapped her keys onto the table and slammed her purse down. And that’s when she saw it. There was a small piece of white paper sticking out of the small pocket on the front of her purse, usually reserved for her cell phone or keys. She tended to keep both in her pockets, so the pocket was always empty.
Now, however, the piece of paper sat there mocking her, daring her to reach over and pluck it from its nest. Had some old list, hastily jotted down and shoved deep into the pocket, come back to remind her of something once important?
She blinked rapidly, letting her hand reach out for it, slowly at first, then snatching it before it could escape.
It was written on plain notebook paper of the sort owned by every schoolchild across the country. The jagged left edge placed it in a notebook at one time, and the folds had been hastily made, meaning the note had been written on impulse. She unfolded it, wondering if fingerprints could be gotten from it. In the end, she decided to just read it.
“Tell Diane I love her and I’m innocent. I’ll come back for her when this is through. Mike.”
Nothing more than that. And yet, it spoke volumes. No guilty man would take the risk of putting a note into a stranger’s purse.
Rachel dropped into the closest chair and let her body droop. Suddenly, every single thing she’d done for the past two days came back to haunt her. Her head throbbed, her stomach roiled, and her mouth went rapidly and completely dry. She could almost hear Rick’s voice echoing in her ears. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of business. How many times had he said that? A dozen? A hundred.
She launched herself out of the chair and hurried to the kitchen, shoving the note into her jeans pocket as she went. There was a large pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge and she grabbed a glass from the drainer and filled it with the brew. Guzzling half of it in one shot, she turned her attentions to the food. There were enough sandwich fixings to feed a small army and she grabbed a stack of them, along with the mustard and bread, and carted the whole mess to the kitchen island.
She remembered when she and Rick had bought the house, some eight years ago. They had knocked out the wall which separated the kitchen and laundry room, eliminating the laundry room and making the kitchen large enough to serve them both well. She was grateful for that space now, as she tossed things around and grabbed for a plate and utensils.
When she was done with her work, there stood on the plate a sandwich so perfect, so beautiful in its creation as to be a work of art unto itself. She stood back and admired it, her mouth watering and her lower lip twitching in anticipation. Then she seized hold of it and bit in, moaning her delight like a hymn of praise to the sandwich.
She tucked the half-full glass of tea into the crook of her arm and carted plate, sandwich and tea back to the living room. She placed it all on the table before her and slumped onto the sofa, reaching for the sandwich with one hand and the remote with the other. The sandwich disappeared bite by bite as she surfed through the channels, finally landing on some cooking show that she had never noticed before. The last bite was shoved into her mouth and she chewed, swallowed, and licked at her fingers in great, greedy delight. Then she drained the tea and flopped onto the sofa on her back with a happy smile.
Rachel woke with a start in the darkness of late evening. The TV was still on, though the show had changed. Frantic, she searched the room for signs of what had happened to her. The clock told her that she had been asleep for four hours. Her body told her that she should have gone to bed and made it eight.
In a desperate attempt to return to normal, she hauled her body off the sofa and grabbed the plate and glass. Rick would be home in a few hours and she wanted to process the video. She refilled her glass and dumped the plate in the sink, then went straight to her purse to fetch her phone.
Once she had booted up the computer, she Blue-toothedinto it and transferred the video onto her hard drive. It was larger and a tad brighter on the computer monitor, but the audio was still indecipherable. She reached behind her for the remote, arched her back and snagged the remote. Then she turned the TV off and tossed the remote to the sofa.
She ran the audio through first one program and then the other, finally putting it on a wavelength equalizer to enhance the voices and remove distracting static and background noise. The result was disheartening. It brought out a few scattered words and offered no real clue as to the speakers’ true voices.
Next, she processed the video. She was able to brighten it a bit and enhance the colors. Once she isolated the two visible faces, she was able to drop them into her graphics software and enhance them. It produced a nearly recognizable portrait of two men; still nothing concrete. But standing behind those other men was a shorter man, leaning against a shovel and wearing a dark hoodie. When she put on the color filter, it turned the hoodie dark blue…the same color the man in the mall had been wearing.
Rachel saved copies of her work, then emailed a copy of every file she had to Sheriff Dooley, along with an explanatory note. Then she stood up and began to pace.
“Mike helped rob the bank. Is Mike also involved in the goings on at the cemetery? It was definitely Mike in the mall, and probably Mike in the car that followed me. But why would Mike be involved in all of this? And did he murder Horace? Oh, surely not! If he had done something that awful, for whatever reason, he wouldn’t have given me that note, would he? Why wouldn’t he come around and talk to Diane himself?”
She continued to pace, and think, wishing that Rick was there to bounce ideas off him. Nothing ever became real for her until she shared it with Rick. It had always been that way. It always would. But he would have a thing or two to share with her, wouldn’t he? When he found out all that she had been up to and how many close calls she had had in just two days, he would have a lot to share with her.
In an effort to calm herself and gain more momentum on the case, she went back to the computer. She could play with a duplicate file and apply any sort of filter or enhancement she wanted without fear of wrecking the original files. And so she played with settings and ran everything through every bit of software she owned. She even tried painting in details which she thought might be there. In the end, it all offered nothing in the way of real results, but it did pass several hours.
Having failed so miserably at such a simple task, she took to researching other software, other filters which might do more for the video than her own had. She hadn’t gone as deep as she might. She almost never resorted to the dark net; only when she had no other options. Her fingers hovered over the RETURN key now as she pondered the ramifications of doing it now. In the end, she had no other choice. She needed the sort of hard-core software used only by criminals and the most secret of government organizations.
As her finger struck the key, the lights went out. It was as if that simple keystroke had brought complete devastation down on the planet. Karma had come to mete out its retribution.
For a long moment, she was motionless. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears and her hands began to tremble. Then she realized just how ridiculous she was being. It was a coincidence, just a coincidence. A fuse had blown or some squirrel had run across a transformer somewhere. Simple as that.
She waited and counted the moments, certain the power would be restored in a few seconds, or minutes. When this failed to pass, she stood slowly, wondering if the emergency flashlight was still in the kitchen drawer or if it even still worked. She knew her own house, but klutz that she was, she walked in short, shuffling steps with her hands out just in case she had misjudged the positioning of the furniture. It wouldn’t do to add a broken ankle or a fresh set of bruises to her already-growing list of ailments.
The fuse box was in the garage, all the way across the house and down five steps. As she entered the kitchen, her hand felt around for the drawer knob. And then it froze.
The back door was standing wide open. This was the door that led to the yard, not to the garage and it was open, not just cracked open or slightly ajar, but full-on, an-elephant-could-walk-through-it open. Rachel swallowed back fear and slid the drawer open carefully. The door had been locked when she put her dishes in the kitchen. She had not opened it all day.
Her fingers refused to find the flashlight amid her growing terror. When finally they lucked upon it, she closed her hand around it and jerked it free of the other detritus which lived in the junk drawer. She flicked at the switch with her thumb but nothing happened. Checking the weight, she realized that one of them had robbed the flashlight of its batteries…probably to fuel some other, momentarily indispensable item.
Panic lodged in her throat then. Her phone was in her purse in the living room and the guns were all locked away on the other side of the house from where she now stood. She stood still, trying to ignore the pounding sound of her heart and listen for other sounds. It was amazing how quiet the world became when the power went out. Without refrigerators running and computer fans humming, the world was a silent, empty place.
And where were the cats? They never went outside. Morgan was terrified of the outdoors and would run and hide if you so much as tried to get her outside. And Jean Claude wouldn’t go anywhere without Morgan. Surely they hadn’t gone out the door.
Rachel licked her lips and the sound of it was deafening. From somewhere in the living room came a sound, a soft shuffling as though mice were tiptoeing across velvet. It couldn’t be Rick. He wasn’t capable of being that quiet. And it wasn’t the sound of the cats.
She turned slowly, trying to get a grip on her racing mind and to remain as silent as possible. She had only two choices now. She could bolt out the back door in a panicked streak or she could go into the living room for her phone. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, fighting for calm. Then she shoved off from the counter and walked into the living room.
Somehow, she thought that if she walked with confidence, she would have confidence. She was wrong. The further she walked, the more she wished she had simply run out the back door and gone to a neighbor’s. Still, the phone was only ten steps away now. Surely she could make it there before anything bad happened.
Surely, she was wrong.
She had just passed the dining room table, was halfway to the phone, when strong arms shot out of the darkness and reeled her in. She felt the hand go over her mouth, the other wrap around her waist. The terror nearly threw her into a dead faint. Then she was being pulled backward, crushed against a hard chest. There were things she could do, things Rick had taught her about self-defense. She couldn’t remember a single one of them.
Hot breath danced over her neck and yet it chilled the skin there. Whoever it was was male, with smaller hands and a shorter countenance than Rick or Logan. This was no joke. This was real and it was scary.
“If you want to keep this pretty little neck in one piece, you’ll stay away from the cemetery.” The voice was deep and gravelly. The words came out through clenched teeth. He tilted her head to the side to emphasize how vulnerable she was. “You keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you. I won’t warn you again.”
Rachel felt tears burning in her eyes. She felt her stomach lurch. For all of that, she nodded her head vehemently. Then she felt dizzy, as though she might pass out. She had never passed out before and she didn’t want to start now. Perhaps the man had drugged her or maybe there was something on his hand that made her woozy.
Then he threw her. It was more than a shove. He pitched her hard across the room, sent her flying across the armchair and crashing into the table. She heard the lamp break and felt the book beneath her back as she landed.
She was panting now, hysterical. There were guns and weapons all through the house. She wasn’t stupid. And yet the fear had paralyzed her, made her numb and thoughtless. She stayed on the floor, gasping for breath, shaking so hard her teeth were rattling. Then she heard the back door slam shut. Seconds later, the lights came back on.
Then she ran. She ran for the back door, which she locked. She ran for her phone. And then she ran for the bedroom, where she locked herself in while she retrieved a gun and dialed 9-1-1.
She hung up before it rang even once.
“Hi, honey! I’m home!”
The sound of Rick’s voice jump-started Rachel’s heart and made her jump in her seat. She quickly minimized the video window, leaving a window open to display an assortment of shoes on her favorite shopping website.
“Baby, you’re back!” She fought to keep the pain at bay as she rose from the chair and made for him. A small grimace twisted her lips as she did so, but she managed to force it back down as she met him with a kiss and a smile. “How was the fishing?”
Rick kissed her briefly, then drew her into a hug, eliciting a small cry from Rachel. “There’s three pounds of filets out in the freezer.”
“Hail the conquering hero,” she laughed. “I’m glad you had a good time.”
He dropped onto the sofa then and began unlacing his boots. He removed them and pushed them back under the table, out of the way. Then he leaned back against the sofa with a sigh, his fingers laced over his belly and his eyes sliding shut. Rachel eased down next to him, maintaining the smile she had put on, just in case he looked her way.
Deep-Fried Homicide (The Laurel Falls Mysteries Book 1) Page 9
