Page 182 of The Woman By the Lake

They stopped and faced each other when they hit the driver’s side door.

“Update,” Harry began. “The powers that be in Seattle have no interest in opening a closed case. Especially not a high profile one. That detective also hasn’t done anything on his own time. So either they went after Nadia last night in their fifteen-year commitment to keep people off this land, or Rus and me tweaked Sharon.”

“Right,” Riggs said.

“And Sean, Raul and Karen are all considering resigning because they’ve spent hours today going through your feeds, but it was worth it.”

Riggs’s attention spiked. “Yeah?”

“Shadowy figure. It was night. They were wearing dark clothing, including a hoodie with the hood pulled up. Kept their head down. Maybe noted Nadia’s Range Rover wasn’t there, and they had a flashlight, which fucked us, because they caught a string of luck and shined it right into the camera when they looked at the house. Obscured the view, didn’t see a face. The light went away, they were running from the house. Sharon Swindell is attractive, tall, slender, but built tough like any mountain woman should be, and fifty-four years old. I wouldn’t swear the person wasn’t her, but whoever it was, was taller than her and moved more like a man, and definitely someone younger.”

“Bryce or Evan?” Riggs asked.

Harry shook his head. “Not Evan. He’s five ten. This person was more around your and my height. But again, it was shadowy. And they weren’t built, so it wasn’t Evan, but could have been Bryce. We’re pulling him in tomorrow after school to have a talk.”

“Casey’s gonna love that,” Riggs muttered.

“Casey can leave my town and go somewhere where they pamper their kids to the point they grow up thinking the world revolves around them. Because I know you agree that it is a thousand shades of fucked up to do that to any woman anywhere, but one who’s in my town to find a peaceful place to grieve the violent death of her mother is unconscionable. He might not have known that at the time, but he knows it now, and bottom line, it doesn’t matter. What he did was fucked up.”

Seemed Harry was getting more impatient with all this shit than Riggs, and Riggs had zero patience for it.

Then again, Harry was right there at nine thirty at night, dealing with this shit, and not at home, shaking it off.

His friend needed to get home and do whatever he did to decompress from his day so he could face the next one.

“Thanks for the callout, brother,” Riggs said, clapping him on the arm.

“What are you gonna do about Bubbles?” Harry asked curiously.

Riggs sighed.

Then he said, “He’s right. I got Ledger out of his shit. But I also just dropped fifteen thousand dollars on a dog, and I’m facing attorney’s fees because Storm and I are suing for full custody. Onward from that, probably occasionally having to eat shit for a lifetime and watching my son do it, because Angelica is Angelica. But they’ve said I was smart since the second grade, and I still can’t figure out why, no matter the crap he pulls, Bubbles is so fucking likeable.”

“That was what I was chewing on the entire time it took you to get here.”

“Gotta say,” Riggs muttered, “I feel safer, him sitting out here.”

“Yeah,” Harry replied quietly.

“Get home, man,” Riggs urged.

Harry nodded and headed to his cruiser.

You could hear the faint drone of a podcast in the distance, so Riggs looked that way to see Bubbles munching a slice of pizza.

Christ.

Bubbles.

He got in his truck, reversed to a safe spot he could do a three-point turn, then headed home.

THIRTY-NINE

One Of Theirs

Riggs

It was Thursday night, and they’d hit another zone where life was just good.

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