Taken in Texas
Page 21
“He told me to get out of town or get buried here.”
“Get buried here, on this property? Is that what he meant?” Had she stumbled across someone illicitly using the house, doing something on the property that they wanted to remain undiscovered? There’d been talk recently of turning the house into a museum. Could someone want to sabotage that for some reason? Make people afraid to come up here?
“I don’t know what exactly he meant by his stupid threat,” she said irritably.
“Could you have crossed paths with him recently? Maybe you’d had a disagreement?”
“I’ve spent the last couple of days up here on the mesa, stopping in stores and cafés and different places, asking people if they knew or ever heard rumors about what happened to my dad. Nobody knew anything. It was all such a long time ago.” She shook her head and winced again. “What happened tonight probably doesn’t have anything to do with that. Maybe he’s just some dealer cooking meth in the woods around here.”
“Why are you conducting an investigation into your dad’s murder now?” Levi asked, feeling his heart speed up a little at the thought that the case might finally be solved. “Do you have some new information?”
“No new information. This is just something I’ve thought about doing for a long time. And now I finally have the chance to do it.”
Levi’s cop instinct told him she wasn’t telling him the whole truth, but this wasn’t the time to press. He heard the ambulance pull up into the driveway and convinced her to let a medic take a look at her.
By the time she’d been cleared, his officers had completed their search of the house and hadn’t found anyone hiding in there. He had one of them stay behind to take down basic contact information from Vanessa and make sure she got home safely. Then he grabbed a couple of flashlights from his SUV and had the other officer go with him to look for signs of the chase she’d described and to search for whatever evidence they could find.
He didn’t know what he expected to find, especially in the dark, but he knew he wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving until he’d done everything he could. Levi had experienced a rocky return to the United States after his years spent fighting overseas. When he’d finally made his way back to Torchlight, he’d become a police officer to give something back to his hometown and do something to help heal his soul. Protecting Vanessa and capturing the sick assailant who’d attacked her would help him fulfill both of those goals.
Maybe this weird attack was related to Josh Ford’s murder all those years ago. Maybe not.
Copyright © 2019 by Virginia Niten
ISBN-13: 9781488040245
Taken in Texas
Copyright © 2019 by Susan Sleeman
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