exactly what Tristan figured he’d say.
He met Ariel’s eyes. She still looked scared. She also looked exhausted, her face pale, her cheekbones gaunt. He hadn’t noticed that before, but then he’d been telling himself for months that he shouldn’t be noticing anything about Mia’s teacher. His life was filled up with work and with his sister. He didn’t have time for relationships. Especially not complicated ones. A pregnant widow? That was way more than he had room for in his life.
“This might take a while. When I finish, I’ll check back in with you.”
She nodded, and he called Jesse to heel and jogged to the building. The perp hadn’t gone out the front. Jesse would have scented him when they’d walked back to the SUV.
“Where is he?” Tristan asked, and Jesse’s ears perked, his nose going to the air and then the ground. Tristan would have preferred to have Shane Weston and his apprehension dog, Bella, there tracking the perp, but waiting was out of the question.
“Find him!” he urged, and Jesse ran to the back of the school, nosing the cement path that led to double-wide doors. They yawned open, the corridor beyond silent and empty. This had to have been the entrance point. The exit point, too, if the guy was gone.
Tristan followed the dog across the threshold, calling out as he entered the building, warning that police were present. No response. He hadn’t expected one. He really didn’t expect the perp to have hung around.
Jesse tugged him through the hall, passing classroom after classroom. The lab stopped at room 119, sniffing the floor before walking inside. There, he nosed around near a teacher’s desk, sniffing a dark blue sweater that hung over the back of a chair. He huffed quietly and left it, continuing across the room to a storage closet that stood open.
Had the guy been in the closet? Maybe waiting for Ariel to return to the classroom? The thought turned Tristan’s stomach. Master police dog trainer Veronica Earnshaw had been murdered in her place of employment, shot to death while microchipping a new litter of puppies for the Canyon County K-9 Training Center. Since then, Desert Valley had been on edge. That wasn’t the first murder in the area. Five years ago, K-9 officer Ryder Hayes had lost his wife on the night of the annual Desert Valley Police Department dance and fund-raiser. She’d been shot and killed while carrying her dress home just hours before the party.
The perp had shot at Ariel. Was this newest incident somehow related to the other two?
Jesse left the closet, tracing a path from there back to the desk and then out into the hallway. They moved through the dimly lit corridor, the dusky sunlight barely penetrating this far into the building. They reached the corner where the east and west wings jutted to either side of the main building, and Jesse barked, prancing around what looked like bits of concrete and wallboard.
“Front!” Tristan commanded, and the dog returned, dropping down on his haunches.
“Stay!” he said, motioning for the dog to lie on the floor, then moving past and looking at the debris that littered the gray-white tiles. A chunk of wall had been blown from the corner, the bullet still lodged in concrete. Tristan called for Jesse and continued on past several closed doors. He didn’t need the dog to show him where Ariel had been hiding. The door to the room had been shot through, the old wood caving in from the force of a foot kicked into it over and over again. Another few well-placed kicks and the door would have caved in, giving the gunman a clear shot at his intended victim.
A random act of violence?
Tristan didn’t think so. Everything about this seemed premeditated—the perp hiding in the closet, the mask that had hidden his features, the determination to get through a locked door. The guy had been after blood, and if Tristan hadn’t had a meeting scheduled with Ariel, he might have gotten it.
God always has a way.
It’s what his father had told him over and over again. It’s what Tristan’s mother had repeated during Tristan’s challenging teenage years. Since they’d died, Tristan had been too busy trying to raise Mia to spend much time trying to figure out what God’s way was.
Maybe that had been his mistake. Maybe it was the reason why Mia was struggling so much in school and with making friends. Becoming a K-9 police officer had seemed like the perfect transition from being an army dog handler into civilian life, but that wasn’t the reason Tristan had signed on to the Canyon County K-9 Center Training Course. He’d joined in honor of his army buddy and good friend Mike Riverton who’d died the previous May.
Mike had sung the praises of the K-9 program, and he’d been trying to get Tristan to apply. Then Mike had died—killed when he’d fallen down steep stairs at his home. That’s the story Tristan had been told, and that’s what the medical examiner’s records said, but Tristan wasn’t buying it. A guy like Mike—trained in mountain climbing and free-climbing rock walls—would never have fallen and not been able to catch himself.
Yeah. Things around Desert Valley weren’t what they’d seemed when Tristan had moved there for the program. Small towns, he was learning, often hid big secrets.
He frowned, his thoughts going back to Ariel, the way she’d looked when she’d been struggling to escape through the broken window, the fear in her eyes, the subtle trembling of her voice.
Sometimes, small towns also hid murderers.
Not for long, though.
Tristan knew the Desert Valley PD was closing in on the killer. He was certain it was just a matter of time before the perpetrator was found. But, time wasn’t anyone’s friend when a murderer was on the loose.
A murderer, he thought, eyeing the splintered door and the bullet hole, who might have just attempted to strike again.
She’d almost died.
Ariel couldn’t shake the thought, and she couldn’t ignore it as an EMT leaned over her cut palm, eyeing the still-bleeding wound.
“You’re going to need stitches,” the young woman said brusquely. “We can transport you to the hospital for that, or you can go to the clinic. Your call.”
“I’ll go to the clinic,” Ariel responded by rote.
If she’d died, the baby would have died. Thinking about that was worse than thinking about herself, broken and bleeding on the floor of the resource room.
She shuddered, and the EMT frowned.
“Are you sure?” she asked, her tone a little gentler. “You seem shaky, and they could check on the baby. It might give you a little peace of mind.”
Aside from the guy who’d shot at her being thrown in jail, there wasn’t much of anything that could give her that. “I’m sure.”
The woman nodded, pressing thick gauze to the wound and wrapping it with a tight layer of surgical tape. “That should hold it until you get to the clinic. Have someone drive you. Husband, family.”
“All right.” Except that Ariel didn’t have a husband and she didn’t have any family. She was making new friends at church and at work, but even after five months, they weren’t the kind of relationships
