Page 229 of It Happened on the Lake

“Radio in for an ambulance,” he ordered over his shoulder, though he knew it was far too late. There was no pulse. Not even the tiniest breath escaping her cracked, bloody lips.

It looked like someone had pummeled her against the concrete steps, maybe smashed her face into the crumbling concrete edge, soaked as it was with blood, but then either her attacker or she had managed to turn her over.

He felt sick inside.

As used to violent death as he was, it still bothered him to think about what the victim had experienced.

He rocked back on his heels, surveying the garage with its washer and dryer and car in one bay.

Then he tried the light switch.

Nothing.

Odd.

Four panels of fluorescents hanging above and none worked?

If she’d come out here at night, the garage would have been completely dark.

She could have stumbled.

Standing, he swept the beam of the flashlight over the rest of the interior of the garage and noted the upturned laundry basket, lying on the dirty floor, and the rake that was nearby. An accident? She tripped in the dark when the lights didn’t come on. She hit her head and had a brain bleed or something and her face got battered to a pulp?

No way.

From the looks of it, she was murdered in her own garage.

At the top of his list of suspects in her homicide was Tristan Vargas /Larry Smith.

Unless Janet had a violent husband, boyfriend, or son, Rand would bet dollars to donuts that Vargas was behind this killing. The lowlife was shutting her up and had moved from dealing drugs and blackmail to homicide.

Or maybe he’d always been a killer.

Could Vargas have decided to murder Janet not because of what she’d mentioned in the voice mail she’d left for Rand at the department, but because she knew of other crimes he’d committed? Rand thought of the unlikely deaths he was investigating, those near Lake Twilight, most having occurred years before.

What about the last couple of decades?

Where had Vargas lived, under what alias, and were there any unsolved homicides in his wake?

And why, after twenty years, had he chosen to strike now?

Did he know that the police were onto him? Had he somehow learned that evidence had been found in the Musgrave cabin? Or, more likely, had he read about Cynthia Hunt’s death in the damned newspaper, the first of a series on mysteries and deaths surrounding Lake Twilight, and decided to take care of any loose ends he’d left dangling twenty years ago? Was Janet Collins’s death an attempt by Vargas to clean up his mess from two decades earlier?

Or was Rand barking up the wrong tree? Even in the wrong damned forest?

He had lots of questions and only a few half-baked answers.

Chelle had joined him in the garage and was staring at the victim. “Son of a bitch,” she whispered under her breath as she crouched down for a closer look at the bruised and battered face. She studied Janet’s hands. “No defensive wounds. No broken fingernails. She didn’t fight back.”

“He surprised her. Got the drop on her,” Rand surmised aloud. “She didn’t have a chance.”

“Vargas.” Chelle rocked back on her heels and glanced up at Rand.

“That’s my guess.”

“You think he knew she put in a call to you?”

“Don’t know.” But it was a good guess that Vargas killed her because of what she knew about him in the past.

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