by LENA DIAZ,
“I didn’t realize there was a US Marshals office in Gatlinburg.”
“There isn’t.” He slid his badge back into his pocket. “Knoxville’s the nearest field office. But that’s not where I work most of the time. Usually, I’m on taskforces throughout the state. Last week I started a new assignment here, working out of the Gatlinburg police station as a liaison, tracking down fugitives with outstanding warrants. Cold cases, basically.”
That explained why she hadn’t seen him around town since she’d gotten back. She’d both hoped for and dreaded bumping into him at some point.
“And you’ve been assigned to hunt down Brian?”
“No. A team of marshals was assembled out of Memphis to recapture him and the others immediately after the escape. The only reason I’m involved is because when I heard Brian was spotted heading toward this area, I decided to check out your place, just in case he went home. I was surprised to find that he had.”
“No more surprised than I was.”
His jaw tightened. “Your interference allowed him to get away.”
“I’m—”
“Sorry. Yes. I know.”
An uncomfortable silence settled between them until an officer opened the conference room door and waved at them.
“That’s our cue. Chief Landry is ready to talk to you.” Colin motioned for her to precede him. “It’s a full house. Given the need to pass along any useful information to the search teams as quickly as possible, the team leads are all in there, as well as detectives. That’s why they’re in a conference room instead of one of the smaller interview rooms.”
She wiped her suddenly sweaty palms against her jeans and headed toward the open door. But ten feet away, he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“Do you know where Brian’s hiding?”
“No. I don’t. I swear.”
He nodded. “All right. We’ll talk later, in private, and try to figure out where he might be holed up. But if you do have any ideas and are asked about him in that room, tell the truth. Deal or not. Lying will only get you in more trouble.”
“But I don’t want Brian hurt. Won’t telling them put his life in jeopardy?”
“Tell the truth,” he repeated. “The second you feel like you know where he might be, I’ll be the first one out the door trying to find him. I’ll do everything I can to protect him. You have my word.”
“Why? Why do you even want to help him, or me? And don’t tell me it’s because of my parents.”
His brows raised. “You and I may be over, but I loved you once. If nothing else, for the sake of what we once were to each other, I feel obligated to keep you both safe. Is that so difficult to understand?”
“After everything that’s happened, yes. It is. You’re a far better person than me, Colin. In your place, I don’t know that I could be so accommodating.”
He frowned and started to say something but the officer who’d waved at them earlier motioned at them again.
Peyton didn’t move. “Should I be asking for a lawyer?” she whispered.
He turned his back to the officer. “Probably. Are you asking for one?”
She considered her meager finances and the staggering cost of Brian’s continued legal bills that had crippled her entire family financially. It would take her years to pay off her portion of his lawyer fees. Adding more legal costs on top of that would be devastating. “No. I’ll just wing it, I guess.”
He frowned. “If you can’t afford one, I can take care of—”
“No.” She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “No, but thank you for offering. That’s very...nice of you, especially considering...” Her voice trailed off. The air between them seemed to thicken with tension. She glanced at the white lines on his hands. How he could have gone through what he had and offer to help her was beyond her comprehension, in spite of his insistence that he felt obligated because of their past.
It felt a thousand ways wrong.
She could never take his money, even though she knew he’d never miss it. Money had never been a concern for any of the McKenzies. They’d become wealthy the old-fashioned way. They’d inherited it. Colin didn’t work because he had to. He worked because he wanted to. But that wouldn’t make it right for her to take advantage of his generosity.
He studied her, as if deciding whether or not to argue the point. Then he shrugged and led her to the conference room.
It took a supreme effort of will not to turn around and run when she saw the people waiting for her inside. A dozen men and women went silent at her approach. Each of them had a legal pad or an electronic tablet on the table in front of them. And every one of them was watching her like a scientist observing a particularly nasty insect through a microscope.
“Over there.” A lean, middle-aged man with skin the color of an old saddle waved toward two empty chairs directly across the table from him.
She took one of the chairs. Colin took the other.
The man who’d motioned them to sit down gave her a smile that was polite, but far from warm. “I’m Chief Landry. Obviously, you already know Deputy US Marshal McKenzie. Everyone else in this room is either a regular police officer or a detective working for me. Miss Sterling, I want to make it clear that you’re not under arrest. I’m going to ask you some questions and, hopefully, you’ll do me the courtesy of answering them. You’re free to go at any time. Do you understand?”
She glanced longingly at the door but nodded. She understood more than he realized. The legal system wasn’t exactly a stranger to her given her family’s history fighting the charges against her brother. By not arresting her, the chief didn’t have to tell her about her legal rights or remind her that she could have an attorney present. She probably should go ahead and ask for a lawyer, in spite of the cost. But she didn’t want to prolong this any more than necessary. She’d just see how things went. Although how they could look worse than they did right now was beyond her.
A stack of folders sat to Landry’s right. He took the top one and set it on the table in front of him. He flipped it open, revealing an ugly window into the past, half a dozen color photographs that he methodically lined up in the middle of the table.
The burned-out hull of a building, smoke rising as fire fighters doused the embers.
The dance hall with scores of students clustered in small groups, being questioned by the police.
The ambulance taking Colin away.
Beside her, Colin tensed in his chair.
“Brief history for those in the room unfamiliar with Brian Sterling’s case.” Landry pulled a sheet of paper from the thick folder and ran a finger across a bulleted list. “The only son of Molly and Benjamin Sterling, Brian was suspected of setting five separate fires as a juvenile but was never convicted, mainly because no one was hurt, the damage was minimal and his parents agreed to make restitution to the property owners as well as take their son to a therapist. That all changed when, at the age of nineteen...” He frowned and flipped the page as if looking for something else. “This doesn’t look right. He was a senior in high school? At nineteen?”
Peyton’s chest tightened. She hadn’t known about the fires. That hadn’t come out at the trial. It must have been part of a sealed juvenile record that the chief had convinced some judge to let him access. Her parents, and her brother, had hidden that information from her. Why? To keep her from doubting her brother’s innocence? If whatever had happened in his past was relevant in any way to the accusations against him when he was nineteen, the judge at his arson trial would have unsealed the records. Her parents should have trusted her to understand that, and to know that she would continue her support and faith in her brother. She knew him better than anyone. She loved him. Unsealed records thrown at her in a room full of police who wanted to hurt him didn’t change that. She drew a shaky breath and forced herself to answer the chief’s
question.
“Brian had...difficulties in school. He was held back a year, so he was a senior the same time I was even though he’s a year older than me.”
“Thank you, Miss Sterling. Says here that a few weeks before graduation, Gatlinburg–Pittman High School held a dance at a place called The Barn, a combination restaurant and dance hall on a nature preserve just inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Toward the end of the evening, Brian poured accelerant on the dilapidated original barn that was no longer used for dances, and set it on fire.”
“Wrong.”
He glanced up at Peyton. “Excuse me?”
“My brother didn’t set the fire.”
“Twelve jurors disagree with you and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison.”
“Juries wrongly convict innocent people all the time. I’m sure you’ve heard of DNA exonerating people after they’ve spent years in prison for crimes someone else committed.”
He sat back and glanced at Colin before continuing. “I can only deal with the facts as they stand right now. Your brother is a convicted arsonist. There were two people in that barn—”
“No one was supposed to be inside. No Trespassing and Danger signs were posted outside.”
“Yes, well, that doesn’t change the fact that a pair of randy teenagers snuck away from the chaperones at the dance and hid inside the barn for a make-out session.”
Her mother had been one of those chaperones. Why couldn’t you have kept a better eye on them, Mom?
“When your brother set the fire—” He held up his hands to stop the denial she’d been ready to make. “When the structure went up in flames and the couple was overcome by smoke and trapped by those flames, Deputy US Marshal McKenzie, at the time a senior at the same high school, rescued those people at no small cost to himself, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard. “I’m well aware.”
Colin rested his forearms on the table. “Thank you for that history lesson, chief.” His droll tone said that he was anything but thankful. “What you all need to know is that Brian Sterling is a convicted arsonist with a complete disregard for human life.”
Peyton stiffened.
“You should consider him armed and dangerous. Approach with extreme caution. And be aware that if cornered, he could resort to setting a fire in order to escape. Now, Chief Landry, I believe you had some questions for Miss Sterling that might assist your teams in narrowing the search area?”
Landry seemed to take Colin’s interruption in stride and readily moved on to discuss her brother’s escape, along with three other convicts, grilling her with questions as he did so. At one point, he announced that marshals had questioned her father at his Memphis home, immediately after the escape, due to his close proximity to the site. Benjamin Sterling had denied any involvement, not that Peyton would have expected otherwise. Her father had always been one of Brian’s harshest critics. It was always she, and her mom, who stood up for him. The fact that the marshals had even considered that her father would help Brian was ludicrous.
“Your father claimed not to know where you were or how to contact you,” the chief said. “Do you know why he’d do that? He didn’t tell the marshals that you’d moved back to Gatlinburg.”
She clutched the edge of her seat beneath the table. “I imagine he thought he was protecting me. Having police at my business or home would have stirred up all the old gossip. It could hurt my café, the life I’m trying to build here.” And more important to her father, smear the precious Sterling name once again. Reputation was everything to her dad, far more important than his family.
The chief gave her a skeptical look then studied the notes in front of him. “Says here your mother passed away several months ago.”
She could feel Colin’s stare beside her. He’d seemed surprised to hear that she owned a café. And at the mention of her mom’s death, he seemed genuinely shocked. She regretted that he’d found out this way. But that didn’t mean that she was prepared to discuss the details. She was barely holding herself together. Discussing her mom right now would destroy her.
“My mother’s death has nothing to do with what’s going on with Brian. I’m not going to talk about her.”
To her surprise, Landry nodded and moved to other questions. She began to wonder whether talking about her mom would have been easier than hearing the details of her brother’s escape. Landry’s account of what had happened had nausea coiling in her stomach.
Brian was being transported along with three other convicts to the courthouse in downtown Memphis. Apparently, his lawyer had gotten him a hearing about alleged inhumane conditions at the prison. Since Peyton was well versed in the lawyer’s tactics, having worked many an odd job to help her parents pay for all those billable hours, she highly doubted that Brian was being treated unfairly. This latest complaint was likely based on Brian’s desire to get some time out of his cell. And he’d apparently taken advantage of the situation by escaping from the prison transport van.
“—and you claim you didn’t know anything about your brother’s plan?”
She clasped her hands in her lap. “Again, no, Chief Landry. As I’ve said repeatedly, I didn’t even know that he was out of prison until I saw him in my kitchen. Even then, it didn’t quite register. I thought his lawyer must have finally managed to get his sentence shortened and Brian wanted to surprise me. Before today, I hadn’t seen him in a little over three months.”
“Then you didn’t know that shortly after he and three other men got away, they were confronted by Memphis police officer Owen Jennings and one of them shot and killed him?”
She drew a shaky breath. “My heart goes out to Officer Jennings and his family. But, no, I didn’t know anything about it. I still don’t. How did they escape? How did the man who shot Officer Jennings get a gun?”
“You mean how did your brother get the gun? Deputy Marshal McKenzie has told me he used to take you and your brother target practicing when you were teenagers. So we know your brother’s more than capable of handling a weapon.”
She glanced at Colin, then back at Landry. “Are you saying that you know that Brian is the one who shot Officer Jennings? Not one of the others?”
“No. He’s not.” Colin sat forward in his chair, his gaze riveted on the police chief. “Dash cam video from the officer’s patrol car shows him getting shot and the four prisoners running from the scene. Which man shot him is still to be determined.”
The chief sighed. “Marshal McKenzie, you’re here as a courtesy due to your close ties to the original arson case, and because you located Mr. Sterling earlier today in an unfortunately failed attempt to apprehend him. I’d appreciate you not interfering in my questioning of Miss Sterling.”
“Stick to what’s relevant and I won’t interfere.”
The chief smiled, seeming to shrug off Colin’s admonition. Peyton figured the two must have a solid friendship, or at least mutual respect, for Landry not to be upset.
“I’m okay moving on to the question of an alibi. Miss Sterling, where were you yesterday morning between the hours of ten and eleven?”
“Alibi? For what?”
“We need to know who might have, and might still be, helping the four convicts who escaped during transport from the Federal Correctional Institution in Memphis yesterday morning. So, again, can you please account for your whereabouts?”
“You seriously think I would have helped them?”
“Peyton.” Colin spoke softly beside her. “Just answer the question.”
“No,” she said. “No, I wasn’t six hours away in Memphis while simultaneously at my shop here in Gatlinburg.”
“Your shop? I believe you mentioned a café earlier?” Landry asked.
“Yes. I own a café and gift shop combination called Peyton’s Place. It’s in The Village, off Parkway. It’s ne
w, not far from The Hofbrauhaus restaurant.”
“Can someone there vouch for where you were yesterday?”
“Joan—she works for me—she can tell you I was there all day, as I am most days. But she’s not there right now. The shop closed at six. It will open again in the morning, at nine.”
“I’m sure you understand the urgency of verifying your alibi as quickly as possible. Waiting until morning isn’t an option. Joan’s last name? Her address?”
“Fairmont, Joan Fairmont. I should call her first and let her know that—”
“If you do, that will destroy the credibility of her as an alibi witness. One of my men will head over there now and speak to her. The address?”
She hesitated. “I don’t want them frightened by a policeman knocking on their door.”
“Them?”
“I have two employees. Joan is full-time, Melissa’s part-time. They’re roommates.”
He motioned to one of the detectives who then wrote something down on the legal pad in front of him. Apparently he was making notes about her alibi.
“And why would they be frightened if a detective knocks on their door? Do they have something to hide?”
Her face heated. “Of course not. But they...they both have criminal records.” She could practically feel Colin’s gaze burning into her. “Nothing dangerous or anything. They were both homeless and became friends while trying to survive on the streets. They were hungry and got caught shoplifting at a grocery store. Both did a few months in the local jail.”
“Are there any other criminals working at your shop that we need to know about?”
She had to count to ten before she could speak without yelling. “I don’t consider Joan and Melissa to be criminals. Being poor and hungry are hardly crimes. They made restitution for what little food they took when they were practically starving. And they’re working hard to turn their lives around.”
“No doubt. My apologies if I seemed insensitive.”
