by Cindi Myers
Grant started to move on, but Masterson’s next words stopped him. “Have you seen Eve lately?” Masterson asked.
“You stay away from Ms. Shea,” Grant said.
“Or what? You’ll have me arrested?” Masterson laughed.
“If you harass Ms. Shea, I will have you arrested,” Grant said.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t see my attentions as harassment.” Masterson leaned against the doorjamb, arms folded across his chest. “But maybe I’ll ask her when I take her to dinner tomorrow night.”
Fury choked off Grant’s words, at the same time his stomach clenched with nausea. Masterson’s expression told him the words were no bluff. Eve, who had rejected Grant, had agreed to go out with Masterson, a man she had previously said she was afraid of. The truth of the situation might have buckled his knees if he hadn’t braced himself.
He whirled and staggered away down the hall. It felt like a stagger, at least, though his steps were firm and even. Masterson’s laughter trailed him all the way out of the building, long after it would have been possible to hear him.
Once safely in his cruiser, he let out a string of curses, forgetting his Lenten vow, forgetting everything but the pain that knifed at his heart.
Chapter Eleven
Several times, Eve had almost called Toby to cancel their date. Only Sarah’s encouragement had made her keep the obligation. “You’re just jittery because he’s so much like Dane,” her friend had observed. “It’s natural, because Dane really hurt you. But I think Toby is exactly your type. In fact, I think these nerves are your subconscience’s way of telling you that.”
Under other circumstances, Eve might have rolled her eyes at Sarah’s logic, but what did she know? In the past six months she’d been on more dates than she could count where she felt exactly nothing for the man. Feeling something—even doubt—might indeed be a good sign.
Her fear eased a little when Masterson arrived, looked handsome and perfectly respectable in dark gray slacks, a dark gray shirt and polished black shoes. Exactly the kind of outfit Dane had favored. He surprised her by handing her a bouquet of dahlias and lilies. “I figure a woman who owns a florist’s shop must love flowers,” he said.
She buried her nose in the blossoms, touched by his thoughtfulness. “Don’t worry,” he added. “I didn’t patronize one of your competitors. I stopped by after I was sure you had left for lunch and Sarah helped me pick out something. She said these were your favorites.”
“Thank you,” Eve said. “Let me put these in water and we can go.”
When she returned from the kitchen, Toby was standing by the door, studying a small landscape painting that hung there. She glanced at her desk, a few feet to his right. Was it her imagination, or did the papers there look rearranged?
“You look lovely,” he said, pulling her mind out of its paranoia. “Thanks for agreeing to go out with me.”
“Thank you for asking.”
The modest sedan he led her to surprised her—somehow she had pictured him on a motorcycle, or some expensive muscle car, or even a tricked-out pickup truck like Dane. He’s not Dane, she reminded herself. That was a good thing.
He took her to a Mexican restaurant with candlelit tables around a central fountain. He was smart and funny and so different from her initial impression of him that she wondered how she could have been so wrong. Over margaritas and chiles rellenos with shrimp, they talked about books and travel, his childhood in California and hers in Oklahoma. By the time the server brought two servings of flan, she was warm and slightly buzzed and thoroughly charmed.
“If I do ever see Dane again, I’m going to have to thank him,” he said, looking at her over the candles. “If it wasn’t for him, I might never have met you.”
She sighed. “I hope he comes home soon,” she said. “If only to explain himself. Of all the people I might have guessed would do something like this—wrecking his truck, disappearing—I never, ever would have suspected Dane.”
“I’d have said the same thing six months ago,” Toby said. “But after you and he broke up, he changed. I think you broke his heart.”
Some of the happy buzz faded. “No!” she protested. “It wasn’t like that at all.” If anything, she had been the one most hurt by the break-up, by the knowledge that Dane hadn’t—and never could—love her enough to change his mind about having more children. More than once she had berated herself for holding on to such romantic, even fanciful notions, but she couldn’t shake the belief that if Dane had truly loved her, he would have wanted to give her the one thing that would most make her happy. Instead, when she had suggested the split, he hadn’t protested at all, merely agreed and started packing the things he kept at her house. That in itself was a kind of rejection.
“Maybe it was just coincidence, then.” Toby scooped up a spoonful of flan. “But about that time he started behaving, well, erratic. Wild mood swings. Paranoia. I even wondered if he was on drugs.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
“So he didn’t give you any kind of a hint that something else was upsetting him?” Toby asked. “Something at work, maybe?”
“No. Dane liked his job, but he didn’t talk about it much. I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about anyway. None of that technical stuff interested me.”
“So he never talked about the projects he was involved in? I’m surprised. I would have thought he’d want to share that with you.”
She shook her head, and took a bite of flan, hoping that would ward off more questions.
“I don’t guess he’s been in touch with you since he went on the lam,” Toby said.
This struck her as such an odd choice of words. She opened her mouth to change the subject but—maybe under the influence of that margarita—she said, “He sent me a letter about a week ago. Well, not really a letter. It was a press release, accusing TDC of falsifying reports or something. It was a wild accusation, with no proof behind it.”
Toby sat up straighter. “What did you do with it?”
“I certainly didn’t take it to the newspapers. It would have been completely irresponsible.” She pushed away the half-finished dessert. “To tell you the truth, the whole thing ticked me off. As if Dane only wanted me to do his dirty work.”
“Like I said, he had changed recently.”
“I don’t want to talk about Dane,” she said. This was beginning to feel less like a romantic date and more like an interrogation.
Toby took her hand. “Of course not,” he said. “Let’s talk about what you would like to do now. We could go for a drink somewhere.”
The last thing she needed was another drink. As the effects of the one—large—margarita began to subside, she could feel a headache coming on. “It’s late,” she said. “I think I’d better go home.”
The warmth in his smile didn’t waver. “Of course.”
At her house, he got out of the car and escorted her up the walk. In the shadows before her front door, he pulled her close, and she didn’t resist. She accepted his kiss, and did her best to respond, but even as his lips touched hers, she had a flash of tilting her head up to Grant, feeling his arms pull her close...
She shoved the memory away, and tried to focus on Toby. But the moment felt flat and mechanical. After a few seconds, she eased out of his grasp and he stepped back. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said, then hurried into the house, disappointment replacing her earlier happiness. Maybe the problem wasn’t with the men she dated; maybe the fault lay with her. She had a knack for falling for the wrong men.
* * *
THE DAYS WERE growing longer, the evenings less chill, so after work Saturday, Grant decided to go for a run. He hoped a jog along one of the park trails would clear his head and maybe help him come to some insight about this case. And the physical exercise might work off some of the anger and frustration that
filled him every time he thought of Eve with Toby Masterson tonight. Logic told him he had no claim on the woman, but logic rarely triumphed over emotion, in his experience.
He changed into running clothes and shoes and set off down the same trail where Marsha Grandberry had been found, her throat cut, Trask’s business card clutched in her hand. The crime scene tape and evidence markers had long since been cleared away, and at this time of day in the off-season, Grant had the trail to himself.
But the murder nagged at him like a rock in his shoe. Everything about the scenario felt wrong. Why would Trask kill a random woman he didn’t know? There had been no sign of assault or robbery or any concurrent crime. The evidence pointed to a killer who had stepped out of the underbrush, killed the woman and left her for someone to find, with Dane Trask’s business card clutched in her right hand.
It simply didn’t fit with the picture Grant had of Dane Trask.
So, if he believed Dane Trask wasn’t the murderer, that left the theory that someone else had killed the woman and tried to frame Trask.
But that theory presented plenty of problems, too, not the least of which was, why? The police were already looking for Trask, along with any number of private citizens hoping to cash in on the $25,000 reward offered by TDC. Did the killer think Marsha’s death would put even more pressure on Trask? It probably had, but it was a weak motive for murder.
He jogged up the trail, gradually finding a rhythm, feet pounding the soft dirt, breath coming hard but regular and strong, heart pumping. He tried to settle into that zone, mind empty except for his focus on his next breath, his next step.
Something kept distracting him, a feeling that as empty as the landscape appeared, he wasn’t alone out here.
He stopped, let his breathing slow, his heart rate return to normal. He took a drink from his water bottle and scanned the scrub oak on either side of the trail. Was that movement in the underbrush in the distance a rabbit or deer, or something more menacing? He knelt and checked the revolver holstered at his ankle, pretending to re-tie his shoe. He liked to think years on the job had given him good instincts, but he felt a little foolish. This place was so empty, but was the killer lurking out there? Was Dane Trask?
And, as impossible as it seemed to him, were Trask and the killer the same person?
He reached the three mile mark on his jog and turned to retrace his steps. Six miles was enough for one afternoon, and he wanted to get home in time to FaceTime with his daughters on the East Coast before too late at night.
By the time he reached the trailhead, orange and pink streaked the sky and the adjacent Black Canyon was already shrouded in darkness. Grant hit the button on his key fob to unlock the cruiser, then slid into the driver’s seat. He started the engine and was about to back out when he noticed something stuck under the driver’s side windshield wiper. He opened the door and leaned out to snag it, then stared at it, a cold feeling in his gut.
“Welcome Home Warriors,” the card proclaimed in red lettering. “Dane Trask” was centered below this, in black letters, along with a phone number.
Grant flipped the card over. In bold black marker on the back of the card was a scrawled message: “I didn’t do it.”
Chapter Twelve
Grant knew from long experience that cases rarely presented themselves as neatly or smoothly as depicted on television or in the movies. Most solutions came after long, frustrating slogs through piles of data and hundreds of hours of legwork. Many cases were never solved. Accepting this was part of the job, and one he had learned to deal with.
And then a string of seemingly unsolvable cases would come along to strip away all his calm indifference and frustrate him as if he was a rookie fresh from the academy. “We haven’t had any luck tracking down the origin of the drawing we found at the dump site,” Dance reported at the Wednesday morning meeting to review ongoing work. “We checked the rosters of all the preschools and elementary schools around town, but none of them have a Max registered. We showed the drawing around, but no one recognized it.”
“As for the other debris, there’s nothing we’ve found that ties it to any one location.” Beck continued the report. “We think it might even be from several locations.”
“Surveillance, both live and with cameras, hasn’t turned up anything, either,” Dance said.
“Unless you count deer, coyotes and one curious bear,” Beck said.
“We think maybe whoever was using the site is done or got spooked and abandoned it,” Dance concluded. “We’ll continue to check regularly, but right now, we can’t justify the resources, and the public lands people are agitating to get the place cleaned up.”
“All right, but I want us to have someone there when they start hauling away stuff,” Grant said. “Just in case anything turns up.”
Beck made a face. “Let’s hope it’s not a body.”
“Unless it’s Dane Trask’s body,” Hud said. “That would solve a lot of problems.”
“And create more,” Officer Redhorse said.
“Speaking of Trask,” Grant said, anxious to move things along. “After I spoke with Mitch Ruffino, TDC handed over some transcripts of calls to their reward hotline that were, essentially, useless.” He glanced at his notes. “The usual collection of people who thought they might have seen Trask buying gas or in line at the movies, or hitchhiking out by the lake. None of them could give a solid description of the person they saw, and the descriptions they did give didn’t really sound like Trask. One woman said she had seen Trask in a dream, at the bottom of the lake, playing poker with a redheaded woman and a man in a black hoodie.”
Laughter traveled around the table. Grant waited for it to subside. “I have a feeling if they got anything less off the wall, TDC is keeping it to themselves. The vice president, Mitch Ruffino, made it clear he didn’t want us poking into the company’s business.”
“I’ve always felt like they wanted to get to Trask before we did,” Beck said.
“Because Trask has dirt on them they don’t want us to know?” Knightbridge asked.
“That could be why he left in such a hurry to begin with,” Beck said.
“But then why stick around?” Grant asked. “And don’t say it’s to see justice done, because if that was the case, he would have come straight to us and told us whatever he knew and let us take care of it.”
“Commander, there’s a call for you on line one.” Sylvia’s voice interrupted the conversation.
“Take a message and tell them I’ll call back.”
“Sir, she said to tell you it’s your ex-wife and this is an emergency.”
The bottom dropped out of his stomach at his words, and he snatched up the phone, aware of the others’ eyes on him. “Angela? What’s going on?”
“It’s Janie. She’s run away.”
His vision blurred for a moment, and he had to remind himself to breathe. “Run away? When?”
“I found the note this morning. Apparently she left some time in the night. She said she’s going to see you!”
A little bit of relief edged out the fear. He had imagined his younger daughter wandering the streets alone, or perhaps with the wrong kind of friends. Instead, she was headed to see him. But there were almost 2,000 miles between her mother’s home and his, and a young girl on her own was so vulnerable. “How did she plan to get here? Did she fly?”
“I don’t know,” Angela snapped. “That’s why I called you. You’ve got connections, haven’t you? You can have police looking for her.”
“Of course. Have you tried calling her phone? Or texting?”
“She doesn’t have her phone with her.”
“You mean she left it there? Why would she do that?”
“She doesn’t have her phone because we took it away from her, as punishment for breaking her curfew last weekend.” Angela sounded as if she was having to force
out the words. “That was the punishment we all agreed on—break curfew and you lose your phone.”
He wasn’t going to argue about the punishment, or spend time finding out why Janie had broken curfew. “I’ll start a search for her right away,” he said. “Do you have any idea what she was wearing? What she took with her?”
He made notes of what she told him and promised to get back to her as soon as he knew anything. “Is everything all right?” Dance asked when Grant hung up the phone.
“My fifteen-year-old daughter decided she wanted to come see me and took off in the middle of the night,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice calm. “We need to find her before she gets into trouble.”
“If you’ll give me the description and photo, I’ll put out a bulletin,” Dance said.
Grant started to protest that he would take care of that, then thought better of it. The information would probably be better accepted coming from someone who wasn’t so closely connected to the situation. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ll text everything to you as soon as we’re done here.”
“I think we’ve got enough,” Dance said. The others nodded.
They left and Dance stood by, waiting. “We’ll find her,” he said when Grant had given him all the information. “I know that doesn’t really help you much.” He offered a crooked smile. “My daughter is only nine months old. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if she decided to head cross-country on her own.”
Grant picked up the phone to call Angela and tell her he’d started the ball rolling, but instead found himself dialing Eve’s number. “Hello?” she answered, sounding wary.
“Hi,” he said. “I just...” He cleared his throat. “I just heard from my ex-wife that my younger daughter, Janie, decided to take off cross-country to see me. She left a note for my wife and went out sometime last night.”
“Oh, Grant!” The words, so full of sympathy and understanding, made his eyes sting.
