A Promise to Protect (Logan Point Book #2): A Novel

by Patricia Bradley

  Cold chills ran over her body. The alarm on her phone she’d set for six-twenty beeped. She couldn’t leave TJ here with Tom. And she couldn’t be late to the hospital. “TJ, let’s go see if Miss Sarah is up. Maybe she can take you shopping to get school clothes.”

  “Now? I want to stay—”

  “I don’t have time to stand here and argue with you.” She nudged him up the stairs.

  “But she’s in the kitchen.”

  Pain shot through her jaw as she ground her teeth. “Then that’s where we’ll go.” She pushed through the kitchen door with TJ in tow.

  Sarah sat at the table, drinking coffee with Marisa. “Wondered if you’d overslept,” she said and poured Leigh a cup of coffee.

  “I didn’t hear my alarm.” Leigh gulped a sip of the strong brew, burning her tongue. She rummaged through her purse for money. “Sarah, would you mind taking TJ shopping today? Get him something new for school? Since the fire, I’ve only bought summer clothes. I’d meant to do it tomorrow, but he has that ball game tomorrow afternoon and I have paperwork in the morning.” She was rattling on, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “That’s a good idea,” Marisa said. She turned to Sarah. “Emily’s dropping the twins off shortly. Maybe we’ll tag along. She’s been so busy, I’m sure she hasn’t bought their clothes, either.”

  Leigh hadn’t anticipated Marisa tagging along, but she couldn’t very well object. She handed Sarah four crisp twenty dollar bills. “If that isn’t enough, let me know.” She knelt over and hugged TJ. “I’ll see you around four.”

  He shrugged out of her embrace. “Does Miss Sarah know what your surprise is?”

  Leigh glanced at Sarah, who had raised her eyebrows. Her throat tightened and she swallowed. “Nope, she doesn’t know.” She tousled his copper hair then grabbed a Styrofoam cup and poured fresh coffee into it. “Thanks,” she said as she walked to the back door. “I really appreciate you taking him shopping.”

  “Wait!” Marisa stood. “Ben’s not here. You can’t go without an escort.”

  In her haste, she’d totally forgotten her escort. Where was Ben, anyway? “I can’t wait. I’m already late as it is.”

  Marisa grabbed the phone on the wall. “Let me find out what’s going on with Ben.”

  A text beeped on Leigh’s phone, and she glanced at it. “That’s okay. Deputy Ford is at the gate.” Ben could’ve at least let her know himself.

  “Mom, can I start your car?”

  She tossed him her keys. “See if you can beat me to it.”

  He shot out the door ahead of her and, ten yards away, stopped and pressed the start button. The Avenger hummed to life.

  “That’s so cool,” TJ said as he handed her the keys.

  “Yeah.” TJ loved technology, even if it was packaged in a five-year-old car. She slid in the seat and lowered the window. “See you this afternoon.”

  A little after nine, Leigh took out her cell and dialed Ian. He answered practically on the first ring. “Good morning,” she said.

  “I hope you’re not calling to cancel our date.”

  Oops. She had completely forgotten their date. Another thing she needed to mention to Ben, along with the news she was moving out. But first things first. “How about if we amend it?”

  “As in?”

  “I want to accept your generous offer to let us use your house on Webster. I’d like to move in today.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end. “So, Ben approved the house?”

  “Ben . . . I’ll make it all right with him. Can you meet me at the house, say around four or four-thirty?”

  “What if I drop the key off at the hospital, and then bring dinner around seven?”

  “Perfect. And, Ian, thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  After hanging up, Leigh didn’t immediately slide her cell back in her pocket. It was done. Now to tell Ben. She dialed his number and was relieved when it went to voice mail. She left a message asking him to call her. Fifteen minutes later as she was looking over a chart, he called back. “Thanks for getting back to me,” she said after she answered.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to escort you to the hospital, but I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of the fire here at the jail.”

  “Your deputy did an excellent job, and for the record, I don’t think I need an escort any longer.”

  “I don’t agree. Did you need anything in particular?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve found a house and want to move in this afternoon.”

  “Whoa, slow down. Did you say you wanted to move today?”

  “You heard correctly.”

  “Leigh—”

  “Ben, we can’t stay with your parents indefinitely. The house Ian is offering is in a gated community with a guard, in the middle of the block with houses all around. It will be perfectly safe.”

  “I don’t want to discuss this on the phone. Would you please wait to make a decision until I pick you up at three?”

  He wasn’t changing her mind, even if he did sound hurt. Neither did she want him to show up at the hospital and argue with her in the middle of the ER. “I’ll see you at three.”

  Six hours to dread the dragon.

  Armero smoothed his hand over the soft leather seat. He never tired of the smell of a new car, and the week-old SUV was no exception. Where was Jonas? He should have been here already. The outside heat seeped into the car, and he adjusted the temperature lower. Behind the driver’s seat, a box of receivers awaited transfer to Jonas’s truck.

  The passenger door opened behind him, and he startled as Jonas slid in the backseat. “I didn’t see you come up,” he snapped.

  “Grouchy today,” Jonas said. “What’s got your goat?”

  “You’re late, and I have meetings.” His lip curled at the odor of sweat and some other foul scent.

  “Well, I’m here now. You got the receivers?”

  “Beside you in the floorboard.” He drew in a steadying breath and almost gagged. The man evidently had come straight from feeding hogs. He’d never get the scent out of his car. He coughed and left his hand over his nose. “Where were you after the fire at the jail? And what did you mean by setting it? What if you’d been caught? Or Logan figures out what you’re doing?”

  “I wasn’t caught. And he won’t. At least not until I’m ready. But Logan is going to pay for my two boys.”

  Armero lowered his hand. “Billy Wayne died because he joined your vendetta against Ben Logan.”

  “All Billy Wayne wanted was justice for Tommy Ray’s death.”

  “Like shooting at the sheriff would give you justice. If you kill an officer of the law and get caught, it’s automatically the death penalty.”

  “I ain’t stupid.”

  “I don’t know about that. You almost killed his father.”

  “My mistake that I didn’t. He was getting too close to my dogs. I came up on him nosing around my pits, then hightailing it back to town. Figured he was going after a search warrant. So I intercepted him and—”

  “Just shut up. I don’t want to know anything about what you’re doing with those dogs, or anything else illegal.”

  Jonas snorted. “You think there’s a difference between the two of us?” He nudged him on the shoulder. “We’re cut from the same cloth. I knew that when I came to you about selling rifles to the Mexicans. And you knew I had fighting dogs when you agreed.”

  Armero clenched his jaw tight. Jonas was a loose cannon. And he knew too much. The idea of selling guns to Mexico had been his idea. Four years ago, the old man worked at Maxwell Industries, and it’d been easy for him to slip a couple of unstamped receivers out when he took a smoke break. Jonas hid them and Armero picked them up. But it was Armero’s connections that made the operation a success. He never told Jonas what kind of money he received for the rifles, but Jonas seemed content with what he gave him, which was plenty.

  Maybe it was time to get rid of the old man. F
rom the rearview mirror, Armero flicked his gaze over Jonas. Stains of no telling what dotted his khaki shirt. Wet dog. That’s what Jonas smelled like. “And I wish you would take a bath and change clothes before we meet.”

  Armero tried shallow breathing. He remembered something else he’d heard. “Did you put those snakes on the ball field last night?”

  The older man cackled. “You ought to have seen Logan and that deputy’s face.”

  “A child was bitten!”

  “He survived.”

  “What was the purpose?” He had to find a way to get rid of Gresham, but another body right now? No, he’d bide his time and make sure there were no trails leading to him when Jonas was caught.

  A sly look slid over Jonas’s face. “He thinks he can protect this county. Every time I do something, he finds out he can’t.” He opened the car door and spat on the pavement before exiting Armero’s car with the receivers. “I heard he was running for sheriff in the special election. Won’t take but a few people talking about the snakes and fires to beat him. He won’t want to be sheriff by the time I get through. Won’t have the heart for it, anyway. Especially when I get finished with his girlfriend and her boy.”

  As soon as Gresham pulled away in his beat-up truck, Armero lowered his windows. Maybe a fast drive around the bypass would get the stink out of his car. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the company parking lot.

  He reached under his seat and pulled out a black box. From it he removed a disposable cell phone and synthesizer. After punching in the code required to block the number of the cell phone, he dialed her number and waited for it to ring. When it went to her voice mail, he hung up. He’d try again later.

  13

  Leigh was going to drive him crazy. Ben didn’t want her to move out of his parents’ house. He hooked his phone on his belt and opened his office window to let out the acrid scent of burnt roofing. Maybe he could change her mind when he saw her at the hospital.

  What he wouldn’t give right now for a thirty-minute nap. He was way past the days of staying up all night and functioning the next day. Even with his door shut, the whine of the cleaning service’s shop vac made a nap impossible. At least the electrician had rerouted wiring and restored power. He massaged the muscles in his neck, and his gaze settled on his dad’s box of papers. He set it on his desk and removed the top. Might as well go through it now.

  There wasn’t much. A couple of advertisement letters and an email joke his dad liked enough to print. He picked up another email from some sheriff in Texas. There was a long list of people it had been sent to, and his dad had scribbled a note in the margin. MI with a question mark.

  At the bottom of the page was a photo of an assault rifle. He backtracked and read the email. Seems the gun in the photo had been found in a drug raid and had no serial number stamped on it. The sheriff who had sent the email was trying to track down the maker of the gun.

  A knock startled him and he laid the email on his desk. “Come in.”

  The door opened, and Taylor Martin walked in, waving her hand in front of her nose. “This smells as bad as when I burned my biscuits.”

  “Taylor! You got my message.” Dressed in green shorts and a white T-shirt with “Walls of Jericho” printed across it, the psychology professor looked more like a student and certainly not like a crime scene profiler.

  “Yep. What’s going on around here?” she asked.

  He motioned for her to shut the door. “Someone set fire to the jail last night. Used a bow and arrow. Sit down.” He pointed toward a leather chair. “How’s Nick? And your mom?”

  “Busy. Nick is working on edits and finalizing the plans for the boys’ camp. Walls of Jericho should be accepting boys by next summer. And Mom’s okay. We’re all grieving Jonathan.”

  Ben nodded. Earlier this summer her uncle had died from wounds received when a madman tried to kill Taylor. It’d been a complex case covering three jurisdictions, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Washington State. The Tennessee state judge appointee who attempted to kill both Taylor and her mother had been killed by the man he hired. That man, now awaiting trial, was obsessed with the professor. “I hear the University of Memphis has hired you. Congratulations.”

  “It was time to come home. I won’t start teaching until the winter session.”

  “Why not the fall?”

  She held her left hand up. An emerald-cut diamond glittered on her third finger. “I have a December wedding to plan.”

  “Nick popped the question!”

  Color rose in her cheeks as she nodded. “Last week.”

  “Congrat—oops, I think that’s supposed to be ‘best wishes’ for you. I’ll congratulate Nick when I see him. He made a good choice.”

  She blushed again and glanced around the office. “Enjoy working this?” She picked up the Rubik’s Cube on the corner of his desk.

  “About as much as going to the dentist. I just can’t grasp the concept.”

  She tilted her head and studied the cube, then began twisting. When she turned the face to him, she said, “Always remember the center color defines the color for the side you’re looking at. And I always start with this.”

  The face of the cube had a white cross.

  “From there it’s just a matter of memorizing a few logarithms.”

  “Logarithms? No wonder I can’t learn how to do it. I almost failed trig.”

  She laughed and set the Rubik’s Cube back on his desk. “You didn’t call me down here to teach you how to do that. What’s up?”

  Ben handed her a folder he’d compiled as soon as the electricity had been restored. “That’s a file on three crimes. The fire at Leigh Somerall’s house—she’s probably more familiar to you as Leigh Jackson, Tony Jackson’s sister—that one just came back from the fire marshal today. He discovered a broadhead arrow point in the rubble.”

  It’d been pure diligence on the fire marshal’s part that the arrow tip had been found. Ben had driven by once when he was literally sifting rubble through a sieve. “Then we have the five snakes let loose on one of the ball fields at the park last night, and now, the fire here at the jail.”

  “I remember the Jackson family. Terrible about Tony.” Taylor took a pen from her purse then opened the folder and scanned the documents. “Three victims?”

  He pressed his lips in a thin line. “Three victims, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s just one target—me.” He leaned forward. “I thought maybe you could tell me if someone is out to make me look incompetent, or am I crazy?”

  “Why do you think someone would do that?”

  “I filed to run in the special sheriff’s election last week. There are a couple of other candidates, but no one who’d resort to what you see there. Still, they may have friends who would.”

  “Leigh Jackson.” She looked up from the file. “Don’t you have a history with her?”

  Everyone knowing your business—one of the benefits of living in a small town. If Taylor remembered their relationship, who else did? Ben licked his lips. “That was ten years ago.”

  “Some people have long memories.”

  That was what he was afraid of. What if the shooting the morning after Tony’s murder was connected to the other three crimes? He turned to a stack of files behind him and took the top one and made a copy. “Add this one to your files.”

  Taylor scanned it. “Billy Wayne Gresham? I read about this in the paper. Didn’t he die in an accident leaving the scene?”

  “Yeah. And we found a .38 Smith and Wesson at his house, but Livy hasn’t gotten the ballistics report back, so right now he’s only a person of interest in Tony’s murder.” Ben fingered the original file. “Do you ever get a gut feeling about a case? That everything isn’t what it seems?”

  She chuckled. “All the time. What’s your gut telling you?”

  Ben sighed. “It’s hard to put my finger on. No denying Billy Wayne was the one who pulled the trigger that morning at Leigh’s. Bullets matched the Sub-2
000 found in the saddlebag on his cycle.”

  Taylor traced the pen along her jawline. “Is there a connection between you and Billy Wayne?”

  “Yeah. I let his brother drown three years ago.”

  The words dropped into the room, creating a ripple of silence. She stilled her pen. “I remember now. Mom mailed me the newspaper clippings—every month she sent an envelope filled with newspaper articles she thought I’d be interested in. But what I remember is an accident, not you letting someone drown.”

  “He died all the same.” He hoped she didn’t try to psychoanalyze him. He waited as she scribbled in her notepad. Ben looked over his notes. “There’s one more angle. Leigh has only been working in the ER for six weeks, and she suspected abuse in one of the cases she treated. A two-year-old boy with cigarette burns on his arms and legs put there by the mother’s live-in. She reported it to Social Services, and when the mother’s boyfriend was arrested, he threatened Leigh.”

  “Have you questioned him?” Taylor asked as she made notes.

  “Unfortunately, he disappeared after he made bail.”

  “I don’t think he’s—” She stopped writing and winced. “Forget I said that. I make it a practice to wait until I’ve studied a case before I offer any opinion. What seems obvious on the surface isn’t always what it seems once I get into the case, and I might send you investigating in the wrong direction. I’ll work on this and get back to you.”

  “Can we afford you? The county only pays standard rates.”

  A twinkle gleamed in her eyes. “And I only charge standard rates.”

  “Yeah, right. I appreciate any help you can give me.” As Taylor stood, Ben did likewise. “Any idea, time wise?”

  “Give me a day or two.”

  He’d have to make do with that. His cell rang as he extended his hand.

  “You better get that,” she said. “I’ll see my way out the back.”

  “Thanks again.” Ben glanced at his phone. U.S. Marshal Luke Donovan.

  “Luke, glad you could get back to me so quickly,” he said as Taylor shut the door behind her.