Lena forced her lips into a tight smile, trying to give Brad some silent support. She had been a dumb cop herself many years ago. Maybe Jeffrey had thought she was worthless, too. The fact that he had tried to turn her into something worthwhile was a testament to his determination. One of the few reasons Lena could give herself for not taking the job in Macon was thinking that she could do something to help Brad be a better cop. She could keep him away from the corruption, train him to do things the right way.
Do as I say, not as I do.
“Are you sure this is it?” Frank demanded. He meant the house.
Brad’s throat worked. “Yes, sir. That’s what the college had on file. Sixteen and a half Taylor Drive.”
“Did you knock on the door?”
Brad seemed unsure of which answer was the right one. “No, sir. You said to wait for you.”
“You got a phone number for the owner?”
“No, sir. His name is Mr. Braham, but—”
“Christ,” Frank muttered, stalking up the driveway.
Lena couldn’t help but feel sorry for Brad. She thought about reaching up and patting him on the shoulder, but he tilted his bright pink umbrella the wrong way and ended up sending a sheet of rain down on her head.
“Oh,” Brad breathed. “Gosh, I’m sorry, Lena.”
She pressed down some expletives that wanted to come and walked ahead of him, joining Frank.
Sixteen and a half Taylor Drive was a one-story garage that was slightly deeper than a minivan and twice as wide. “Converted” was a loose term, because the structure had not been altered well on the outside. The roll-up metal door was still in place, black construction paper covering the windows. Because of the overcast day, the lights inside the apartment showed through the cracks in the aluminum siding. Tufts of pink fiberglass insulation were matted down by rain. The tin roof was rusted red, a blue tarp covering the back corner.
Lena stared at the structure, wondering why any woman in her right mind would live here.
“Scooter,” Frank noted. There was a purple Vespa parked by the garage. A bike chain attached the back wheel to an eyebolt screwed into the concrete drive. He asked, “Same chain as what was on the girl?”
She saw a flash of bright yellow under the wheel. “Looks like the same padlock.”
Lena glanced toward the main house, a split ranch with a sloping gable on the front. The windows were dark. There was no car by the house or on the street. They would have to find the landlord for permission to go into the garage. She flipped open her cell phone to call Marla Simms, the station’s elderly secretary. Between Marla and her best friend, Myrna, they represented a combined Rolodex of every person in town.
Brad pressed his face up to one of the windows in the garage door. He squinted, trying to see past a rip in the construction paper. “Jeesh,” he whispered, backing up so quickly that he almost tripped over his feet. He drew his gun and went into a crouch.
Lena’s Glock was in her hand before she thought about putting it there. Her heart had jumped into her throat. Adrenaline made her senses sharpen. A quick look over her shoulder showed Frank had drawn his weapon, too. They all stood there, guns pointed toward the closed garage door.
Lena motioned for Brad to move back. She kept a low crouch as she walked up to the garage window. The tear in the construction paper seemed larger now, more like a target she was about to put her face in front of. Quickly, she glanced inside. There was a man standing at a folding table. He was wearing a black mask. He looked up as if he heard a noise, and Lena ducked down again, her heart racing. She stood still, counting off the seconds as her ears strained to hear footsteps, a gun loading. There was nothing, and she slowly let out the breath she’d been holding.
She held up one finger to Frank: one person. She mouthed the word “mask,” and saw his eyes widen in surprise. Frank indicated his gun and she shrugged as she shook her head. She hadn’t been able to see whether or not the man was holding a weapon.
Without being told, Brad walked toward the side of the building. He went around the back, obviously checking for exits. Lena counted the seconds, reaching twenty-six by the time he showed up on the other side of the building. Brad shook his head. No back door. No windows. Lena indicated that he should go down the driveway and serve as backup. Let her and Frank handle this. Brad started to protest, but she cut him with a look. Finally, he hung his head in surrender. She waited until he was at least fifteen feet away before nodding to Frank that she was ready to go.
Frank walked toward the garage and leaned down, wrapping his hand around the steel handle at the base of the roll-up door. He checked with Lena, then yanked up on the handle hard and fast.
The man inside was startled, his eyes going wide behind the black ski mask covering his face. He had a knife in his gloved hand, raised as if to charge. The blade was long and thin, at least eight inches. What looked very much like dried blood was caked around the handle. The concrete beneath his feet was stained a dark brown. More blood.
“Drop it,” Frank said.
The intruder didn’t comply. Lena took a few steps to her right, closing any escape routes. He was standing behind a large cafeteria table with paperwork strewn across it. A twin bed was angled out from the wall so that between the bed frame and the table, the entire room was cut down the middle.
“Put down the knife,” Lena told him. She had to turn sideways to get past the bed. There was another dark stain on the concrete under the bed. A bucket with brown water and a filthy-looking sponge was beside it. She kept her gun trained at the man’s chest, stepping carefully around boxes and scattered pieces of paper. He glanced nervously between Lena and Frank, the knife still raised in his fist.
“Drop it,” Frank repeated.
The man’s hands started to lower. Lena let herself exhale, thinking this was going to go easy. She was wrong. Without warning, the man shoved the table violently to the side, slamming it into Lena’s legs, sending her back onto the bed. Her head grazed the frame as she rolled onto the concrete floor. A shot rang out. Lena didn’t think it was from her gun, but her left hand felt hot, almost on fire. Someone shouted. There was a muffled groan. She scrambled to stand. Her vision blurred.
Frank was lying on his side in the middle of the garage. His gun lay on the ground beside him. His fist was clamped around his arm. She thought at first that he was having a heart attack. The blood seeping between his fingers showed that he had been cut.
“Go!” he yelled. “Now!”
“Shit,” Lena hissed, pushing away the table. She felt nauseated. Her vision was still blurred, but it sharpened on the black-clad suspect bolting down the driveway. Brad was standing stock-still, mouth open in surprise. The intruder ran right past him.
“Stop him!” she screamed. “He stabbed Frank!”
Brad jerked around, giving chase. Lena ran after them, sneakers slapping against the wet ground, water flying up into her face. She rounded the end of the driveway and flew down the street. Ahead, she saw Brad gaining on the suspect. He was taller, fitter, every stride closing the gap between him and the intruder.
Brad yelled, “Police! Stop!”
Everything slowed. The rain seemed to freeze in midair, tiny droplets trapped in time and space.
The suspect stopped. He reared around, slicing the knife through the air. Lena reached for her gun, felt the empty holster. There was a popping sound of metal breaking through flesh, then a loud groan. Brad crumpled to the ground.
“No,” Lena gasped, running to Brad, falling to her knees. The knife was still in his belly. Blood seeped into his shirt, turning the white to crimson. “Brad—”
“It hurts,” he told her. “It hurts so bad.”
Lena dialed her cell phone, praying the ambulance team was still at the lake and not making the half-hour trip back to the station. Behind her, she heard loud footsteps, shoes pounding pavement. With startling speed, Frank sprinted past her, yelling with uncontrolled rage. The suspect turned around to s
ee what hell was about to be unleashed upon him just as Frank tackled him to the asphalt. Teeth shattered. Bones snapped. Frank’s fists were flying, a windmill of pain raining down on the suspect.
Lena pressed the phone to her ear. She listened to the rings that were going unanswered at the station.
“Lena …” Brad whispered. “Don’t tell my mom I messed up.”
“You didn’t mess up.” She used her hand to shield the rain from his face. His eyelids fluttered, trying to close. “No,” she begged. “Please don’t do this to me.”
“I’m sorry, Lena.”
“No!” she yelled.
Not again.
CHAPTER THREE
SARA LINTON NO LONGER THOUGHT OF GRANT COUNTY AS HER home. It was of another place, another time, as tangible to her as Rebecca’s Manderley or Heathcliff’s moors. As she drove through the outskirts of town, she couldn’t help but notice that everything looked the same, yet nothing was quite real. The closed military base that was slowly reverting to nature. The trailer parks on the bad side of the railroad tracks. The abandoned box store that had been converted into a storage center.
Three and a half years had passed since Sara had been home, and she wanted to think that her life was okay now, getting closer to a new normal. Actually, her current life in Atlanta looked a lot like it would have if she had stayed there after medical school instead of moving back to Grant County. She was the chief pediatric attending in Grady Hospital’s emergency room, where students followed her around like puppy dogs and the security guards carried multiple clips on their belts in case the gangbangers tried to finish the job they started on the streets. An epidemiologist who worked for the Centers for Disease Control on Emory’s campus had started asking her out. She went to dinner parties and grabbed coffee with friends. Occasionally, on the weekends, she would take the dogs to Stone Mountain Park to give the greyhounds space to run. She read a lot. She watched more television than she should. She was living a perfectly normal, perfectly boring life.
And yet, the minute she saw the sign announcing that she had officially entered Grant County, her carefully constructed façade started to crack. She pulled over to the side of the road, feeling a constriction in her chest. The dogs stirred in the back seat. Sara forced herself not to give in. She was stronger than this. She had fought tooth and nail to climb out of the depression she’d spiraled into after her husband’s death, and she was not going to allow herself to fall back in just because of a stupid road sign.
“Hydrogen,” she said. “Helium, lithium, beryllium.” It was an old trick from her childhood, listing out the elements from the periodic table to take her mind off the monsters that might be lurking under her bed. “Neon, sodium, magnesium …” She recited from memory until her heart stopped racing and her breathing returned to normal.
Finally, the moment passed, and she found herself laughing at the thought of Jeffrey finding out she was chanting the periodic table on the side of the road. He’d been a jock in high school—handsome, charming, and effortlessly cool. It had tickled him no end to see Sara’s geeky side.
She reached around and gave the dogs some attention so they would settle back down. Instead of starting the car again, she sat for a while, staring out the window at the empty road leading into town. Her fingers went to the collar of her shirt, then lower to the ring she wore on a necklace. Jeffrey’s Auburn class ring. He’d been on the football team until he got tired of warming the bench. The ring was bulky, too big for her finger, but touching it was the closest she could come to touching him. It was a talisman. Sometimes, she found herself touching it without remembering putting her hand there.
Her only consolation was that there was nothing left unsaid between them. Jeffrey knew that Sara loved him. He knew there was no part of her that did not belong wholly and completely to him, just as she knew that he felt the same. When he died, his last words were to her. His last thoughts, his last memories, all were of Sara. Just as she knew that her last thoughts would always be of him.
She kissed the ring before tucking it back into her shirt. Carefully, Sara pulled the car off the shoulder and back onto the road. The overwhelming feeling threatened to come back as she drove farther into town. It was so much easier to push away the things that she had lost when they weren’t staring her right in the face. The high school football stadium where she had first met Jeffrey. The park where they had walked the dogs together. The restaurants where they ate. The church that Sara’s mother had occasionally guilted them into attending.
There had to be one place, one memory, that was untouched by this man. Long before Jeffrey Tolliver even knew there was such a thing as Grant County, she’d had a life here. Sara had grown up in Heartsdale, gone to the high school, joined the science club, helped out at the women’s shelter where her mother volunteered, done the occasional odd job with her father. Sara had lived in a house Jeffrey had never stepped foot in. She’d driven a car he’d never seen. She had shared her first kiss with a local boy whose father owned the hardware store. She had gone to dances at the church and attended potlucks and football games.
All without Jeffrey.
Three years before he entered her life, Sara had taken the part-time job of county medical examiner in order to buy out her partner at the children’s clinic. She had kept the job long after her loan had been paid off. She was surprised to find out that helping the dead was sometimes more rewarding than saving the living. Every case was a puzzle, every body riddled with clues to a mystery that only Sara could solve. A different part of her brain that she hadn’t even known existed was engaged by the coroner’s job. She had loved both her jobs with equal passion. She had worked countless cases, given testimony in court on countless suspects and circumstances.
Now, Sara could not remember one detail from any of them.
What she could vividly recall was the day that Jeffrey Tolliver had strolled into town. The mayor had wooed him away from the Birmingham police force to take over for the retiring chief of police. Every woman Sara knew practically tittered with joy whenever Jeffrey’s name was mentioned. He was witty and charming. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He’d played college football. He drove a cherry red Mustang, and when he walked, he had the athletic grace of a panther.
That Jeffrey set his sights on Sara had shocked the entire town, Sara included. She wasn’t the type of girl who got the good-looking guy. She was the type of girl who watched her sister or her best friend get the good-looking guy. And yet, their casual dates turned into something deeper, so that a few years later, no one was surprised when Jeffrey asked her to marry him. Their relationship had been hard work, and God knew there had been ups and downs, but in the end, she had known with every fiber of her being that she belonged to Jeffrey and, more important, that he belonged completely to her.
Sara wiped her tears with the back of her hand as she drove. The longing was the hardest part, the physical ache her body felt at the memory of him. There was no part of town that didn’t slap her in the face with what she had lost. These roads had been kept safe by him. These people had called him friend. And Jeffrey had died here. The town he’d loved so much had become his crime scene. There was the church where they mourned his death. There was the street where a long line of cars had pulled over as his casket was driven out of town.
She would only be here for four days. She could do anything for four days.
Almost anything.
Sara took the long way to her parents’ house, bypassing Main Street and the children’s clinic. The bad storms that had followed her all the way from Atlanta had finally subsided, but she could tell from the dark clouds in the sky that this was only a temporary reprieve. The weather seemed to fit her mood lately—sudden, violent storms with fleeting rays of sunshine.
Because of the coming Thanksgiving holiday, lunchtime traffic was nonexistent. No cars were snaking a long line toward the college. No noontime shoppers were heading into downtown. Still, she took a left instead of a right at
Lakeshore Drive, going two miles out of her way around Lake Grant so that she would not drive past her old house. Her old life.
The Linton family home, at least, was welcoming in its familiarity. The house had been tinkered with over the years—additions tacked on, bathrooms added and updated. Sara’s father had built out the apartment space over the garage when she went away to college so that she would have a place to stay during summer break. Tessa, Sara’s younger sister, had lived there for almost ten years while she waited for her life to start. Eddie Linton was a plumber by trade. He had taught both his girls the business, but only Tessa had stuck around long enough to do anything with it. That Sara had chosen medical school instead of a life navigating dank crawl spaces with her sister and father was a disappointment Eddie still tried his best to cover. He was the kind of father who was most happy when his daughters were close by.
Sara didn’t know how Eddie felt about Tessa leaving the family business. Around the time Sara had lost Jeffrey, Tessa had gotten married and moved her life eight thousand miles away to work with children in South Africa. She was as impulsive as Sara was steady, though no one would have guessed when the girls were teenagers that either of them would be where they were today. The idea of Tessa as a missionary was still hard for Sara to believe.
“Sissy!” Tessa bounded out of the house, her pregnant belly swaying as she angled herself down the front stairs. “What took you so long? I’m starving!”
Sara was barely out of the car when her sister threw her arms around her. The hug turned from a greeting into something deeper, and Sara felt the darkness coming back. She was no longer certain that she could do this for four minutes, let alone four days.
Tessa mumbled, “Oh, Sissy, everything’s changed.”
Sara blinked back tears. “I know.”
Tessa pulled away. “They got a pool.”
Sara laughed in surprise. “A what?”