Текст книги "Shattered Secrets"

Автор книги: Karen Harper

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

13

Tess stared at the single light flickering through the corn. It moved steadily along the back of her yard, maybe only a couple of rows in. She tried to concentrate on the dark form carrying it. The person was holding the light low, maybe thinking it was hidden or so it wouldn’t reveal a face. It was hard to tell the person’s height from this high up. She was so scared for a moment she just stared, mouth open.

Then she scrambled to action, fumbling for her purse. She found it and reached inside for her phone. Its dim light almost blinded her. She had to ransack her purse, looking for her billfold, where she’d tucked the paper with both of Gabe’s numbers written on it.

Her hand shook so much as she punched in Gabe’s home phone number she misdialed and had to do it again. He had to be there. He could get in his cruiser, scare away or catch whoever that was. Could it be someone related to the kidnappings, who wanted to chase her away? Or worse, to silence her?

Gabe’s number rang and rang. He told her if she dialed 911, his night dispatcher could reach him, so maybe she should do that. As his home phone was still ringing, she peeked out the window. The light in the corn was moving right through the area where she’d been snatched. She heard a voice.

“Gabe McCord.”

“Gabe, it’s Tess. Someone made all my lights go out, both inside and out. And someone’s out in the corn in back with a light, kind of moving around, out by where I was taken.”

“I’m looking out the window. Yeah, you’re pitch-dark. Stay put in the house, and I’ll be right there. I’m going to get a stun gun as well as my pistol and come through the cornfield between us on foot, see if I can surprise your visitor.”

“But I want him gone! Can’t you run the siren on the cruiser?”

“Tess, we want to catch this guy. I’ll be right there, sweetheart, so don’t be afraid.”

Sweetheart? That word both comforted and frightened her, just like his plan. She crawled from the back window to the side one and crouched under the window, staring through the darkness toward Gabe’s place.

She felt a sudden surge of anger. She couldn’t just cower here, had to do something to help. Rather than just watch for Gabe, she returned to the back window so she could look at the light and maybe signal with her phone or shout to Gabe which way it went.

She couldn’t let this monster control her. And she’d never forgive herself if something happened to Gabe.

* * *

Gabe strapped on his gun belt and grabbed the stun gun and a flashlight but didn’t take time to throw on a jacket. Thank heavens he was here, not in town, not in the shower or in bed. It was only a little after ten. He’d been exhausted, planning to hit the rack for a couple of hours, but now adrenaline surged through him.

He raced out the side door, cursed taking the time to lock it, but he didn’t want anyone to get inside to see what he had hidden in his spare bedroom. He tore past his parked cruiser into the field that stretched to Tess’s house. He pushed himself hard. Ears of corn bounced against his shoulders and hips. He told himself to keep his toes pointed in, concentrate on not tripping over roots. Surely Aaron was going to cut these fields soon, though they’d been planted later than most in the area. At least asking when they’d be cut would be an excuse to interview the man. He didn’t want someone being able to sneak up on Tess or him either like this.

Compared to when he used to run miles each day, he felt out of shape, sucking air. He slowed to avoid giving himself away with noise. It was so different from the way they’d handled problems in Iraq. They’d go in with a heavily armed convoy accompanying his blast-resistant Humvee with its four-hundred-pound doors. That let people know they were coming, that they could handle things, that the U.S. had power and might. But he’d also used remote-controlled cameras and robots to defuse danger. Here in Cold Creek it was hands-on and in-your-face.

As he neared the Lockwood edge of the field, he raised his flashlight and blinked it at the side of Tess’s house, once, twice, just to let her know he was here. He strained to listen a moment to see if he had spooked the intruder. If the guy ran, he’d hear him rustle the corn, wouldn’t he? Who among the suspects had the know-how to cut off the power to Tess’s place?

Gabe heard her open her window above him. Did she think his signal meant she must answer? If the guy had a gun, she was about to make herself a target.

He vaulted out from the corn to yell up at her, but she called down, “He’s moving away, toward Dane’s place! I think he’s almost halfway across, but I can’t see his light now. He was in a row about where the swing set used to be, but he could have doubled back. Be careful!”

“Stay in there!” he shouted. He turned on his flashlight and, holding the stun gun, ran across the small backyard and crashed back into the rows of corn. Marva had said Dane, John and Sam were out in the hills tonight, but were they really? If there were three of them, he could be running right into a trap where he was outnumbered.

He switched off his light and went around to another row far from the area Tess had indicated. If this was a ploy to lure him away from Tess, to make sure he was out of the way so someone could not just scare her but hurt her, he wouldn’t allow it.

Moving out of the field onto the side road, he headed back toward her house. Close to her property, he saw why her lights had gone out. A vehicle had hit the pole that carried those wires, and the whole thing was atilt. It was no accident, he’d bet, as there was no vehicle in sight. He’d have to notify gas stations and body shops in the area to watch for dents in fenders or crumpled hoods. Maybe Mike could get paint scrapings off the pole.

He cut across Tess’s backyard, playing his light on the ground before him. Two eyes gleamed at him from the picnic table. He jumped back, transferred the stun gun to his left hand and went for his pistol.

But the thing—a dog—didn’t move. Glassy-eyed. Dead. Mounted. Again, memories of Iraq haunted him. There had always been dead dogs in the streets, but what did this one mean? The scarecrow, now this. Either someone was leaving him clues, or this was meant to scare Tess away.

He shone the light on the dog. The shadows made it look even more frightening. This could be John Hillman’s taxidermy work. But he’d never be so stupid as to leave it here, like a calling card, a come-haul-me-in-for-questioning sign. So who had left it here?

Through the back door, Gabe told Tess to stay inside, then he slumped on the picnic table seat. He called Vic.

Vic was staying in a motel out on Route 23 almost to Chillicothe. Gabe updated him. Vic said Mike had gone to BCI headquarters, but he’d get him back to look at the taxidermy work on the dog. Mike would also check for paint on the telephone pole. He said he’d see him first thing in the morning at the sheriff’s office.

Gabe called Jace and asked him to call body shops in a wide area to ask that they be notified if someone came in with a staved-in or even dented fender. Then Gabe called the emergency line at the power company to get Tess’s power restored.

“Can I come out now?” she called from the back door.

“No, I’ll come in.”

He didn’t want her to see the dog. It was a pit bull, snarling and looking ready to leap, which was how he felt. As soon as he was done with the staff meeting in the morning, he was going to question John Hillman, Dane Thompson, even Sam Jeffers. They’d better have brought that stag back dead or alive to prove they weren’t around Tess’s place during the night. Could all three guys—loners and eccentrics, though the woods was full of them around here—have colluded on abductions over the years? Hillman was divorced, Sam a longtime widower and Dane a bachelor, so there were no mates or children in their lives.

“Oh! Gabe, what’s that?” Tess cried, coming up behind him.

“I told you to stay inside.”

“A stuffed dog! One that looks like it wants to attack. Obviously a warning to me.”

“I called to get your lights back on, but it may not happen until early morning,” he told her, getting up and facing her to put himself between her and the back cornfield. He snared her wrist with one hand to pull her away from staring at that dog. “Tess, please go in your house, grab a couple of things to spend the night at my place. You got any big plastic trash bags in there? Damn, I’m tired of hauling weird stuff around to show people.”

“I saw you showing the scarecrow to Wanda Kurtz and wondered why. Yes, I have a trash bag. But can’t you stay here instead?”

“We’d be sitting ducks in the dark. We’re going to my place. I’ve got an extra room, a spare bed. You’ll be safer there.”

“We’re going through the cornfield? What if that’s his plan?”

“I think he—or they—only wanted to give you a good scare or warning. Just do as I say, okay?”

“All right, but you haven’t confided in me, and not only about Wanda Kurtz. I hear you’ve been to the Hear Ye Commune, but then I guess I didn’t tell you something too. I heard a woman or girl scream at the compound, but I kind of checked it out and got a reasonable explanation—if reason is any part of that place.”

“What are you, my other deputy? Here, take my flashlight, go in the house, get your things now, or I swear, I’ll arrest you for something and put you in the detention cell in town for safekeeping. I checked out Amanda’s possibly being held at the compound. Brice Monson’s weird, but he’s got too many people around to be hiding Amanda, Jill or Sandy there. Now, do what I say!”

Obviously as frustrated with him as he was her, Tess grabbed the flashlight from him, went in, slammed both doors, came out, threw a trash bag at him and banged inside the house again. That all infuriated him too, but for one thing. She was not whimpering in a corner. It was kind of the spunky, younger Teresa again, animated, defiant, a fearless tomboy before trauma had crushed her.

Trying to keep his temper in check—it riled him especially that he wanted to put his hands all over her even when she was defying him—he worked the dog into the bag so he could carry it upright.

Tess came out with a full paper sack and her purse and thrust the flashlight back at him. “See, you’ve turned me into a bag lady,” she said. “Like one you’re taking off the streets because she can’t care for herself. But I wasn’t going through that field with my suitcase.”

“Let’s go. We’ll set a timer and argue for an hour, then hit the rack, or since you’re a bag lady, hit the sack. We’re both exhausted, and I can’t believe you’d even consider staying here alone tonight after this.”

“Let’s see, how to put this...” she said, her tone still sarcastic, as they walked toward the cornfield with him leading. “You can’t teach an old, scared and traumatized dog new tricks, so Tess is going to ruin things if she tries to think on her own to help you out. She was misled at first because you said you wanted her to help, so—”

“I wanted you to remember what happened to you when you were taken twenty years ago, not take over now! Did you lock up the house?”

“Of course. Did you lock yours in your rush?”

“You bet I did. Look, I know you’re upset and scared, but keep quiet right now. There’s another saying that I’ve seen on signs in yards around here for years—Beware of Dog—and I think that’s the message here.”

“From that stuffed, dead dog or from the top-dog sheriff?”

He turned back to face her. “Stop fighting me! Someone wants you to leave town or worse. Or if this dead dog is a message for me, I’m not sure what it means.”

“I was just...just trying to keep my courage up, I think.”

“Stick close, okay? Right behind me.”

As he turned away to head into the field, he heard her sniff back tears. He knew he shouldn’t have been so rough, but she really got to him. Maybe she was right on the edge of hysteria. Actually he knew the feeling. How many times had he beat down a screaming fit of fear when he’d had to dismantle a bomb by hand when the robot just wouldn’t work?

“Yes, I’m staying close,” she told him in a suddenly quiet voice that caught on a half-smothered sob as they headed into the tall, thick corn between their houses.

* * *

Tess drank the hot chocolate he fixed for them in his kitchen. She remembered how it had once looked, but it had all been updated, even to stainless-steel appliances. If she could recall what a kitchen looked like from two decades ago, why couldn’t she recall more important things? She looked around. It was neat, not even dishes in the sink or drain rack. He’d pulled down all the blinds so no one could see in. She felt safe from anything outside now, but sealed in with him, newly alert as they faced each other across the wooden kitchen table.

“I can’t take you to the early-morning meeting at the station with me,” he told her. “But since you’re so involved—and I didn’t mean to shut you out except to keep you safe—I’ll call you right after and tell you what the three of us have decided.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“But I want you to stay here until the power is restored at your place.”

She nodded. She was so exhausted her eyes almost crossed.

He went on, sounding nervous, “I’d better open up the extra bedroom for you so it heats up in there. I keep both extra rooms upstairs closed in the heating season. There’s just one bath upstairs—a half bath down here, but you’re welcome to take a shower or whatever. I’ll get some towels out.”

“Your mother would be proud of your hospitality and how great this place looks. She was always a good hostess.”

“Yeah. Still is in the trailer park where she lives in Florida. Too good a hostess at times, I guess.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but a bath and bed sounded so good. And to sleep at night in security, to feel safe, as she never quite had in the old house the three nights she’d been back, would be great—safe from everything except her feelings for Gabe.

She followed him upstairs as he opened the door to a plainly furnished bedroom. It was his boyhood one, she was sure of that, though it had been redone. It was a bit feminine, maybe in case his mother visited. So he must sleep in his parents’ larger one across the front of the house. But no, he tossed his windbreaker into the room at the back end of the hall.

“Don’t you sleep in front?” she asked, suddenly feeling awkward again as his eyes swept her. Oh, no, that over-the-waterfall sensation again. She’d been fighting it, but feelings flew between them like pounding spray.

“No, I keep that for my home office,” he said, but he didn’t open the door to give her a glimpse. “It’s bigger. I’m down the hall. I can use the bathroom downstairs, so you just go ahead.”

He got a set of towels and an extra blanket from a hall linen closet and piled them in her arms. “I’ll be getting up early,” he said. “Probably before six. If you want to join me for breakfast that’s fine. Otherwise just get what you want, and don’t go back to your house until you’re sure the power’s on,” he repeated. “Don’t answer the phone here either. Only use your cell.”

He was so close she could see how thick his eyelashes were. Little flecks of gold swam in the blue irises of his eyes. He had a slight scar on his chin—from the war?

“I can’t thank you enough,” she whispered.

“Maybe sometime,” he said. Then before she knew it was coming, he leaned forward to kiss her.

At first it was just closed lips, controlled, kind of sweet. But suddenly they crushed the stack of towels and the blanket between them, holding tight, clinging. When she clasped her arms around his neck, everything cascaded to the floor. They pressed together, chest to breasts, hips and thighs. His hands raced over her waist and back as they opened their mouths in a devouring kiss. He cupped her bottom with his hands, lifted her up against him, before setting her back, almost roughly. Both dazed and shaky, they stared wide-eyed at each other, standing a few feet apart.

“I don’t mean to take advantage of the situation,” he said, his voice raspy. “You have to be able to trust me. I made a big mistake once, mixing business with...with pleasure.”

She was breathless too, but she managed to speak. “Dating Ann or someone else?”

“Yes, Ann. I should have considered her hair-trigger-temper brothers, as well as the fact that I wasn’t that crazy about her. Besides, it hit me a few minutes ago that one of them—Jonas—raises pit bulls. I’ve been wanting to bust him for illegal dogfights. I think they have some sites in the woods, but I’ve never found the locations. And they’re very protective of Ann. I’ve been trying to back off, even before you came back, but they all think I should be full steam ahead—like just now—between us.”

They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Despite all those words—information—he’d put out between them like a barrier, she almost threw herself into his arms again. Instead she bent to gather the linens from the floor.

“Thanks for taking me in,” she said as she forced herself to head for the bedroom he’d given her. He had taken her in, heart and soul, as the old song said. But she had to fight that sweeping need for him with all her might.

* * *

As exhausted as Tess was and as good as she felt after a hot bath in Gabe’s big bathtub, she couldn’t sleep. She prayed she would not dream of that dog, nor of the monster in the cornfield. If she screamed out in the night, would Gabe come running? She tossed and turned, thinking of her father, her sisters, the missing girls, Gabe.

She heard a voice, a young girl’s voice, muted but close. Was she dreaming? No.

She sat straight up in bed. She heard a girl’s voice coming from out in the hall.

Tess got up and wrapped the extra blanket around her like a robe. She was wearing her nightgown, but she’d forgotten her slippers. Her feet were cold on the wooden floor. Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it a crack.

Light bled from under the door of the room Gabe had said was his home office. And that’s where the voice came from, definitely a young girl’s. Could he have a TV on in there? Maybe he couldn’t sleep either.

Tiptoeing closer, she put her ear to the door.

She could hear the words clearly now. “My name is Jill Stillwell. I love puppies and to camp out with my family. I love to read books. I can read now all by myself if the books are elentory, I mean easy enough, like in elentory school. I have an older brother, Jeff, who is nice to me mostly...”

The high, sweet, little voice went on. But...but Jill Stillwell was the name of the second girl who had been abducted, taken years after Tess’s family had moved to Michigan. She sounded so real, as if she was just on the other side of this door!

Carefully, quietly, Tess turned the doorknob. She only meant to open the door a crack, but it swung inward with a loud creak. She gasped and gave a little cry at what she saw, just as Gabe turned around to glare at her.

14

“Tess!” Gabe cried as he jumped to his feet. He killed the sound track—he’d been sitting at a laptop—and came at her as if to block her from seeing what was here. Or was he going to grab her?

“I heard—I heard a girl’s voice,” she said, retreating into the hall. “Jill Stillwell’s, one of the kidnapped—”

He grasped her shoulders in hard hands. “It’s a recording her family gave me from their Facebook page. It helps me to remember.”

It scared her how she recalled that some murderers kept relics of their victims. In the brief glance into the room, she wondered if it could be like a big memory box, a memorial to the lost girls. She’d glimpsed a large blown-up picture of a child who must be Amanda Bell, next to a map with all kinds of lines and other pictures. Were there things in there about her too?

Gabe gave a huge sigh that seemed to deflate his body. His broad shoulders slumped. “You’re not dressed,” he said as his eyes went over her. “And it’s cold tonight. Go get something on so you don’t distract me even more, and I’ll show you what I’ve never shared with anyone. I do have some stuff like this at the office, but I’ve got more here—maybe it will jog something loose for you.”

Hurrying, shaking, she did as he said and joined him in the big room that had been his parents’ master bedroom. Two walls seemed dedicated to the two earliest victims, Teresa Lockwood and Jill Stillwell. He’d posted photographs of the kidnap victims and their families, with lines drawn out to what he explained was “a circle of acquaintances.” On the next wall, narrower because of windows, he’d started to put up things about the Sandy Kenton kidnapping.

Each wall was a collage of evidence. He’d written in times, places, even things like height and weight of the victims. For each, he’d posted an age-advanced photo of what she might look like now. Tess was amazed at how close to reality the one of her came.

Amanda Bell’s area covered only the double-closet doors, but it included a big map of Brazil with cities and roads highlighted with a black pen. Sandy Kenton’s wall shared space with a four-by-four-foot bulletin board with a map of Iraq. It was marked where, as Gabe put it, “those sites had victims too. We worked hard to disrupt bombs.”

“Those red dots?” she asked, mesmerized by all that he was sharing, and still hesitant to look too closely at her own wall.

“No, the black ones. The red ones show where we didn’t get there in time. Where the bomb went off. This one,” he said, pointing at a dot nearly obscured by men’s first names, “was where I...I lost my friends—and I was in charge.”

She touched his arm, slid her hand down to hold his. He gripped her fingers so hard it hurt, but he didn’t look at her, only at the names.

Finally, she steadied herself to turn away and move closer to the wall dedicated to her. There were newspaper articles about her abduction, all laminated. From somewhere, probably her mom years ago, he’d gotten four photos of her, one alone, two with her sisters, one with the whole family. She stared at her parents, so young. What did her father look like now? And her mother was gone. Gabe had also posted a photo of his father in his sheriff’s uniform. And down by the floorboard a map of the area with Dane Thompson’s house and grounds diagrammed and labeled. She bent down to look at it closely. “So Dane really was your father’s number-one suspect?”

“But he couldn’t make it stick.”

“Dane had an alibi?”

“That he was out of town at the time of the abduction, heading for a meeting in Chillicothe.”

“A meeting?”

Gabe squatted beside her. “Yeah, with a woman, a colleague who still has a vet clinic there. She covered for him with a lie—at least Dad thought so. I have copies here of all the affidavits filed, the investigation files. I go over them, go over everything. It’s kind of like looking for the missing link.”

“But Sandy’s and Amanda’s disappearances are different from...from mine and Jill’s,” she said as they stood.

“Yep. No cornfield escape. But Jill was taken right out of a small tent she was sharing with her brother, near the cornfield that abutted their backyard. Why she didn’t wake up and scream, we never figured out.” He got up, walked across the room and pointed to a picture of a boy. “Mrs. Stillwell said both Jill and her brother were light sleepers.”

“Maybe the kidnapper gagged her right away.”

“Or used chloroform or some drug—jabbed her with a needle, since you’d been given shots of some sort. If we’d gotten you back in this day and age, they’d have run tests to pinpoint exactly what you had in your system instead of just having you treated by the small-town doctor your father insisted on.”

“So the answers are still out there. And that’s why this memory room.”

“My real war room. I just didn’t realize I had the recording with Jill’s voice up so loud.”

“You probably didn’t. I have excellent—sometimes too-good—hearing. Sounds seem to stick with me.”

“Like the harvesting machine sound you mentioned.”

“Do you have the others’—our voices recorded?”

“All but yours. But yours, I remember. I was there not only when you were taken, but also when they got you back. I rode my bike into town when I heard they’d taken you to Dr. Marvin’s office. I blamed myself for what happened to you. I had to see you, so I waited, but your father came out and told me to leave, to stay away from you. But then he saw my mother in the little crowd gathering, and he told her he was sorry for what he’d said to me, that he knew what happened wasn’t my fault. They...hugged each other—hard.”

Tess put her arm around his waist. He put one hard-muscled arm around her shoulders. “As I said a couple of days ago, Gabe, I don’t blame you. And I understand you’re partly so...so into this—”

“Say it. Obsessed.”

“—because you’re trying to finish what your dad started. You drive yourself hard for the victims, for his memory and for yourself too. But if you don’t get some rest, you won’t be any good to anyone.”

He hugged her to him, sideways, hip to hip. When he spoke, his deep voice vibrated through her. “My mother would love you. ‘Are you eating well, Gabe? Be sure you get your sleep and exercise even with all that’s going on.’”

“Then she’s still a good mother. She saw your father work so hard and tried to help him any way she could and now you.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice hard again, but he sounded exhausted instead of intense. “She was a good mother, but he was gone a lot and that was hard—too hard for her sometimes as a wife, I guess. Let’s get some rack time before the sun comes up, okay? And I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell anyone about this room, including Vic Reingold or Deputy Miller.”

“Right. I understand.”

“You know,” Gabe said, turning her to face him, “you do understand.”

His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Was he falling apart under the strain? She understood that too. He’d made a memorial here to all his tough times, his failures—including the bulletin board with his battle against bombs.

Maybe she should see if Miss Etta had a book that would help him—though she wouldn’t say who it was for. Something about pressure on the job, stress, handling hardship. She desperately wanted to do anything possible, not only to help him solve the abductions, but to help him stay stable and strong. Strange, but worrying about him actually made her feel a little better about herself.

* * *

The next morning, Tess and Gabe had breakfast together, then she offered to clean up as he rushed out the door to head for his meeting with Vic and Jace. He also intended to have Ann check the stuffed pit bull into evidence. Washing up their dishes by hand, she thought about the difficulties of being married to a sheriff or any law enforcement agent. He might always be rushing out the door. Did Vic Reingold have a wife? If so, he had been gone from her for days. Jace Miller was a newlywed, so how hard was his job on his marriage?

And standing in Gabe’s mom’s kitchen she wondered about those long days alone when Gabe’s father was working on her abduction case and then Jill’s. It was a lonely life, but Gabe had explained at breakfast that his mother had friends, including Marva Green, no less, and Wanda Kurtz too. They’d even worked together sewing those small scarecrows to earn extra cash. Did the wives of law enforcement men ever hear about their cases the way Gabe had shared with her last night?

She went up to make her bed and looked out the window across the cornfield toward her house. There was an AEP electrical truck in the driveway. She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t leave until he called, but she couldn’t wait to tell him that.

She cleaned up the room, then walked through the downstairs. Despite how tidy things looked, except for the kitchen, things were really dusty. So Gabe kept things neat—or had cleaned up the place once—but didn’t manage the upkeep.

At seven-thirty, Tess got her cell phone out. She wanted to call Char in New Mexico and knew she’d have to phone her before she went out among the Navajos in their distant houses, some of them traditional hogans, which she visited as a social worker. But it was only five-thirty out there and she hesitated to punch in the numbers. Char would console her but question her too. She’d figure out how close she and Gabe were, then lecture her that she was crazy.

Holding her phone, Tess continued to pace in a big circle, through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, around again. Surely, if she could just find the spot she’d been held prisoner, she would recognize it somehow, the house, at least. But the numerous places she’d driven past already, slowing down, staring, had not rung a bell. Even if she’d been kept inside all that time, she’d surely have looked out the windows. She must be able to recognize things outside, a barn, a field, a road—something. Maybe if she drove more of the roads around here, something would strike her as familiar.

Tess jolted when her cell phone rang.

“Tess, it’s me.” Gabe’s familiar voice seemed to fill the house, to warm her, even though he sounded all business now. “I’m going to talk to Sam Jeffers, John Hillman and Dane Thompson, separately and on my own, so Vic won’t spook them. I want you to stay put until you get your power restored and—”

“I see the repair truck in my driveway.”

“Good. Jace is on his way to take paint scrapings from the telephone pole for Mike—he’s coming back here today—before the repairmen handle it or climb it if they put it back up.”

“Gabe, I think I should go with you to see those three men. If not, I’ll drive to their places on my own, just to see if anything jogs my memory.”

“What? No way you’re heading alone to their properties! Tess, I’m not going for a good-time chat. I’m checking to see if they have alibis, at least for the time you were harassed last night, not to mention when Sandy was taken.”

“Well, if I shouldn’t go alone, I should go with you. We’ll tell Sam Jeffers that I just learned he tried to track me with whatever dog he had twenty years ago and wanted to thank him. I assume you’re going to show John Hillman the stuffed dog that was on my property, so I’d have a natural stake in that.”