Sole Witness (24 page)

“And then this morning, you were on TV. Your name,
anyway, and this really terrible photo of you. They said you’d been dating T2.
Were you really, Amber? You told me you weren’t dating anybody. I thought you
were going to date me.”

Was this guy for real?

He asks her about doughnuts before he asks her about
the latest newsflash, and he was too consumed by jealousy to register the part
about Tommy Turner being dead, for Christ’s sake?

She had to get outta this state. Floridians were
freaking crazy.

“Miss! Miss!”

One hand clutching the pump handle while the other
balanced her phone against her ear, Amber turned in time to see the cashier
racing from the convenience store.

What now?

“Miss! Hang up the phone! You can’t use electronic
devices while pumping gas. Didn’t you read the sign? You could blow up the
whole place!”

No, she hadn’t read the sign, and she didn’t need to
read it to know he was an idiot. Didn’t he watch Mythbusters on the Discovery
Channel like the rest of America?

Amber snatched the phone from her ear without
replying to George.

“That’s an urban legend, you moron,” she called back
and hurled the phone toward him.

With a satisfying crack, it shattered two feet in
front of him, sending shards of plastic and chunks of electronic miscellany
skating across the lot.

The attendant stood stock still, stupefied.

The pump clicked and Amber hung up the handle before
closing the gas cap and crossing to the driver door of the Camry. For Christ’s
sake, you’d think she was out here juggling cherry bombs.

The cashier found his voice.

“That’s assault! That’s assault, you lunatic! I’m
calling the cops!”

Amber started the engine. She rolled down the
passenger side window as she turned the car toward the exit lane and extracted
her Glock from her purse.

“No, this is assault, you hyperactive pea brain,”
she muttered and leveled the barrel at his head.

He screamed like a girl and ran around the side of
the building.

She rolled her eyes and set the gun back down on the
seat without firing.

No way would she have wasted her bullets on a
nothing like him. She had far better fish to fry.

Annoying little fish named Lori Summers.

The pungent smell of gasoline wafted from Amber’s
hands as she turned the wheel. What did you get when you crossed three
containers of gasoline and a fully loaded Glock?

Independence Day, baby.

She could hardly wait for the fireworks.

*          *          *

Lori sat on the living room
floor.

Her halter-topped back to the
almost floor-to-ceiling window, she splayed her legs and sorted through Davis’s
sketches.

At first, she’d tried putting
them in some semblance of order, but the erratic case numbers made no sense and
about a third of the drawings were missing dates on the back.

Now she just sifted through the
portraits, lost in thought. She was trapped in a house she couldn’t leave,
staring at the faces captured by a man she couldn’t help.

But like he’d said, she couldn’t
even help herself.

Oh, he hadn’t put it into those
exact words, but the implication was clear. Don’t throw rocks if you live in a
glass house, and all that.

Lori snuck a quick glance over
one shoulder and shuddered. No more talk about glass houses. She was in a fish
bowl on stilts. Of all the houses in Florida, why stilts?

The faces swam before her and she
sighed. If Davis were a tortured man, he wasn’t going to admit it. If he wanted
to rocket himself toward burnout and an ulcer, then fine. Have at it.

Maybe the sketch artist idea
really was stupid. Probably didn’t pay much. And could be he needed the money.

Take this house, for example.

A bit suicidal, if you asked
Lori, but she was pretty sure a realtor would call it a good investment. That
said, two bedrooms and one bath didn’t exactly fit her expectation of a man who
could live the rest of his life off the interest from his trust fund.

Had his parents cut him off when
he’d divorced Juliana? Could they do that?

Jerks.

Davis was a decent guy. He didn’t deserve to be
treated that way.

Case in point: hadn’t he been the
only guy in recent memory to care more about her mind than her body? Matter of
fact, had that particular scenario ever happened before?

No. Or at least, not since high
school. Not since… Davis.

Everything seemed to start and
end with Davis. Lori had surprised herself by forgiving him for preferring
Juliana, but she couldn’t forget how much she’d hurt.

How different would her life have
been if he’d chosen her? If they’d married.

Would they have had a family?
Might she have been a soccer mom instead of a supermodel? Wouldn’t that life
have been so much better?

Stupid. No sense dwelling on
questions with no answers.

Lori stacked the sketches back
into the portfolio and reached for her book. She’d nearly killed herself
getting it—literally—so she might as well read the darn thing.

The squeal of tires interrupted
her before she made it through the first paragraph. Lori glanced at the window
again, annoyed this time, but didn’t get up to look out.

Beach. Spring Break. Add two and
two together and you were bound to get lots of noise complaints. How did Davis
stand this place?

Shrugging, Lori returned to her
book. She finished the first page and was flipping to the second when a loud
shot rang out and the picture window exploded behind her.

Shattered glass clattered across
the floor. Floating fragments glittered in the sunlight like fairy dust. Tiny
shards peppered the bare skin of her arms and legs.

Screams. Hers.

Lori wrapped her arms around her
bent legs and lowered her face between her knees.

What should she do? What could
she do?

The broken glass would shred her
bare feet in seconds if she so much as moved from this spot. Great. Just great.

New shots rang out.

Tinkling glass flew into the
hallway as mini-explosions destroyed each room’s windows in methodical
succession.

This was not good.

When the round of explosions
stopped, Lori held her breath and waited.

Silence.

A salty breeze stole through the
suddenly drafty house and stung her skin with bits of glass caught in the
current.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t run.
Couldn’t escape.

Lori grappled for her cell phone
at her waistband. Davis would know what to do. Davis would help. Davis… wasn’t
going to get this call.

Dead battery. Damn.

She knew she should’ve asked for
her cell charger. What was she going to do now?

Lori tossed the phone onto the
couch. It landed with a crunch. An inch of glass coated every surface of the
house. Why did Davis have to like windows so much?

She glanced around for his
cordless phone. Nowhere to be seen.

Was it in the bedroom? Or the
office? Think think think.

Cripes, she couldn’t remember.
But the office was right across the hallway, not twenty feet from her, and the
bedroom seemed miles down the hall. She’d have to try the office, then. If she
could somehow navigate this sea of broken glass.

She needed a plan.

“Lo-ri Sum-mers,” rang out a
female voice from below. “I’m he-ere.”

No kidding. Lori shot frantic
glances around the living room and clutched her legs to her chest even more
tightly.

“I’m coming to get you,”
sing-songed the voice, this time from a different angle.

With all the windows gone and the
wind whistling through her hair, Lori couldn’t get a bearing on which direction
the voice was coming from. It seemed like the killer was moving from spot to
spot, just to freak her out.

It was working.

“Little pig, little pig, let
me
IN!” came the gleeful shout.

Glad one of them was enjoying her
diabolical games.

“Not by the hair of my
chinny-chin-chin,” muttered Lori. She squeezed herself into a tighter ball.

“Bet you finished the rhyme!”
called the killer. “Well? Did you? Do I win?”

Lori grimaced. No. The killer
hadn’t won yet. Lori stuck out a tentative toe and winced when a shard of glass
sliced through the tender pad. She sucked in a shallow breath and started to
hyperventilate.

She was trapped.

Davis slumped in his office chair and drummed his
fingers on the ink-stained desktop.

Chewing the end of a pencil rather than a cough
drop, Carver stared back at him without raising so much as an eyebrow. She knew
how he felt without bothering with a verbal conversation.

Amber Tompkins was still out there. Somewhere.

If they didn’t get a bead on her soon…

Every squad car they had was out there trolling for
her. He’d even requested an unmarked to drive down the strip of beach by the
convenience store near his house every hour.

The call had come in not fifteen minutes ago—all was
quiet. The officer planned to grab lunch before cruising by again.

Too quiet, if you asked Davis.

He flipped through his notebook, certain he’d missed
something, anything, that could catch this psycho. He reread the notes with his
initial impression and then flipped to the page where he’d interviewed the
motel clerk.

A face stared back at him. Almost the face of a
killer.

Now that he knew the perp was Amber Tompkins, the
resemblance came clear. That was the problem with sketching someone else’s
shaky memory. How close attention did people really pay?

Even if the motel clerk would’ve had a photographic memory,
would that have even helped? How accurately can the average person describe the
shade of someone’s skin? The slope of a jaw? The slant of an eye?

Davis slammed the spiral notebook shut.

No way could he be a sketch artist. He drew someone
he’d even met in person, for God’s sake, and he hadn’t even recognized her in
his own portrait.

“That was pretty close, you know,” Carver said,
mouth around her pencil.

He frowned. “What was?”

“Your picture. If it weren’t for the fact that all
of Turner’s women were skinny blondes with creepy vibes, we’d have had a solid
lead.”

“Didn’t help much in this case, did it,” muttered
Davis.

“Maybe, but remember the Holloway kidnapping? I saw
you doodling when the neighbor gave her description of the intruder. I
recognized the maintenance guy right off. We totally nailed that case because
of that. And the Rodriguez incident last month, ’member that? I love having you
as a partner. It’s like having my own private—”

“Don’t say it.”

“—sketch artist, standing right there next to me.
Man, I wish I could draw. You should see the stick people I come up with. Most
of the time, I forget to add noses.”

Davis glared at the wall above her head.

Carver shrugged and tossed her ruined pencil into
the trash. “I’m just saying.”

Yeah, yeah. Everybody was just saying.

Maybe he’d been too harsh with Lori. A bit too
defensive. No doubt she just wanted the best for him. Wanted him to be happy.

Being a cop made him happy. He’d have to tell her
that.

To be honest, being with Lori also made him happy. He’d
have to tell her that, too.

Davis flipped through his notebook again, this time
paying attention to the number of sketches rather than the outcome of the
cases.

Maybe Carver was right. Maybe he was a sketch artist
and a cop, all rolled into one. Maybe he should stop fighting it.

Lori’s face sprang to mind. Maybe he should stop
fighting the attraction there, too.

After all, he was a man in charge of himself now.
Impervious to his parents’ dictates. Shouldn’t he go for happiness when the
opportunity presented itself?

Davis lifted his desk phone from the receiver. He
poised his hand to dial.

Wait a minute. What was he doing? Calling to declare
his undying love from a telephone in the middle of the crowded police station?
Cripes. Davis hung up the phone without dialing.

With his hand still on the receiver, it rang.

“That was creepy,” commented Carver. “What did you
do, summon a ghost?”