by Mayer, Dale
“Did you call the cops to let them know? Did they take any fingerprints?”
He shook his head. “I just wanted it to be over with. But then she went after my Jeep.”
“What did she do?”
“She keyed it,” he said, his voice hard, angry. “And then she put sand in my gas tank. I went out another morning, and all four of my tires were flat.”
“At that point did you contact the cops?”
“Yes, again she was charged, but somehow she ended up with a misdemeanor—apparently by pleading she was bipolar or something, and had forgotten to take her meds. She claimed she was back on her meds, and she was fine again.”
He shook his head. “When I saw her, I didn’t have much to say to her. The bottom line is, at the end of the day, she finally disappeared from my life. And I have been very low profile because of her. I have not seen her since. And, until you came to the restaurant this morning and said she was dead, I hadn’t seen her in six months.”
“When exactly was the last time you saw her?”
“I caught sight of her in a coffee shop six months ago. I turned around and walked out.”
She nodded. “Do you know anybody who would have a reason to kill her?”
He snorted. “Except for me, any other lover she’s done this to. She was dangerous as hell. I don’t know how she was killed, but there is a good chance the other person killed her in self-defense. Believe me when I tell you—she was nuts.”
*
Alex focused on the man across the table from her. She was sure his name gave him nothing but hell as he grew up. Similarly his size, compared to that of the Mack trucks, would not have gone unnoticed by kids intent on sending jabs to the most painful emotional spots. She’d asked Caitlyn about him only days ago. Caitlyn had gushed with joy as she expounded on the man Mac was. When Alex had asked Caitlyn about Mac’s girlfriend, all humor and joy had left her face, and she had explained just how psychotic Marsha had been in her treatment of Mac. Caitlyn had ended it with “We were really worried about him. Mac seems to be unconcerned, but she kept coming around. She’d go under for a couple weeks and pop right back up, like a bad penny.” Alex remembered Caitlyn’s last words because she had stared off in the distance and told Alex, “This can’t have a good end.”
She dropped her gaze to the folder on the table in front of her, realizing how prophetic Caitlyn’s words were. “What about your relationship with Caitlyn?”
She watched as his body language settled and opened. The grin that came across his face was incredibly endearing. “Caitlyn is a sweetheart. She got a little bit lost, but now she’s back where she belongs. She’s with Ryder, and, as far as I know, her world is completely rosy.”
Alex had heard the same from Caitlyn herself. Alex nodded and said, “What other girlfriends have you been involved with since Marsha walked into your life.”
Macklin snorted. “I now live by a couple rules. One of those is, don’t if you think they’re crazy. Because obviously I’ve lived that.”
She barely held back a smirk at his first comment.
“The second is, I don’t go out with girls unless I know them really, really well.”
The second surprised her. She studied the man carefully. “No one-night stands? No short-term weekends? No girls overseas?”
At each question Macklin shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “When you’re up against somebody with a serious problem like Marsha’s, it makes you very hesitant to move forward.”
She nodded. “Do you know any of her friends? Relatives? Enemies? Who might’ve hated her?”
Mac’s response was instant. He shook his head. “I’ve never met anybody else in her circle. I never met any family or other friends. The fact that she’s done this to me means she very likely did it to somebody else, which would make that other person a likely suspect.”
“Which also puts you exactly in the suspect seat as well.”
He nodded his head in acknowledgment. “Which is why I’m here. But I did not kill her.”
“Something else makes you a whole lot guiltier than you may like.”
He leaned across the table, his sheer size intimidating. But it was the cold clarity in his gaze that made her swallow hard. “Explain,” he said in a very soft voice.
Rather than explain, she pulled one of the crime scene photographs from the file and placed it in front of him. Written in blood at the site of Marsha’s murder was his name. He leaned back, swore, and said, “Wouldn’t it be just like that bitch. The last thing she does is incriminate me. As if she couldn’t make my life bad enough while she was alive, so she has to make sure she keeps the torture on after she’s dead.”
He turned his gaze to the far corner of the room, his mind occupied with what he’d seen. His shoulders sagged, and he turned to look at Alex and said, “I shouldn’t have said that. I think she was probably mentally unstable, but maybe that wasn’t her fault. I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry that, in her lifetime, she couldn’t get the help she needed. But I still didn’t kill her. And whoever wrote my name could’ve been her killer.”
“Which is why I’m asking the next question.”
He waited, his gaze unwavering.
“Who hates you enough to see you get charged with murder?”
He pinched his lips and stared for a long moment, but she didn’t drop her gaze. She searched his eyes for the truth. She didn’t see any deceit. She saw no lies. No hesitation, no searching for answers or a plausible excuse.
“I don’t know. I’ve been in the military a long time. I was off on medical leave for three months this year. I don’t think I have anyone personally who hates me. However, if a terrorist happened to be on American soil who knows about me, he could easily have targeted me. The problem is, he would’ve been after everybody else in my unit too.”
She tapped her finger on the folder, thinking about that. “Give me the names of the men in your unit. And who else met her.”
Mac gave her six names without hesitation.
“If you think of any more, let me know. I’ll run down these names, verify your story, and take it from there.”
He looked at her and asked, “Am I free to go?”
She nodded, and then her smile fell away. She knew he wouldn’t appreciate the next hit. “I need you to stay in town for the moment.”
A thundercloud swept across his face.
She expected that and looked for any sign of loss of control.
But instead he groaned and said, “Fair enough. But please hurry up. I’m finally cleared medically to go back to work next week.”
She stood and said, “I’m working on it.” Alex shook his hand and walked him back to the waiting area. Caitlyn caught sight of Alex, lifted a hand, and waved. Alex let her guard drop, and she smiled at her friend and waved back. She stood for a long moment and then realized she was attracting attention. She turned and headed back to her office.
Why the hell did the most interesting man she’d seen in over a decade end up being a murder suspect?
Just her bloody luck.
Chapter 2
Alex left her car in the Coronado PD parking lot and walked into work the next morning. She was still getting used to the California weather. The mornings were lovely, but, by the afternoons, she struggled with the heat. She was from Delaware originally, then moved across the country. California was by far the nicest state she had lived in, but it was also the most crowded, and it was hard for her to acclimatize. Things were different here. More casual. No longer being in the military had opened up Alex’s lifestyle completely.
Then, with her new job, she just might be feeling the pressure a little more. In past years, the Coronado PD had five to six detectives. Now there was one—her. And, true enough, there hadn’t been a murder in this city in over a decade, and the budget hadn’t allowed for officers whose mandate wasn’t being utilized so … But having come from a department with dozens of other detectives and officers to this one, whe
re everyone looked to her to solve the issues on her own, was intimidating. Empowering. Challenging. And she loved that, but it also pushed her buttons. She had no one to turn to for help. She missed bouncing ideas off her peers. She had supervisors and a chief here of course, but that wasn’t the same as having a partner.
She also had to rely on the local police officers in a way she hadn’t had to before.
As such she hadn’t found her comfort level yet. But then she’d only been here for a month.
As usual, she sat at her desk to see papers and messages tossed on top. She booted up the computer and logged in. First thing she did was check her emails. She was waiting on the autopsy report for Marsha, but it still wasn’t in.
Neither were the lab tests back.
In other words, things were operating at the normal slow pace they always did, no matter what part of the country she lived in. She went through her phone messages until she came to one, a caller who wanted to speak to her about the McEwan case. Alex picked up the phone and dialed the number. There was no answer. She frowned and let it continue to ring, hoping for voice mail. But there was nothing.
She wrote a note to call back and stabbed it onto the spike she kept on her desk. It was an easy way to keep track of pieces of information she’d lose otherwise. They often had people calling in, wanting to say something about a case, then getting cold feet.
Those were messages or notes she couldn’t afford to forget. She had to go through the pieces of paper on that spike every day before she left work. That was the only way she didn’t miss anything. Details were the devil. But, without them, everything fell apart.
She continued to work steadily that morning. She had Macklin’s interview typed up and in the system and checked on a couple more people to interview.
For the rest of that afternoon she made phone calls to get the contact information of the men from Macklin’s unit who were overseas so she could back up his statement. She’d have to arrange to make those calls through formal channels. Depending on where the men were, what they were doing, confirming Mac’s story with them could take a few days, if not longer. Unfortunately Marsha’s murder wasn’t Alex’s only case. There’d been several break-ins at Silver Strand Housing, the military housing complex—three so far, all in the last week. In each case but one, a woman had been home alone. In each case the intruder had been chased off.
But what really bothered Alex was, in each case, the intruder got a little farther. The first case, he managed to get into the front door before the woman screamed. He’d bolted, and she had raced onto the front deck, screaming for the police, and he’d escaped into the shadows.
The police had done the usual interviews and filed reports, but they had not found anything helpful. There were no footprints outside, nor fingerprints on the door.
The second case had been similar, but he’d made it all the way through the kitchen and into living room, where the homeowner was coming down the stairs. In that case, she had a dog. The dog started barking, and the intruder bolted—getting away again.
In the third case, however, the intruder was caught upstairs. He tried to get downstairs, but the woman’s boyfriend was there. Blows were exchanged, and the assailant managed to escape again.
Now Alex had three breaking-and-entering cases, and, in each one, the intruder had been more successful than the last. She highly doubted that getting caught by a boyfriend would stop him from trying again. Having successfully circumvented any problems, she knew he would feel proud of himself for getting that far. The trouble was, she didn’t know what his end game was.
She was stuck, waiting for him to make his next move. She had officers out canvassing the community and warning the locals to beef up their security and to be extra vigilant.
In the meantime, she lacked any forensic evidence for when they did catch him. They had a visual from the boyfriend, but, outside of basic traits—young, tall, brown hair, and white—the boyfriend couldn’t give them any further details.
The woman with the dog had added he was slim built and fit. But he’d worn a black hood, black gloves, black athletic jogging pants, and a black jacket zipped up in the front.
The intruder had gone into the houses around the same time, which was early evening. So he was casing the victims, either assuming they were away or assuming he was in the clear, and had gone in when it was still daylight but just as darkness settled.
That was an interesting time because a lot of people were still moving about then. She’d have expected him to go around midnight or the early hours of the morning. So either he did a crappy job in assuming nobody was home, or he did not care. His next attempt would tell her which way he was going.
If he continued as is, he not only was okay with the confrontation but he was possibly looking for more. And she knew that would bring an escalation of violence.
“Alex?”
She glanced up to see Lance, one of her senior police officers, standing in the doorway. She smiled. “Good morning.”
He frowned. “I thought you’d be at the house.”
Her heart sank. “What house?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “We had another one last night.”
She stood slowly. “I wasn’t called.”
He nodded. “I realize it’s awkward with you just taking over, but you got to go hardnose to get the respect you deserve. And you gotta do it now. Don’t give them any leeway, or it’ll just get worse. You know you’ll have to deal with that, right?”
She drummed her fingers on the desk for all of ten seconds and then gave a clipped nod. “I thought I had, but apparently I wasn’t clear enough.” She grabbed her bag. “You have the address?”
He handed her a small sheet of paper.
She glared at it, then him. “When did you find out?”
“Several hours ago,” he admitted. “It never occurred to me to call you because I assumed you’d already been there.”
She didn’t say anything, just brushed past him. “Any report in yet on it?”
“It happened in the wee hours of the morning.”
She spun to look at him and said, “When?”
“Initial reports say somewhere around three o’clock in the morning.”
She nodded. “Who were the responding officers?”
“Wilson and Owen.”
Under her breath, she murmured, “Interesting.” She didn’t have a beef with either officer. As far as she knew, they were on board with her arrival, but she’d jumped over several internal applications. However, the bosses had their reasons for bypassing those people in lieu of Alex. Still, that didn’t make it any easier for those who had applied and were rejected. Now by her vehicle, she took a moment to look up the address. She recognized it to be in the same military complex area, just slightly to the left of the other houses, but still in the Silver Strand Housing complex, according to the map on her cell. Getting in her car, she drove to the house.
When she pulled up and saw an ambulance, her heart sank. She hadn’t asked if there had been any fatalities. By going in during the middle of the night, the attacker had assumed either the house was empty, the inhabitants were asleep, or maybe he didn’t give a damn but knew he would be in the power position. After the altercation at the last break-in, it was quite possible he didn’t want to have another one.
When she arrived, one of the officers stood outside taking pictures. She stepped to his side.
He smiled. “There you are. We wondered when you were getting in.”
“I wasn’t called,” she said, her voice hard.
His smile fell away. “Oh.”
Everyone knew what that meant.
“Good enough.” She walked in the front door, careful to stay clear of the men and their equipment. It didn’t take her long to figure out this case had not only been an escalation but it had been bad.
Officer Sandra Mellon stood on the far side of the living room. She looked up and smiled. “There you are.”
; Alex made her way over and repeated, “Sorry. I wasn’t called.”
Sandra’s eyebrows rose. “Really? I assumed you were busy.” She glanced at her wrist. “But it’s been hours. I should have called you myself.” She glanced around and frowned. “Owen called me after Wilson had to leave.”
Officer Owen caught sight of Alex and said, “I got the call at ten to four. Wilson came in right behind me. But he had to leave, so Sandra came in.”
Alex stared at him in disbelief. “Five hours? Five hours later and nobody called me?” She didn’t bother asking what they were still doing here at this point. An hour—two, max—was all that should have been required. Still it wasn’t her problem. Thankfully.
The two officers looked at each other and then shrugged. “At least you’re here now,” Owen said. “I don’t have a formal report written up, but I can give you the gist of it. The perp broke in about three this morning. The owner… the resident is Melanie Schaefer. She was sleeping alone. She heard a noise downstairs. She has no security in the place and no dog. She got up to investigate and was grabbed from behind. A fight ensued. She took a bit of a beating but not bad. She was knocked out. When she woke up, he was gone.”
“Was she raped?”
Owen shook his head. “It doesn’t look like it. We’re still figuring that out.”
“So she was fully dressed?”
Owen nodded. “Yes. She called the police soon after waking. We were here within fifteen minutes. But of course he was gone. She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She’s currently at the hospital being checked over. She did a quick examination of the house but didn’t recognize anything missing.”
“Right. I’ll do a walk-through.” She was still miffed but needed to focus.
Turning her attention to the house, she did a careful walk-through, checking how the intruder entered, which appeared to be via the backyard.
And then he went up the stairs to the bedroom. Nothing seemed to have occurred while the owner was out cold. It was almost as if, when the intruder came in, the woman woke up right away, came downstairs, a fight ensued, and then he took off. But, if the woman was unconscious, he was free to do what he wanted, at least until she regained awareness. She had no camera system inside or out, no security on the doors or windows. Which was typical of all the houses in this area. The intruder picked the lock and just walked right in.
