angry set of her features eased a little and after a moment, she sighed. “I hope I can convince Marcus you were just being an ex-cop.”
Despite his own annoyance, he could see she genuinely cared about the boy. He supposed he could see things from her point of view. He had a particular soft spot for anybody who tried to help kids in need, even if they did tend to become zealots about it.
“I can try talking to the kid if that would help,” he finally offered, though he wasn’t quite sure what compelled him to make the suggestion. Maybe something to do with how her eyes softened when she talked about the punk.
“I appreciate that, but I don’t think—”
A woman’s frantic scream suddenly ripped through the evening, cutting off whatever Julie Osterman had intended to say.
Julie’s heart jumped in her chest as another long scream echoed through the fair. She gasped and instinctively turned toward the source of the sound, somewhere out of their view, away from the public areas and the four long rows of vendor tents.
Before she could even draw a breath to exclaim over the noise, Ross Fortune was racing in the direction of the sound.
He was all cop now, she couldn’t help thinking.
Hard and alert and dangerous.
She was too startled to do more than watch him rush toward the sound for a few seconds. It always managed to astound her when police officers and firefighters raced toward potentially hazardous situations while people like her stood frozen.
She knew a little about Ross Fortune from her friend Susan, his cousin. He had been a police officer in San Antonio but had left the force a few years ago to open his own private investigation company.
He was a trained detective, she reminded herself, and she would probably do wise to just let him, well, detect.
But as another scream ripped through the night, past the happy laughter of the carnival rides and the throbbing bass coming from the dance, Julie knew she had to follow him, whether she was comfortable with it or not.
Someone obviously needed help and she couldn’t just stand idly by and do nothing.
Ross had a head start on her but she managed to nearly catch up as he darted around the corner of a display of pottery she had admired earlier in the evening.
Probably only ten seconds had elapsed from the instant they heard the first scream, but time seemed to stretch and elongate like the pulled taffy being sold on the midway alongside kettle corn, snow cones and cotton candy.
She ran after Ross and stumbled onto a strange, surreal scene. It was darker back here, away from the lights and noise of the Spring Fling crowd. But Julie could still tell instantly that the woman with the high-pitched scream was someone she recognized from seeing her around town, a blowsy blonde who usually favored miniscule halter tops and five-inch high heels.
She was staring at something a dozen yards away, illuminated by a lone vapor light, high on a power pole. A figure was lying motionless on the ground, faceup, and even from here, Julie could see a dark pool of what she assumed was blood around his head.
A third person stood over the body. It took Julie only a moment to recognize Frannie Fortune Fredericks, a frequent volunteer at the center.
And Ross’s sister, she remembered with stunned dismay that she saw reflected in his features.
Frannie was staring at her hands. In the pale moonlight, they shone much darker than the rest of her skin.
“It’s her. She killed him!” the other woman cried out stridently. “Can’t you see? The bitch killed my Lloyd!”
Her Lloyd? As in Lloyd Fredericks, Frannie’s husband? Julie looked closer at the figure on the ground. For the first time, she registered his sandy-blond hair and those handsome, slightly smarmy features, and realized she was indeed staring into the fixed, unblinking stare of Lloyd Fredericks.
This couldn’t be happening…
Ross quickly crossed to Lloyd’s body and knelt to search for a pulse. Julie knew even before he rose to his feet a moment later that he wouldn’t have been able to find one. That sightless gaze said it all.
That was definitely Frannie’s husband. And he was definitely dead.
Ross gripped his sister’s arm and Julie noticed that he was careful not to touch her blood-covered hands. How did he possibly have the sense to avoid contaminating evidence under such shocking circumstances? she wondered.
“Frannie? What’s going on? What happened?”
His sister’s delicate features looked pale, almost bloodless, and she lifted stark eyes to him. “I don’t…It’s Lloyd, Ross.”
“I can see it’s Lloyd, honey. What happened to him?”
The screaming woman wobbled closer on her high heels. “She killed him. Look at her! She’s got blood all over her. Oh, Lloyd, baby.”
She began to wail as if her heart were being ripped out of her cosmetically enhanced chest. Julie would have liked to be a little sympathetic, but she didn’t fail to notice the other woman only began the heartrending sobs when a crowd started to gather.
Ross turned to her. “Julie, do you have a phone? Can you call 911?”
“Of course,” she answered. While she pulled her phone out of her pocket and started hitting buttons, she heard Ross take charge of the scene, ordering everybody to step back a couple dozen feet. In mere moments, it seemed the place was crawling with people.
The 911 operator had just answered when Julie saw a pair of police officers arrive. They must have been drawn to the commotion from other areas of the Spring Fling.
“This is Julie Osterman,” she said to the 911 dispatcher. “I was going to report a…an incident at the Spring Fling but you all are already here.”
“What sort of incident?” the dispatcher asked.
Julie was hesitant to use the word murder, but how could it be anything else? “I guess a suspicious death. But as I said, your officers are already here.”
“Tell me what you know anyway.”
The woman took what little information Julie could provide to relay to the officers, who were pushing the crowd even farther back.
When she hung up the phone with the dispatcher, she stood for a moment, not sure what to do, where to go. She disliked this sort of crowd scene, the almost avaricious hunger for information that seemed to seize people when something dramatic and shocking occurred nearby.
She wanted to slip away but it didn’t feel quite right, especially when she had been one of the first ones on the scene. She supposed technically she was a witness, though she hadn’t seen anything and knew nothing about what had happened.
Julie scanned the crowd, though she didn’t know what she was seeking. A familiar face, perhaps, someone who could help her make sense of this shocking development.
In the distance, she saw
