style="font-size:15px;"> Death. Pain. Betrayal.
I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, Josie reminded herself. Sitting alone in her shadowed office, however, she still couldn’t escape her next thought.
Not this time.
Chapter One
September 22
“Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.”
“Hmm?” Detective Jack Stryker lifted his scrunched eyes from the coroner’s report and belatedly followed his partner’s gaze. “Damn.”
“Just what we need,” Detective Stone Richardson agreed, “like a hound dog needs a flea.”
“At least fleas don’t campaign for your vote—they know they’re a nuisance.” Jack sighed. He tucked the coroner’s report back into the Olivia Stuart file with a last glance of frustration and longing. The answers were in there somewhere, he just knew it. He’d missed something the first time around, made a mistake. He didn’t screw up often, but he must have this time, because it had been more than three months and they still had no leads on the Olivia Stuart case.
And now Hal Stuart, acting mayor of Grand Springs and one of the most annoying men God had ever created, had entered the police station. He wove through the corridor like a tin soldier, his arms held tightly against his double-breasted suit as if he didn’t want to touch anything—the dirt might rub off.
Hal Stuart didn’t come to the police station often—Jack figured it was too long on chaos and too short on decoration for his taste. The plain corridor poured into the main room, comprised of a beat-up wood floor, numerous metal desks and one wall of windows. In the corner, the lone office belonged to Frank Sanderson, the chief of police. It was as bare bones and worn as the rest of the place. As Sanderson had informed Hal during his last visit, he had better things to do than pick out wallpaper.
Grand Springs was becoming a big city in many ways, and it had a growing drug problem and overworked police department to prove it. Now it also had the murder of Grand Springs’s mayor, Olivia Stuart, making the pressure even more intense.
Jack planted his feet on the floor and summoned a last deep breath. He was tired—he often worked until ten at night, then brought work home with him—but it didn’t show. He’d already smoothed his face into the bland, capable expression cops wore for outsiders. He’d learned a lot about how to handle politicians over the years.
Stone, who prided himself on irreverence, leaned back and propped up his feet on his desk in a deliberately casual pose.
“Don’t antagonize him,” Jack ordered under his breath as Hal entered the main room. “It just encourages him to talk more.”
“But baiting him is the only sport I get around here.”
“It’s not a sport—to be a sport, it would have to be a challenge.”
Stone was still chuckling softly when Hal planted himself in front of their desks. The acting mayor’s soft features were already screwed into a scowl. His blond hair, normally carefully smoothed back, looked mussed, and his tailored suit was uncharacteristically disarrayed. Someone, Jack thought, must be making the acting mayor actually work. Judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t happy about it, either.
“Howdy, Hal,” Stone sang out. “Nice of you to drop on by. Did you bring us poor slaving public servants any lunch?”
Hal’s frown grew, the look in his eyes uncertain. He crossed his arms over his chest and adopted a firm expression.
“No. Look, I’m a very busy man, so let’s make this quick—”
“Of course,” Stone said politely. Jack hid his wince behind a small cough. When Hal said “let’s make this quick” it meant it was going to be long.
“I’ve given you three months!” Hal announced. “In the beginning, everything was upside down from the power outage, I understood that. Then there were the immediate needs of restoring order and policing the streets after the ensuing accidents and incidents. But it’s late September now. The other situations are in the past, and I want to know—why isn’t my mother’s case being given top priority?”
“It is,” Jack said. He didn’t need a lecture on his job. He already knew that the chances of solving a three-and-a-half-month-old murder case were slim. It ate away at him every night as he pored over old case notes, wondering why they couldn’t connect the dots.
“Then, you have new leads to report?”
“No,” Stone said. “But we’ve processed forty-six people for vandalism and theft, fifteen men for drunken and disorderly conduct, and six people for brawling. Plus, we’ve worked on finding your vanished bride as well as the mother who abandoned her baby at the hospital, and then your sister, Eve, and her daughter, Molly, when they were kidnapped. We’ve also worked on discovering the true identity of Martin Smith, evacuating people from unstable areas and delivering supplies to people cut off by the mud slides. Oh, and I foiled a bank robbery. A pretty slow summer here in Grand Springs, wouldn’t you say, Stryker?”
“We’re giving the investigation everything we can,” Jack translated for Hal. He gave Stone a meaningful look that his partner ignored.
“Didn’t Randi give you a name? What more do you require?” Randi Howell was Hal’s former fiancée. She’d fled on their wedding day due to her own misgivings…and two thugs who had caught her eavesdropping on their conversation.
“Randi reported that she overhead one of the men say, ‘Jo will take care of the broad—it’s her specialty.’ The statement’s too vague,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “We can’t be sure they were talking about Olivia. We can’t even be sure ‘take care of the broad’ means murder. And we have no idea who ‘Jo’ is.”
“As far as we know, Jo could be an acupuncture specialist,” Stone volunteered. “We can’t arrest everyone named Jo based on a statement like that.”
Hal’s face reddened. He turned on Stone. “And your friend the psychic woman, doesn’t she know anything else? Or is she talking to Elvis instead these days?”
Jack placed his hand on Stone’s arm to keep him sitting. As Hal well knew, Jessica Hanson was a little more than Stone’s friend. She was now his wife. And she wasn’t exactly a psychic. The visions she’d experienced after hitting her head during the blackout in June had stopped, and no one was certain why they had happened or what they had meant.
For a bit, however, Jessica had been plagued by the image of a tall, blond woman stabbing a hypodermic needle into Olivia’s leg. These “visions” were always followed by the scent of gardenias.
Hal had been informed of all this. He had also been told that someone had sent a bowl of gardenias as a funeral bouquet to Olivia Stuart’s house. The flowers hadn’t included a card and Eve Stuart, Hal’s sister, could only vaguely recall an elegantly dressed blonde standing in the doorway with the bowl. Stone had tested the bowl for fingerprints. Nothing.
Jack said now, “As you know, Hal, we followed up on Jessica’s ‘visions.’ Stone had the doctors examine the body, and the autopsy confirmed that Olivia had been injected with a dose of pure potassium, leading
