tactics that had served her well in the past.
At thirty-six years old, she knew how to defend herself, and how to guard against danger and trouble.
She hadn’t thought it would come to her on the lonely stretch of highway between town and the farm belonging to her foster mother, Abigail, but she should have been able to extricate herself from it.
She turned her attention to the two men dressed in Hidden Cove Sheriff’s Department uniforms. They looked legit. The jackets. The badges. The shirts and hats that were pulled low over their eyes. Clean-shaven. Caucasian. One with fair skin. One with an olive complexion. The fact that she could see those things meant they weren’t trying to hide their identities. She wanted to believe that was a good thing, but her gut was telling her something different.
No legitimate law enforcement officer left a man lying on the ground bleeding.
“What about Deputy Parker? You can’t just leave him there. He needs medical attention,” she said, trying to engage them in a conversation that went beyond the Miranda rights they’d read her before they’d cuffed her and shoved her in the back of their squad car.
“You probably should have thought about that before you shot him,” the driver said. Mid-to late-twenties. Slim build. A small scar on his jaw. His hair was hidden, but Wren would guess it to be dark to match his tan skin.
“I already told you, I didn’t shoot him. The shots were fired just before you arrived.” Ryan had pulled her over. She’d realized it was him after he’d gotten out of his squad car. He’d told her that he was in trouble and that he needed her help. She’d stepped out of the SUV. Before he could explain more, a shot had been fired, and he’d gone down. She’d reached for his service weapon and had been shot while trying to free it.
Not a kill-shot.
Not like the one that had taken Ryan down.
She swallowed a wave of grief. Like Wren, Ryan had been one of Abigail’s foster kids. A teenager with no future who’d been shuffled through too many placements for too long, he’d arrived at the farm three years after Wren. It had taken a while, but eventually they’d warmed up to one another. By the time she’d left for college, she’d thought of him as her annoying kid brother—still finding trouble, still not settled into the structured life Abigail offered. She had been frustrated with his lack of progress, but she had also been hopeful that he would grow up and mature.
Still, she had been surprised when he’d told her he planned to become a police officer. She’d been even more surprised when he had decided to stay in Hidden Cove. Small-town life wasn’t anything either of them had been used to when they’d arrived. Both had often complained about the constraints of living in a town where everyone knew everyone else’s business. As a teen, Ryan had always been chomping at the bit, ready to break free of the life he had been forced into. The idea of him getting a job with the local police and staying in Hidden Cove hadn’t been on Wren’s radar.
But then, she had never been close to Ryan.
She’d loved him like a brother, but they had been too far apart in age and in personality to be friends. The inner workings of his mind had always been as mysterious to her as hers had been to him.
Now, he was gone, and she was being questioned about his murder as if she were a suspect or the perpetrator.
“I didn’t have anything to do with the shooting. Swab my hands for gun residue, take me in for questioning, but while you’re doing all that, make sure you have someone out there looking for the real perpetrator,” she said, hoping to illicit a response from one of the men.
They remained silent. No further comment on her supposed shooting of a man she considered a brother, no questions asked in the hope of getting answers that could be used against her. The silence in the vehicle was eerie. The space between her and the two officers was unencumbered by mesh or Plexiglas.
This wasn’t like any police cruiser she had ever been in. There were locks and handles on the interior door panels. Easy escape for a criminal who wanted to get away. As far as she had been able to see, there wasn’t a radio or computer attached to the console. Even a low-budget, low-tech police department would have radios in the vehicles.
She shifted forward to get a better look, and the fairer-skinned man lifted a gun and aimed it in her direction.
“Back off,” he said harshly, barely glancing in her direction.
She did. She’d already seen what she wanted to. She had been correct. There was no police radio in the car. No computer system. Nothing tying this vehicle to the sheriff’s department. If these men were imposters, they had to be tied to Ryan’s shooting. If that were the case, they had an agenda that didn’t include taking her to the sheriff’s department and booking her on federal charges. This area of Maine was largely unpopulated, deep forest and stretching across the landscape. It would be easy to get rid of a body here—to hide someone and make it seem as if that person had gone on the run.
What kind of trouble were you in, Ryan? she silently asked. Something big. So big he had been killed because of it, and it looked as if Wren was being set up to be the fall guy. If she didn’t escape, her SUV and Ryan’s squad car would eventually be found. His body would be discovered, and she would be gone—a story people told for years to come. How an FBI agent killed her foster brother and then went on the lam. The police would be searching for her instead of searching for the real killer, but she would never be found. Her body would be buried somewhere deep in the Maine wilderness.
And that was something she couldn’t allow.
Not just because she was innocent and needed to prove it, but because she wanted justice for Ryan. She wanted the person who had shot him to be punished to the full extent of the law. She had gone into law enforcement to make that happen to as many criminals as she could. She had committed herself to that goal, and she had spent more than a decade of her life devoted to it. Everything she was, all that she did, was tied up in her need to see justice served. She had no regrets about that.
Lately, though, she had been tired.
She had returned home after long days of work at the FBI’s Boston field office and asked herself if her devotion to justice was worth the silent and empty apartment, the lack of romantic relationships, the bonds of friendship that had become frayed and worn after years of missed and rescheduled get-togethers. Returning to Hidden Cove to help Abigail had seemed like the perfect opportunity to reassess her life and her goals. Wren had imagined plenty of downtime spent walking the farm or hiking through the woods.
She hadn’t imagined this.
She hadn’t anticipated it.
She was neck-deep in trouble, and she was the only person who could get herself out of it.
She slid sideways on the seat, watching as the vehicle zipped past shadowy trees. She knew this road well and knew exactly where she was. She’d traveled this way hundreds of times as a preteen and teenager. She knew the curves and the hills, the places where it opened up and where it narrowed.
She knew that the next turnoff led down a long dirt driveway to a tired-looking bungalow-style house that overlooked Mystic Creek. She thought the place had been abandoned years ago, but she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t asked Abigail, because she hadn’t wanted her to know that there were still times when she thought about the bungalow and about Titus Anderson. Even after all these years.
She
