If You Hear Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (17 page)

The whole damn thing gave him one massive headache.

And then there was the story with Lena Riddle. A very strange, very curious story, and one Nielson would like to just ignore.

But duty wouldn’t let him, and as he skimmed through
the report, he had a weird tingling sensation in his gut. He couldn’t ignore that either. Blowing out a sigh, he looked at Jennings. “About Riddle. What’s your call?”

“Well, she’s not lying.” Sergeant Keith Jennings sat in the chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. He’d been a soldier in the Army—did eight years and then came back home and joined the sheriff’s department. He hadn’t tried to play off the distant relationship with the mayor, or the DA, either. Nielson appreciated that; he respected it. “But that doesn’t mean things happened just as she says they happened, either.”

“Shit.” He smoothed a hand over his bald scalp. His hair had started to thin in his twenties and rather than fight the inevitable, he’d kept it cut close. For the past few years, he had been shaving it. Easier than messing with haircuts, in his opinion. He had a narrow face, and dark, intelligent eyes, and he had little tolerance for bullshit.

He didn’t much like having something muddy the waters in his quiet neck of the woods.

Lena Riddle’s report definitely muddied the waters. It didn’t fit.

“Why couldn’t it have been Deb Sparks?” he mused out loud.

“Because that would have been too easy.” Steven Mabry smiled over his cup of coffee. His deputy sheriff’s round face was serene and pleasant, and hid a mind that was as sharp as a steel trap.

Deb, their local gossip, busybody, and general pain in the ass, lived just a mile or two away from Lena Riddle. If it had been her …

Routinely, she made calls complaining of suspicious activity.

If it wasn’t a serial killer’s van patrolling the highways at night, then it was a meth lab or a Peeping Tom or white slavery rings. Also included, for variety, she’d accused a local kid of trying to poison her cat, a niece of
trying to steal her dog, and three different times, she’d accused her mailman of tampering with her mail.

The complaints ranged from tedious to strange.

She liked attention, and Dwight gave each of her reports the needed attention to make sure there wasn’t any real danger, a little extra consideration for Deb, and then it was done. After that, she’d find something else to focus on for a while—something in town, usually, inappropriate books at the library, or a historical building that was going to be renovated in a way that would “harm the historical significance.”

It was always something with Deb, and because of that, if she had made the call, he figured he could send Jennings out there one more time just to be sure, then they could move on.

Lena Riddle was a different story altogether. Because Lena Riddle did not make calls.

“How long has she lived here now, do you remember?” he asked, glancing at Jennings.

“She moved here a little before I came back home.” Jennings remained sitting, so stiff, so straight, he could have been at attention. “A year or so before, I think. Would be close to nine years.”

“Yeah. That sounds about right.” It was right about the time Dwight had settled into office here. “Nine years, Keith. She’s been here nine years and to my recollection, this is the first time she has ever had us out to her property.”

Dwight plucked the report from the folder, studying it. “Go back out there. Talk to her again. Get the story one more time and do another walk through the woods. See if anything changes.”

As Jennings left the office, Dwight turned away and stared out the window. Her story wasn’t going to change. He knew it.

A nice, quiet little town. He wanted it to stay that way.

Yet he had that itch in his gut.

Something very, very bad was going on.

So he hadn’t found much in the woods out by Lena’s place. Yet.

But Ezra wasn’t one to sit around and wait, either. The day after he’d prowled around through the trees, Ezra found himself waking up early with the sole intention of going into town. Or at least it seemed early to him.

Over the past six months, he had become a little too lazy. Getting out of bed before nine or ten was to be avoided at all costs, if possible—one of the new rules he had established when he decided to waste the rest of his life.

Noon sounded ideal to him.

But today made the second day he’d been up before eight, and he wasn’t even grouchy about it.

Right now, he had a mission. Right now, he had something to focus on, besides the damn deck, besides working himself into exhaustion so he’d sleep too deep to dream about the night his life had gone to hell.

He even had a focus that wasn’t entirely centered around Lena. Yeah, he knew he needed to keep his distance. That was the wise thing to do. The smart thing.

Although the longer he thought about it, the more he thought about her, the more he wanted to say,
The hell with being smart
.

Maybe you’re just so hard up for her, you’re imagining things
, he tried to tell himself.
Creating some mystery where there really isn’t one
.

But that wasn’t it.

There was something fucked up in the works—he knew it, as well as he knew his own name.

After hauling his tired ass out of bed, he spent a few minutes stretching his right leg, doing the exercises he knew he needed to do, even though he skipped them
half the time. All in all, his leg didn’t feel that bad, considering he’d spent a couple of hours tramping through the woods the day before.

He felt almost optimistic, almost useful. Up at a decent hour, had a goal, had something resembling a plan.

It wasn’t until he was in the shower that he started to question himself.

So what are you going to do when you get into town, slick? You don’t have a badge to flash. Nobody here has to tell you anything. What do you think you’re going to accomplish?

The first question was easy—he wanted to know if the sheriff’s office had much of anything, although he really doubted it.

And yeah, he knew pretty damn well nobody needed to tell him anything. He could ask all he wanted, but that didn’t mean anybody had to answer.

That last bit grated on him, burned him, like salt in a fresh wound. For the first time in six months, he was questioning whether or not he really wanted to walk away from his badge. If he had a fucking badge, he could do something.

Before, he’d always been in a position where he could help and now? He just didn’t know.

Maybe that was why he had to try.

He couldn’t ignore the feeling in his gut, couldn’t ignore what his instincts were telling him. Even if all he could do was watch, even if all he could do was ask questions, at least he was doing something.

The thought of doing something left him with some sense of satisfaction—the kind of satisfaction he hadn’t felt in months. Not since he walked away from his job.

Being a cop was more than carrying a badge, more than carrying a gun—and shit, he didn’t know if he wanted to carry a gun again. Maybe he missed that sense of purpose, but he didn’t miss the responsibility
that came with it, and that was part of the reason he was still on leave.

Blood—blood on my hands …

Before his mind could travel down that path, he jerked it back in line. He didn’t need to be thinking about that. Not at all.

No, what he needed to be doing was making some coffee, getting dressed. Then he needed to get his ass to town. Mind made up, he set about doing just that.

Thirty minutes later, he was in town. What little morning traffic this town had was already cleared. The hot, late summer sun beat down on his head as he climbed out of his truck and started toward the sheriff’s office.

It was housed in a plain, squat building of gray brick across from the town hall. Some optimistic soul had planted flowers in cheerful red, white, and blue in the beds in front, hoping to cheer up the look of things.

It didn’t do much good.

It looked like exactly what it was.

Nothing could really pretty up a place like this—it might be a little different in small towns, but basically, cop shops were all the same. Full of cops and the occasional lawyer. Hell, they even smelled the same.

It was busier now than it had been the last time he was here. There was a kid sitting slouched on the bench just inside the front door, a sullen look on his face. He had a fat lip, and the swelling just under his eye was going to be one hell of a shiner before much longer.

There was another kid somewhere close by, arguing. Judging by the sound of his voice, these two had gotten into it.

There were also other people, including one woman sitting in front of a desk and staring despondently off into the distance. Unlike the boy by the front door, this woman’s bruise wasn’t fresh. Somebody had whaled on
her and hard. The discoloring had faded to a sickly yellow, and it spread from just over her left brow to more than halfway down her cheek.

Sensing his attention, she glanced up and away.

Afraid of her own shadow. Ezra knew the type, and he imagined he even knew the type who had put the mark on her face. He also suspected she’d be going back to him when she left here, even though part of her already knew she shouldn’t.

There were times when this was the most frustrating job in the world.

“May I help you?”

He stopped and met the harried gaze of a woman whose head barely came to his chest. She had a steel-gray helmet of hair covering her scalp, and the glasses she wore were about the same shade of gray. Her eyes were a bright, vivid green and they glared at Ezra with biting impatience.

He flashed her a smile.

She lifted a brow.

Okay, so charm wasn’t going to work. “I’m looking for Sheriff Dwight Nielson.” No, the charm hadn’t worked, but it had given him the two seconds he needed to rack his brain and remember the name of the man he needed to speak with.

Surely by now, there was some sort of report … right?

Might as well see if he couldn’t sit down with the top dog and find out whatever there was to find out.

The woman turned out to be Nielson’s secretary.

Ezra wondered if she’d been a dragon in her former life—the kind who guarded some secret treasure locked away in a cave or something. He wouldn’t be surprised, considering how she acted—much more befitting a treasure than the affairs of a small-town sheriff.

Maybe she was buffing up for a job with the Secret Service.

She kept him waiting for close to forty minutes before he was told in a lofty voice that he could have a few minutes—if he could wait another forty minutes.

Seeing as how he’d already wasted half the morning, he figured he might as well do what he came for, and he gave her an easy, completely fake smile. “Sure. Got nothing better going on right now,” he said.

She sniffed and dismissed him.

He killed the time reading magazines from the last decade and staring out the window, watching the town go by.

Forty minutes later, on the dot, to the second, he was ushered into the sheriff’s private office. She pointed to a chair and Ezra just lifted a brow. “I’m good, thanks.”

She opened her mouth and the sheriff cut her off. “Ms. Tuttle, if he wants to stand, let the boy stand.”

Boy?
Ezra thought with an inner smile.

She gave another one of those disdainful sniffs and left. As the door closed behind then, Ezra studied the other man. He didn’t look like a cop—unless you looked in the eyes.

More than anything, he looked like a professor. Maybe a preacher. A skinny face, his eyes dark and watchful, mouth unsmiling.

“So.” Nielson leaned back in his seat and said, “I’m going to take a shot in the dark here and guess this isn’t about the trespassing out at your place the other night.”

Ezra shrugged. Hell, he’d half-forgotten about that, not that he was going to point that out. “Well, as irritated as I am, I wouldn’t hang around this place for nearly an hour and a half over trespassing.”

“Figured as much.” Nielson straightened in his chair and leaned over his desk, rummaging through the files and folders. “Although while you’re here, if you intend to file that complaint, you need to go ahead and finish it. You left it unfinished.”

“Well, you can thank your deputy Prather for that. I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out, Sheriff, but I’ve seen hall monitors more capable than him,” Ezra said. “He spent a good ten minutes trying to talk me out of filing the damn thing.”

“Did he now?” Nielson smoothed a hand back over his head and lowered his gaze, studying something on his desk.

The report, Ezra assumed. “Yeah. Something about the kid who owns the four-wheeler is the mayor’s son—the deputy seems to think it would be problematic for a citizen to actually expect the mayor to have law-abiding kids.” Then he shrugged. “Not that he said it in so many words.”

Nielson made a sound in his throat that could have meant a thousand things. He shoved the report toward Ezra and said, “Well, if you want to file the report, just sign it and we’ll get things rolling. Or …”

Ezra scowled.

Nielson caught the look on his face and smiled. “Hear me out, Detective. Jennings isn’t a bad kid. He’s just … well, his mama died a few years ago. Cancer. She was only thirty-eight. It hit them all pretty hard, as you can imagine. Brody and his dad … well, they’re going through a rough patch.”

“Aw, hell.” Ezra turned away and reached up, pinching the bridge of his nose. He didn’t give a damn whose kid it was, but hearing something like that … well, hell. Yeah, it changed things, some. Plus, it helped that it was coming from somebody who didn’t come off as a total asshole.

“Somebody has to talk to that kid and his friends,” Ezra said, before he changed his mind. “I won’t file the complaint this time, but the next time he’s on my property …”

He let his voice trail off.

Nielson nodded. “Understood. And it’s appreciated.” He gave a slow smile and said, “I’m sure his dad will appreciate it, too. Brody, probably not so much, especially at first. But we will talk to him. Now … why don’t you tell me just why you decided to spend nearly an hour and a half waiting to talk to me?”