Deadly Reunion

Sighing, she started toward the door of the caretaker’s cottage office, not caring if Boone followed or not.

Her cell phone rang before she got halfway up the walk. She slipped her badge and ID inside one pocket of her beige, cropped jacket and grabbed the phone out of the other. Her sister’s number showed in the little window.

Angie’s heart thumped against her chest. This call was not to chat. Chloe didn’t “chat” with her. They were both still too bruised and cautious about their renewed relationship, which was another reason she wasn’t jumping into the middle of her sister’s romance with her gun drawn on Detry. She knew who Chloe would side with.

The phone kept chirping. She turned around to find Boone staring at her curiously. He was still by his Mercedes.

“I have to get this,” she more asked than said.

Boone shrugged his broad shoulders, and she tried to convince herself she didn’t want to hide her face against one now. She never hid from anything, but she did not want to take this call. What on earth was wrong with her?

She was afraid of what Chloe was going to say, that was what.

With a deep breath, she walked well away from Boone to the back of his car, hit a key on the phone and cupped her hand over her mouth to keep her voice from carrying. She hoped.

“Chloe?”

“Ange, yes, it’s me. I have the greatest news, and I just had to call you. I hope that’s okay. You said the other night you would get this week off, right?”

“Right.” She’d called Chloe the night she’d found Cliff dead, unnerved by shock, wanting to make sure her sister was still all right. Maybe she’d also called Chloe because she wanted to hear the voice of someone familiar. It hadn’t comforted her, not when she’d really wanted to be talking to…someone else. She glanced at Boone.

“Chief Gregg gave me over a week of compassionate leave time,” Angie added. To pull herself together, which she would have to do all over again when she attended the funeral tomorrow. Nine days to get over losing a friend. It wouldn’t be enough. She already knew that.

She needed to focus on her sister. Chloe was chatting and gushing. Chloe sounded extremely happy. And given the circumstances of her sister’s life at the moment, that could only mean one thing.

“Warren proposed!” Chloe chirped in her ear. “We’re getting married Saturday.”

Oh, please, Lord, no, was what she thought. “Wow,” was what she said. What else could she say?

“I’m so happy,” Chloe added. “I was going to let you get the invitation in the mail, but Warren said he’d imagine a call would surprise you more.”

Oh, yeah. Angie rested her hips against Boone’s car, her knees threatening mutiny. Detry was a snake coiling around her neck. Tightly.

She couldn’t tell Chloe her suspicions yet. She needed absolute proof to back her up, like that murder weapon, with only Detry’s fingerprints on it. She probably could use more than that—maybe an indicting tidbit from Detry’s past that Boone missed when he ran the man’s background check. And hard as it was for her to accept, she probably needed to ask Boone to let her read his copy of that report. Detry was already making his moves. There was no time to waste.

As her sister bubbled over with hopes and dreams for her future with a murderer, Angie cast a long look at Boone. How on earth would she get him to go along with her game plan of ruining his former client, which would require his admitting to having made a mistake?

Around them birds chirped; an elderly woman, with a waterfall of red roses next to her, drove through the gate; and a plane flew through some clouds overhead. So much for the dead quiet. The world was back to normal—except for her own life.

“Ange, I really want you to be there for the shower, the rehearsal and the wedding. There’s a party, too, one evening. Mom said you can stay at the house if you don’t want to drive back and forth.” Some of the gush left Chloe’s voice as she added, “If you can come soon, maybe it will give us some time together to get to know each other again before I’m all caught up with being a wife. I’d like that.”

“I’d like that, too,” Angie whispered. She refused to tear up now, with Boone’s intense gaze on her. “I do love you, Chloe.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d said that—if she ever had. She must have, right?

At the other end of the invisible line, Chloe hesitated, a reflection of the hard times they’d had. “I love you, too. My invitation will have the dates and times. Please let us know when you’re coming. Bye!” She disconnected.

Angie slipped her phone back into her pocket and straightened up. Boone moved to her side, so close their arms were touching. She longed to lean into him and absorb some of his strength. He was always a rock, no matter what, and she’d been on her own so long that leaning on him held great appeal. She ought to be thinking of God as her rock, but sometimes, like now when trouble was slapping her into a small, dark place, God seemed so remote.

“You hear my heart, Boone?”

“Is this a test?” he asked lightly.

“I’m surprised you can’t hear my heart,” she said, not joking. Her sister’s situation was life or death. She pulled her bag up into her arms to hold that instead of him. “I can hear my heart. It’s pounding.”

“You’re upset.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Whether or not now was a good time to ask him for permission to read the background check he’d done on Detry, she wasn’t certain. She doubted if he would let her if she didn’t first tell him about her sister’s engagement and how she was going to stop the wedding. Was it a good idea? She needed to think, but Boone’s intense gaze and nearness made that extremely difficult.

“Bad news?” Boone asked.

“Yes, I would say so.” She backed away from him a little to break the mental hold he had on her. “That was my sister.”

Boone’s face registered surprise. “I thought you two weren’t speaking.”

“We weren’t, until Warren Detry stepped into the picture. Chloe was part of a Bible study ministry for inmates. That’s how they met. When he was freed, he looked her up at her church, and they started dating.”

“You were going to tell me this when?” His eyes narrowed.

“Now?” She lifted her eyebrow. The edges of his lips lifted, but only briefly. His attention was diverted by the elderly lady’s car leaving. He watched the vehicle carefully, then resettled himself to look at her.

“Go on,” he said.

“Chloe never believed Detry capable of murder. At some point, Warren discovered we were sisters. Not too long ago, he made it a point to ‘encourage’ Chloe to reconcile with me.” Not out of any love of his fellow man, Angie was certain. The monster just wanted to assure she was out there, scared. Sweating. Petrified.

“The call just now was to tell me she and Warren are getting married Saturday.” She met Boone’s eyes again. “Warren encouraged her to call and invite me especially. He’s taunting me.”

“Angie—”

“He is,” she insisted, “because I know as soon as Chloe moves in with him, she’s readily available to be his next victim, and he wants me to worry. He must know we’re here, looking for the evidence. That I’m not giving up, despite his death threat on my car this morning. He’ll either kill her to get revenge on me for insisting the murder weapon existed, or he’ll hold her over my head to keep me from taking the murder weapon to the authorities.”

Boone’s skeptical eyes made Angie want to kick him in the shins, but she held back. At the rate today was going, she would probably just break a toe. Besides, she was trying to change inside, to mature as a Christian.

A hard battle, especially when it came to Boone, in more ways than one.

“I’ll admit,” Boone said, “that his choosing your sister to fall in love with and marry is very coincidental, but it’s not like he went looking to meet her in the first place just to get revenge on you. The trial hadn’t even happened yet when they met.”

Was she wrong? The memory of Detry’s evil eyes lacerating her appeared in her mind like fireworks, clear and sharp at first, then fading into nothingness, and she shivered, despite the warmth of the June morning. No, she wasn’t wrong. She’d met up with perps like him before, men who had it out for females, but never any with the intensity of hatred in their eyes that Detry had displayed toward her. Her guess was that Detry was a psychopath who hated women. When she’d claimed a weapon existed that he’d stated wasn’t there, she’d become tops on his hit list.

Maybe it had been a coincidence Detry met Chloe, and maybe even that he’d found out they were sisters. But it hadn’t been by chance he’d sought out Chloe later, after the trial was over, and begun dating her. No, that had been his plan.

But she’d never convince Boone of that.

“You’re also assuming Detry was guilty,” he added, “and that someone else didn’t commit Laurie Detry’s murder and write that note to you. Someone who doesn’t want the weapon found now.”

She sidestepped impatiently. “Do I really need to remind you there were no signs of any break-in or struggle at the mansion? That the forensics team found no stranger’s prints anywhere? I’d stake my life on there not being an intruder.”

“I wouldn’t stake your life on that,” Boone said fiercely.

That almost sounded like he cared. She supposed he did, in a way, but he cared more about his clients. He would never side with her over one of them. Ever. This was proving it. Worse, he was gazing down at her as though she were being an illogical child. Just like at the trial, he was still doubting her opinions and abilities. That hurt.