moved to her side and cupped her elbow in his palm as they walked back to his police cruiser. He wanted to make sure she didn’t slip and fall, but he also wanted to hurry her along so that she was in plain view for as short a time as possible. As long as she was out in the open, she was vulnerable. He kept her along the shoulder, keeping himself between her and anyone passing by.
If someone was going to play target practice with them, hopefully they would hit him first and give her time to flee. Isaac didn’t even think of not protecting her. It was just the way things had to be. The area between his shoulder blades itched. He could almost imagine the crosshairs of a scope lining up.
He increased his pace. She kept up with him. For a little thing, she was quick. Her head barely came to his shoulders, and he was only five foot ten.
A minute later, Isaac squired her into his vehicle.
The young woman shifted in her seat. It wasn’t difficult to tell that being in a police car was not something she was comfortable with. He wished he could make it easier for her, but it was just something she would have to deal with. Isaac was not unsympathetic. He remembered very well the first time he had dealt with the police. Uncomfortable was a mild way of putting it.
Another quick glance out the window assured him that no one with a gun was bearing down on them. He blew out a breath, relieved. He had never been shot in the line of duty, not in the two years he had been a police officer. He would prefer to keep it that way.
Turning his attention back to his passenger, he squelched the pity that he instinctively felt as he viewed the red-rimmed blue eyes. His whole focus needed to be on keeping her safe and catching the perp. That called for objectivity.
“Before you begin to tell me what happened,” he said to her, “let me call in to my station. If there is some guy out there with a gun, I want more than just myself out looking for him.”
She frowned, as if he had offended her a bit by what he had said. What had he said? Oh, maybe it had sounded like he didn’t quite believe her. He didn’t mean it that way.
Isaac quickly radioed in to the station.
“I have a possible shooting,” he told the dispatcher. “Requesting backup.”
“Affirmative, Isaac. What’s the location of the shooting?”
He turned to the young woman sitting beside him. “Can you tell me where you were when this happened?”
She nodded her head. “I am not from here. But I do remember it was about five minutes back. There was an old abandoned place. It was a large blue building. The windows were all broken out.” She bit her lip. “I am sorry. That is all I can remember.”
Isaac flashed her a brief smile. “It’s fine. Believe it or not, that helps a lot.” He pushed the button for the radio again. “Maureen, I have reason to believe that the shooting was at the Carstairs place.”
“Gotcha, Isaac,” Maureen said on the other end of the line. “I have Ryder heading out your way. He should be there in under ten. You hold on.”
“Will do. Could you also send out a tow truck? We need the car towed into evidence.” He waited for her to answer in the affirmative and then he disconnected the call. The young woman beside him was staring out the window, her eyes scanning the road. “All right. Another officer will be here soon. I am Officer Isaac Yoder with the Waylan Grove Police Department. Why don’t you start from the beginning? Who are you and what you were doing when all of this happened?”
She gave the surrounding area one more sweep before focusing her large blue eyes on his face. Her black bonnet was sagging on her head. Only a hint of pale blond hair peeped out from under it. She cleared her throat. Her voice, when she spoke, was soft. He was surprised that she kept it steady. It was obvious to him that her anxiety had not lessened.
“My name is Elizabeth Miller. Lizzy. I live outside LaMar Pond, a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania. I am training to be a midwife.”
She flushed. A smile nearly slipped out of him. He remembered that women did not talk about things such as having babies and pregnancy in front of strangers, and especially not in front of men. He’d been living in the Englisch world so long he’d almost forgotten that.
“I know where LaMar Pond is. Go on.”
“My cousin Addie asked me to visit her here in Ohio.” She paused, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. “My normal driver was sick, so her brother, Bill, showed up to drive me.”
Bill. William Allister. He sat up straighter in his seat.
“Had you met Bill before?”
She shook her head, her nose wrinkling. “I do not hire men to drive me around. I would not have gone with him, but I knew that I needed to get to my cousin’s house. I had promised her, and it was too late to change plans. Besides, I didn’t want my regular driver, Sue, to feel bad.”
Distress shadowed her face. It didn’t take much imagination to know that she was thinking about how the poor woman would feel when she found out what had happened to her brother. He blocked an image of his own brother’s face from surfacing. That was twice in one day he’d thought of Joshua’s death.
“I am sorry about the delay, Lizzy. I will try to get you to your cousin’s house as soon as I can. I promise.”
She shrugged it off. “I got in the car. We drove for a while. I noticed that Bill was going a back route. One that I wasn’t as familiar with. I was annoyed with him.”
She seemed ashamed of that now.
“He said he had an errand to run. When he stopped, he told me to wait in the car. And I did. I waited for a long time. Over thirty minutes. When he didn’t come back, I got impatient and went to find what was taking him so long.”
In the quiet car, Isaac heard her swallow in a loud gulp.
“I went behind the building. I could hear voices arguing, but I was so irritated that I did not pay attention to what they were saying. I saw Bill. He was facing another man. The other man had a gun. He shot him. He shot him!”
Her voice rang with horror. Isaac could only imagine how shocking that must have been, for her to witness such an awful thing.
“You saw him shoot Bill?” He wanted to be certain he had the facts correct.
She nodded. “I saw Bill fall. I was so scared I ran back to the car. Bill had left it running. The man shot out the back window.”
She pointed to the rear passenger seat with an unsteady finger. He recalled the shattered window. He would need to get this car into the station so that it could be searched for the bullet. Or other evidence. It would not be safe to try to process the car on the side of the road with a possible killer searching for her.
“Then what happened? After he shot out the window.”
“I drove away as fast as I could. I have only driven a couple of times, for fun. I haven’t driven at all since I was baptized two years ago. I know that the man will come after me. He was running to his car when I reached the street.”
He was sure that he would come after her, too. Right now, he had a possible dead body, a single witness and
