Page 65 of Killer on the Homestead
“It’s Duncan—” Before he could even get his last name out, Beckett was cursing.
“If you call me again, I’m—”
There was no time for that. “I found Rosalie’s truck crashed in a ditch on Route Two. She’s nowhere to be found, but there’s some blood.”
For a moment, the detective said nothing. “Where on Route Two?”
Duncan looked around, tried to discern what mile marker he’d be at. Gave the detective an approximation.
“All right. You’re going to stay put. Right by the truck. I’m going to send an ambulance, then I’ll be out. Once I get there, you’re going to get the hell out of our way.”
Duncan knew Detective Beckett was right. The police knew what they were doing. Detectives knew what they were doing. But he couldn’t bring himself to verbally agree.
“Listen. This is dangerous. Terry Boothe’s truck was found parked in an abandoned garage not far from the hospital. There’s a threat here. I’m on my way. You need to step back and let the police handle it.”
Duncan considered it. For maybe two seconds. Terry had left his truck near the hospital? Where Rosalie had last been?
No.
“Sorry. Can’t do that.” He hung up. Surveyed the quiet world around him. What had happened here? An accident? A fight? She hadn’tjustcrashed, or she’d still be here. She would have used that phone to call it in or at least taken it with her.
Something bad had happened. Maybe it wasn’t Terry, but too much was adding up.
Duncan took a few steps away from the truck in the tall grass. He could kind of see where some of the blades had been depressed by someone stepping on them. He’d follow the trail as best he could.
But before he could take even two steps, his toe hit something hard. He looked down and saw the glint of metal. He crouched to examine it. He couldn’t be sure it was Rosalie’s, but it was definitely a gun. So he picked it up.
He had a bad feeling they were going to need it.
Rosalie stumbled,her stomach roiling so much she thought for sure there was no way she’d breathe through the need to wretch.
But she managed. On her hands and knees, the muddy ground seeping into both, she managed to swallow down the need to be sick. She blinked at the gunk in her eyes, but she couldn’t see. She wanted to believe it was just blood, but she knew better.
She was losing consciousness. The grip of black was edging around her brain, and she kept fighting it off, but only barely.
“Come on,” she muttered to herself. “Get it together.” She sucked in a deep, painful breath, then pushed off her arms so that she was upright on her knees.
But the sight that greeted her wasn’t a good one. Terry was approaching. He’d caught up with her. Found her.
Now what?
She tried to get to her feet, but her legs wouldn’t seem to move, so she tried to scoot back, away from him. She groped around on the ground for something, anything she could use as a weapon.
“You’ve made this much harder than it needed to be, Rosalie,” Terry said, walking in slow, menacing steps toward her. “I could have buried you out here. It could have been easy, but you had to wreck that truck. Now, we’ve got to complicate things.”
He moved toward her, and she tried to scramble away, but she couldn’t seem to get to her feet. She just stumbled, and then she felt his hand on her arm and she was being dragged back. Shethoughtshe was kicking. She was trying to kick, but it didn’t seem to change the steady slide of her body across the ground.
“You left a pretty nice blood trail. Now, do we think it’ll be the cops or Duncan who comes to rescue you? My money’s on our boy. If not, that’ll be okay. It can still look like him. It’ll look like him.”
She tried to speak, tried to get her mouth to move, but it wouldn’t.
“You shouldn’t have crashed the truck, Rosalie. You shouldn’t have done it. But you did, so we’ll deal with it.”
She tried to push him away, but she had such little strength left. He had one arm behind her, then the other, and shoved her back against the tree as something wrapped around her. A rope?
She tried to focus on breathing over panic. Understanding what Terry was saying over wanting to start sobbing.
“You can’t really think you’re going to get away with this,” she rasped.
