style="font-size:15px;"> “None,” she admitted. “It certainly wasn’t for the purpose of being close to Dad and me. We were never invited out to see the house. I understand he bought the place longer than five years ago, but didn’t do the renovations until then. Whatever, he didn’t even mention it at dinner.”
“Well, I think this is enough to get started with,” Mike said, closing his notebook. “I should have more information later today, and probably more questions to go with it. Will you be at home?”
“All day,” she said, finishing her coffee. “Feel free to come by with as many questions as you like. You’re very easy to talk to.”
“Most people would not agree with that sentiment,” Mike told her with his own amusement as they left the booth. And to be honest, he’d just been thinking the same about her… “I’ll try to call before dropping in.”
“Fine,” she said with a smile, offering her hand. “Thanks for the coffee—and the understanding ear.”
“Understanding your situation isn’t terribly difficult,” Mike said, liking the firm way she took his hand. “Losing a brother is the hard part of life. You may not have liked your brother, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t love him.”
She looked as though she was about to say something else, then apparently thought better of it. After retrieving her umbrella she left the diner, unaware of the way Mike’s gaze followed.
You’d better watch that, old man, he thought as he stopped to pay for the coffee. No matter what you said, she is a suspect, and it won’t do you any good to let gray eyes make you forget that. She isn’t the first attractive woman you’ve met, so get a grip on yourself.
With that firm advice ringing in his head he went back out into the rain, but it didn’t do the good he’d been hoping for. He never had met a woman like Tanda Grail before, and it was more than the possibility of new answers that made him look forward to their next meeting. Maybe he would even find an excuse to ask her out to dinner…
TANDA GRAIL CLIMBED into her van, then sat there for a moment with her eyes closed behind the hand covering them. Events around her were growing from bad dream to nightmare, and she had already begun to feel helpless to stop them. But that didn’t mean she intended to quit on the promise she’d made herself. She would find the one who had killed Don, and make sure he or she faced everything the law demanded.
Through the rain-soaked windshield Tanda saw Lieutenant Gerard come out of the diner and head back toward the motel. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, handsome in a tired, overworked way. He wasn’t the police officer she’d spoken to when Don’s body had first been found, but he should have been. There was something about the man, something that said he knew what he was doing.
Which meant she would have to be very careful. Her resolve had caused her to make a mistake and call in an outsider, and now an innocent man was dead. She should have handled the investigation herself to begin with, which was what she intended to do from now on. The police would gather the clues, she would work on them in her own way, and then—
And then she would find the person who had caused her to be all alone in the world.
Chapter Two
Mike Gerard got back to his office in a thoughtful mood. This newest victim just might have given him a lead the death was supposed to have prevented, and it was certainly worth checking into. But not if it had already been checked, which was the first thing he had to find out.
Detective Sergeant Rena Foreman sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair while she argued desultorily with her partner, Detective Larry Othar. The two were always arguing about something, a clear sign that as partners they were really close. Rena was tall and slender with auburn hair and blue eyes, and Larry was tall and broad-shouldered with brown hair and blue eyes. They were also good cops, but that hadn’t kept them from being replaced as team leaders of the serial-killings case when the fourth body was found.
The brass was being screamed at by the press and public alike, so they wanted action and an arrest as quickly as possible. When they hadn’t gotten the arrest by the time the third body was discovered, they’d put Mike in charge instead of calling in the FBI.
“Hey, you two,” Mike said, approaching Rena and Larry. “I need to ask you about your part of the serial-killings investigation. How much of a background check did you do on each of the victims?”
“The checks were routine but fairly thorough,” Rena answered. “We knew where the victims came from because of their ID’s, so we checked with the police in those places. Our counterparts confirmed that the victims were who we thought they were, but there was nothing in the way of records or files on the deceased parties.”
“And that first victim, Don Grail, is originally from around here,” Larry added. “He’d gotten into some trouble as a kid, but his old man managed to get the charges dropped. Something about getting into an argument with a girl, and starting to beat up on her. The argument was loud enough that somebody called the cops, and they got there before Grail did worse than slap her around a little. The girl and her family were the first ones we checked, but they’d all moved away years ago and never came back.”
“We traced them to Colorado, and the locals checked for us,” Rena continued. “Every one of them was accounted for, including the girl’s present husband. She was in the hospital having her third child, the rest of the family and the husband were there with her, and none of them had left the state for at least two years.”
“And this is more involved than a simple revenge killing,” Mike said with a nod, showing them he knew they’d realized that. “You did exactly what I would have done—and did do—with the fourth victim, but now there’s something to add to the rest. Victim number five was a private detective brought in by victim number one’s sister.”
Rena and Larry both exclaimed in surprise over that, and Mike gave them a quick rundown. After telling them what the dead man had said to Tanda Grail, he added, “So that means Saxon saw someone he knew, but not from the city and probably not from his work for the agency. If he’s the only one who could have spotted whoever he did spot, that tells us we have to look into Saxon’s past life. Private detectives are often retired cops. If Saxon happened to be one, where did he live and work? If it was another agency he’d been with, again, when and where?”
“What makes you think it was a person he saw?” Rena asked. “Maybe he spotted some thing, and was able to recognize it because he came from a small-town area like this one, and everyone else at the agency is city-raised.”
“That’s a possibility that should be checked, but I don’t think it’s what happened,” Mike answered with a distracted head shake. “Spotting some thing would not have gotten the man killed unless some body went along with the thing, which leads us back to an individual. And there’s one more job that has to be done—take the pictures and prints of all five victims, and have them sent along the network to the entire country. None of the victims have police records where they live, but how about elsewhere? And see if you can find out where they were all supposed to be before they turned up here and dead.”
“According to his sister, Grail was supposed to be nowhere but here,” Larry offered. “Grail came back here every year on August first, and stayed for the whole month.”
“Which he’d been doing for five years,” Mike agreed, remembering what Tanda had told him. “Take another
