Mountain Witness

by LENA DIAZ,

  “So it’s fair to say the three of you became friends?”

  “More like acquaintances than friends. I clicked pretty well with Alan and Kathy, but they were like oil and water with each other. She tolerated him but didn’t really like him. I tried to stay friends with both of them, but Alan and I got serious pretty fast. He...helped me through a really tough time. And, well, when you’re guy-crazy you sometimes forget about your other friends. Kathy and I didn’t ever get very close because I was usually with Alan. We got married right after graduation. Or, well, my graduation anyway. Alan had failed a few courses and never finished his degree. After I graduated, he stopped taking classes and decided to go into his family’s business, Webb Enterprises.” She waved her hand. “Not that any of that is relevant.”

  Chris didn’t want to assume anything wasn’t relevant at this point, but he did have other questions he wanted to ask right now. “Did Nelson attend your wedding?”

  “No. We didn’t invite her.” Her cheeks flushed a light pink. “It’s embarrassing now to say that. I mean, she was a friend, even if we weren’t really close. But like I said, Alan didn’t like her. So, no invitation. I guess you’d say I chose Alan over her.”

  “Maybe you only thought she and Alan didn’t get along. Maybe she liked him and resented you. After all, you did both meet him at the same football game.”

  She shook her head. “She was never anything but kind to me, never expressed any resentment. And Alan never looked twice at her. She wasn’t his type.”

  She held up her hands as if to stop him from arguing. “Before you say it, I know—she’s tall and blonde, which most guys like, while I’m short and a brunette. But even if he and Kathy had been able to get along, he just wasn’t attracted to women like her, with her kind of forceful personality. Everything about her set him off, irritated him. And he showed me pictures of some of his former girlfriends. Every one of them was like me—short, brunette.”

  Chris could certainly see Julie’s appeal over the glossier, more made-up look that Kathy Nelson sported. Nelson was sophisticated but seemed fake, whereas Julie seemed the girl-next-door type, a beautiful girl next door but still down to earth, approachable. Still, that didn’t mean Alan couldn’t have been attracted to both of them.

  “If neither of you kept up with Nelson, then why is she so invested in your case that she drove all the way out here from Nashville?”

  “We didn’t keep up with her at all. The first time I had seen her since college was the night that Alan was arrested. And the reason she’s taking this case so personally is because Alan is...was...something of a celebrity in Nashville. He comes from money. His family is well-known in high-society circles and he was a respected philanthropist. Kathy is a career muckety-muck looking for a way into the governor’s office. She made no secret to me that she felt if she could win against someone as high profile as Alan Webb, she’d prove she was in nobody’s pocket and was tough on crime. She’d make a name for herself and be well on her way to establishing her political career.”

  That part didn’t surprise Chris at all. Even in Destiny, people had heard of Kathy Nelson and her political aspirations. But there might have been another reason, too. If Julie was wrong—if Kathy did like Alan and felt he’d chosen Julie over her—maybe being in charge of the case against him was a way to get even for him passing her over in college. That seemed unlikely, though, to hold that kind of a grudge over three years later. Especially since Kathy was married.

  Chris made a mental note to check with his team to see if they were looking into Kathy as a potential suspect. Just to cover the bases.

  “Let’s get back to the night your husband attacked you in Nashville. When was that?”

  “About five months ago, on my twenty-fifth birthday.”

  A sick feeling twisted in Chris’s gut. “Not that there’s a good day to try to kill you, but on your birthday? Really?”

  “Yes. Really.” She was twisting her hands together again. “Like I said earlier, we’d been separated for about four months. Looking back now, the marriage was never what I’d hoped it would be. He’d doted on me in college. But as soon as that ring was on my finger, things cooled off, changed. At first, I thought it was because he’d quit school and took over the family business. He was under a lot of stress. And I figured he was frustrated that he never got to work in the field he loved.”

  “What field was that?”

  “Botany. He absolutely loved working with plants. He could talk for hours about their medicinal properties and how to get more yield from organically grown crops. He’d planned on having his own career for a while before having to take the reins of the company. But it didn’t work out that way. He’s an only child, and his father’s health was failing. He had to step in much sooner than he’d hoped. Once he started working at Webb Enterprises, that’s when he started getting depressed and closing himself off from me. Then again, maybe I’m making up excuses for him. Maybe it was just me he didn’t like.”

  The hurt was there again, in the tightening of her jaw, the way her lips thinned. She’d loved her husband once upon a time—that was obvious. And even now, she couldn’t fathom why he’d turned on her.

  Neither could Chris.

  Why had Alan tried to kill her? Twice?

  She waved her hands again, as if waving away her words. “Shortly before we separated, I remember him coming home one night in a sour mood after work and shutting himself up in his office for hours. Wouldn’t even come out for dinner. And once he did emerge, it was almost as if...as if he were a different person. He was...serious, angry. He insisted that I call in the next day and take a week’s vacation, said we needed to get away. I couldn’t just drop everything like that. People count on me.” She twisted her hands. “At least, they used to. I had to quit work once the media got hold of the story about Alan attacking me and me shooting him. I became a liability to my coworkers at that point.”

  “Where did you work?”

  She hesitated, looked away. “I started a nonprofit foundation, figured it was a good use of my business management degree and I could help people. The office was in downtown Nashville. We fought to raise awareness and money to fight orphan diseases—illnesses that are so rare that it isn’t profitable enough for a drug company to devote money researching possible cures or even treatments. But the diseases are devastating to the victims and their families.”

  He studied her. Her voice was a little too bright, like the emotion was forced. She was hiding something. He’d sensed it from the moment she’d begun talking about the tough time she’d been having right before she’d met Alan. There’d been a flash of pain in her eyes then, the same flash of pain in her eyes right now.

  “Julie?”

  “Hmm?” She was staring toward the front window, at the acres of green grass that would need mowing soon.

  “What was the name of the nonprofit?”

  She swallowed hard. “Naomi’s Hope Foundation.”

  Again, she wouldn’t look at him. And then he got it.

  “Was Naomi a friend or a family member?”

  Her startled gaze shot to his. She stared at him so long he thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then she sighed heavily, looking defeated.

  “She was my sister, a year older than me. My parents went broke taking her to hospitals, flying around the country to different specialists. They even went down to Mexico once, looking into alternative medicines. Nothing helped. She had a condition so rare it didn’t even have a name. It baffled every doctor who tried to treat her. It struck her during her senior year in college, my junior year at the same school. She died four months later. At least she wasn’t in pain anymore. She was free. But my parents...”

  She shook her head. “They were immigrants, my mom and dad. Star-crossed lovers from London. Both sets of their parents, my grandparents, didn’t ap
prove of them dating. So as soon as they were of legal age, they married and moved to this country. They left their families, their history, everything familiar to them to have a fresh start, to build a legacy of their own. They were Romeo and Juliet, basically, coming here for the American dream.

  “They didn’t have any money, their families had disowned them and they had to fight for everything they had, which was never much. Their entire life savings was built around sending Naomi and me to college. But when Naomi...” She shook her head. “Naomi was a daddy’s girl. When she died, my father couldn’t handle it. He shot himself. The day after his funeral, my mother took an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol.”

  Tears were running down her face now. Her bottom lip trembled.

  “I always wondered what went through their minds when they did it. I know they were devastated. We all were. But, somewhere along the way, they forgot they had another daughter. They left me all alone. I had no one to turn to. But I couldn’t let their sacrifices be for nothing. Naomi died in the summer after my junior year, my parents right after that. A month later I enrolled for the fall session of my senior year. I felt I owed it to my parents to get my degree. But I was miserable, couldn’t concentrate on my studies. A couple of months later, I was about ready to give up. And that’s when I met Alan. He turned my life around. He was there for me, encouraged me. And then he...then he...”

  She covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking as her misery overtook her.

  Chris stood and crossed to her. He couldn’t bear doing nothing, so he took a chance and damned the consequences. He pulled her to standing and wrapped his arms around her.

  “I’m so sorry, Julie,” he whispered, resting his cheek against the top of her head. “I’m so very, very sorry.”

  She’d stiffened when he first touched her. But then she seemed to melt against him, putting her arms around his waist and clinging to him while tears tracked down her face, soaking his shirt.

  They stood there a long time while he whispered soothing words against her hair. The storm finally subsided, her tears stopped and she was no longer shaking.

  Finally, with one last sniffle, she pushed back and gave him a watery smile. “Thank you.”

  The pain in her beautiful blue eyes had him wanting to pull her back into his arms. But he fought the urge and instead allowed himself only to gently push her tousled hair out of her eyes, then wipe the last of her tears from her cheeks before dropping his hands to his sides.

  “Anytime.” He smiled and stepped back to put some much-needed space between them.

  She drew a shaky breath. “I don’t think my heart or your shirt can take much more of this. You might as well finish asking your questions right now.”

  “We don’t have to—”

  “Yes. We do,” she said. “I want to know why Alan did what he did. And you need the investigation resolved. Both of us need this case closed in order to get on with our lives. So go on. Ask whatever else you want to know.”

  “All right. What about the movers?”

  “Movers?” She frowned. “What about them?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, they brought your furniture and belongings. I assume they drove down from Nashville. Did you pay them cash, too? Or did you use a credit card when you hired them?”

  “I went to the bank the day I left and withdrew several thousand dollars from my checking account so I could live on cash for a while. I paid the movers in cash like I did everything else.”

  “Several thousand dollars—from checking, not savings?” he asked. “I’m not exactly living paycheck to paycheck, but I’d have to dip into savings to pull out several thousand in cash.”

  “Even with the civil suit freezing our joint accounts, I still have plenty of money in my personal accounts. As long as I’m not too extravagant, I’ll be okay until the case is settled. Money has never been a problem for Alan and me. Like I said, he took over the family business, an import/export empire. Even without receiving his botany degree, he’d taken enough classes in his minor—business management—to do really well running the company. And he was smart, really smart. The company was struggling when the economy went south. But within weeks of Alan taking it over, the profits soared.”

  That didn’t sound right to Chris. A young kid, freshly flunked out of college, was able to turn around the family business? A lot of things about Alan didn’t sound right. The next time Chris called his boss he was going to see how the background check on Julie’s former husband was going. He wanted a complete history on Alan Webb, from birth to the grave.

  Julie shoved her chair up to the table and remained standing, wrapping her arms around her waist. “That’s what allowed me to work at the nonprofit instead of getting a job that paid real money. I’d offered to work at his family’s business, to help him manage it. But he didn’t want me to worry about that, insisted that I chase my dream of getting the government to devote resources to research orphan diseases like my sister’s. It truly was the most decent thing he ever did.”

  The bitterness in her voice told him there was a lot more water under the matrimonial bridge, but he decided to steer clear of that for now. Making her miserable wasn’t his goal. He’d only delve into that earlier line of questioning again if it was absolutely necessary.

  “All right. Back to the moving company then. I’m surprised they took cash. Most companies like that require a credit card.”

  “Yeah, well. You’d be surprised what a few hundred dollars under the table can do for you.”

  “You bribed them.”

  “I did what I had to do to stay under the radar. It’s not like Alan was involved in some kind of nefarious criminal activity and the government was giving me a new identity to testify against him. He was just a husband who’d tried to murder his wife. I was on my own. I would have used a fake name if I could. But they required ID, wouldn’t budge on that. So, as soon as I decided that I wanted to leave Nashville, I had them put the things I would need into storage and left everything else in the house to deal with at a later time. Like I said before, about a week later I knew where I wanted to settle. After renting the place in Destiny, I called them to arrange a date and time for them to deliver my things.”

  “There’s a direct link from your house to the moving company to here if someone wanted to follow it. That could be how Alan tracked you. But it’s not like he could have watched the storage unit 24/7. He had to sleep sometime. If the movers had loaded up the unit while Alan was asleep, he’d have missed that link to you and wouldn’t have been able to find you—assuming that he did find you through the movers. I’m betting he had a partner. He wasn’t working alone in his quest to locate you.” He studied her carefully. “And you’re not surprised by that. Why not?”

  She shrugged. “When your husband tries to kill you, trying to figure out why he wants you dead pretty much consumes your thoughts. The fact that he found me so fast this second time shocked me. And it made me think he had to be working with someone else. He had to have help. And I couldn’t see him hiring a private investigator, not with the criminal case hanging over his head. That could look bad in court. Like he was stalking me. I figure it has to be someone bad, a criminal, someone likely as dangerous as Alan became. So, no, it doesn’t surprise me. I figured he had a partner. The only question is who, and of course, whether they still want me dead now that Alan’s gone.”

  Listening to the pain in her voice, the confusion and anger pretty much obliterated his earlier concerns that she might have intentionally used him as a tool to kill her husband. She was consistent in her answers. She didn’t hesitate like she would if she was making up lies as she went along. And her body language struck him as honest, too. He’d bet all of his years of experience at interviewing witnesses that everything she was telling him now was true.

  Or at least what she thought was true. But th
ere was still one more thing bugging him.

  “Have you told me everything?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then why are you still running? Why stow away in the back of my truck, and steal Cooper’s truck, to get away from me if you’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide? You said you think your husband has a partner who might be after you. So why wouldn’t you trust the policeman who risked his own life to save you yesterday? It doesn’t make sense, unless the real reason you want to be on your own is because you want to get even.”

  She blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t want some cop hanging around when you figure out who was working with Alan against you. Because you want revenge.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I want to be safe, that’s what I want.”

  “Then why run from me? I can protect you.”

  “I’ve known you for all of two seconds,” she said, her voice shaking with anger. “I knew Alan for three and a half years, was married to him for three of those years. You tell me. Why should I trust you when I couldn’t trust him?”

  And that was the last piece of the puzzle he’d been looking for. It had been in front of him all along. He’d quit thinking of her as a conspirator and was thinking of her solely as a victim. But he still hadn’t understood why she’d run. It all came down to trust. She’d been hurt, horribly hurt, and here he was berating her for not being willing to put her faith and her life in his hands when, as she’d said, she’d known him for all of “two seconds.”

  He’d been a complete ass and hadn’t even realized it.

  “Julie.”

  When she didn’t reply, he moved a step closer and took her hand in his. She tried to tug it away, but he held fast.

  “Julie, maybe you don’t trust me completely yet. I get that. I understand it after everything you’ve been through. But look at this objectively. We both want the same thing. We want answers. The answer to why Alan tried to kill you—twice—will enable you to go back and live your life without having to look over your shoulder and worry that someone else is out there trying to hurt you. That same answer will help me resolve this case so I can go back to my life, to being a cop. We both want the same thing, to end this. So how about we work together, as a team, and end this once and for all.”