Page 5 of In Safe Hands
Closing her fingers around her phone, she pulled it out and tapped on the video app. The scene was strange enough that she felt like she needed to record it, even if it was just so she could watch it in the morning. In the light of day, the ominous feeling would be gone, and she could laugh at the way her overactive imagination had turned something innocuous into a nebulous threat.
No matter how she shifted, raising up or dropping low, Daisy couldn’t find the right angle to get a glimpse of the man in black’s face. Even if she had gotten a clear view, though, she probably wouldn’t have been able to identify him. She only knew Chris’s coworkers through his work anecdotes. She zoomed in her phone camera, but the image just got darker and grainier, rather than clearer.
Leaning forward, the man half-dropped, half-shoved the large bundle into the back of the SUV. The rear of the vehicle sagged a little, which meant the object must be heavy. There was an unsettling familiarity in the way the tarp-wrapped item fell, bulky and weighted, that sent a shiver across the back of her neck.
The black-clad man shoved at the bottom of the bundle. He’d managed to tuck the majority of it into the SUV when something dark escaped from the bottom of the rolled tarp, tumbled over the rear bumper, and fell to the ground.
Daisy sucked in a breath hard enough to scrape her throat. From her vantage point, that dropped item looked very much like a boot.
Chapter 2
Stunned by the possibility that there was a body in the back of the SUV, Daisy froze. She didn’t move as the man grabbed what was definitely a boot and chucked it into the back with what couldn’t be a dead human being…could it? He closed the back hatch door quietly. Any click or thump it might have made was buried under the whistling groan of the wind.
It wasn’t until the man opened the driver’s door and looked directly at her window that Daisy returned to life, leaping away from the glass so violently that she stumbled over her backtracking feet and fell, dropping her phone. It took her a few moments before she could scrape up the nerve to stand and approach the window again. By the time she got close enough to see the street, the SUV was gone.
“Stupid,” Daisy scolded herself, frantically looking in one direction and then the other, vainly trying to make out the red glow of taillights. There was nothing but darkness. “You could’ve gotten a good look at his face if you weren’t such a chicken. He couldn’t have seen you up here in the dark.” Giving up on getting another glimpse of the SUV, she slumped against the window. “At least you could’ve looked at the plate number.”
She rushed over to where her phone had fallen. Grabbing it, she pulled up her pathetically short list of contacts. Her finger hovered over Chris’s name first, and then her father’s. Her dad was in Connor Springs, installing solar panels on a new, high-end condo project. He was scheduled to be back that evening.
Her finger, poised above the screen, retreated before it tapped on either contact, and her arm dropped to her side. It was sinking in that she didn’t have anything concrete. There was no plate number, no way she could identify which deputy had tossed a human-shaped bundle into the back of a squad SUV, and no certainty that there was, in fact, a dead body currently being transported who knew where. All she had was some indistinct video footage of a dark form putting something into an SUV.
If she called either her dad or Chris tonight, they’d think she was imagining things. Worse, they might believe she’d expanded the boundaries of crazy-town, adding delusions to her current phobia. Her father would look at her with angry, helpless eyes and scratch his beard. In the short time he’d be staying at the house before leaving for another installation job, conversation would be infrequent and awkward. Daisy cringed at the thought.
Chris, on the other hand… Daisy wasn’t sure what he’d do. He’d been acting so squirrelly lately, and he might use this as a sign that he should stop telling her about his cases, especially the one revolving around the headless guy found in Mission Reservoir a couple of months ago. Worse, maybe he’d stop visiting her altogether.
Her breathing quickened, becoming harsh and shallow, and she closed her eyes. Daisy imagined hiking on a rocky trail, winding higher and higher until she reached the summit. In her mind, she turned around and could see the entire county spread out beneath her. The jagged edges of the lower peaks, furred with evergreens and aspen, smoothed into the flat plains. A distant herd of pronghorn grazed, and a pair of hawks circled in the impossibly blue sky. Daisy’s heart beat faster, not in fear of the expansive space, but at the sheer beauty of it all. After a few minutes, her breaths came slow and even, and she allowed her eyes to open.
Carefully, she placed her phone back on the bedside table. Maybe there was a way she could investigate on her own. The Simpson Star, the weekly local paper, would be online at noon. She could check the section where the emergency calls and responses were posted. If a deputy had been sent to number 304, it would show up in that week’s “Sheriff’s Report.” In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to check if any missing-persons reports had been filed recently.
Instead of logging on to her laptop, though, she sat on her bed, shifting until her back was against the headboard. Pulling one of her pillows out from under her hip, she wrapped her arms around it. As she stared at the window across the room, she hugged the pillow and tried not to think about dead bodies, murderous deputies…or how desolate her life would be without Chris in it.
* * *
The flames followed the line of gasoline, lighting the fumes with a whoosh. Tyler grinned. That was his favorite part, when the fire went from the tiny flicker of a lighter to a ravenous monster intent on consuming an entire building. Heart pounding, he watched as the pile of cardboard caught fire, red and black crawling around the edges of each piece before the yellow flames appeared, growing until they almost touched the garage rafters.
Tyler coughed, eyeing the thickening layer of smoke. As much as he wanted to watch the fire close up, it was time for him to leave. Breathing was getting harder, and the owner—or a neighbor—would notice the smoke and flames. That meant the big red trucks would be arriving soon…and so would his father.
A twinge of guilt ran through him as he moved toward the side door, the one not facing the house. Tyler had promised he’d quit, and he’d tried. It was just such a rush—the roar of flames, the crash of a collapsing structure, the spreading glow as tree after tree ignited in an ever-widening circle, all because of him. He’d created that destruction with some accelerant and a flick of his lighter. It was tempting to tell everyone at school, all those kids who thought he was nothing—when they even thought of him at all. Tyler wouldn’t tell, though. His dad had a hard enough time covering for him as it was.
Cracking open the door, he checked for any observers. A breeze brushed through the doorway, and the flames crackled and danced. After admiring the growing fire for a proud moment, Tyler slipped outside and darted for the cover of the trees.
It only took another minute or two before a cry came from the house, and the owner ran outside, wearing a coat over her pajamas. Tyler watched as she shouted into her cell phone while struggling to hook up the garden hose with her free hand.
The woman reminded him a little of Lou, and he shifted as he remembered, exhilaration and guilt surging through him. That had been the first time he’d set a fire knowing someone was inside. It had been freaky and intense to see her lying limp on the couch in a drugged sleep, to know that he was about to kill her. He’d felt a little bad, since she’d always been nice to him, but she’d been too interested in Willard Gray’s death. She had to be stopped.
Tyler’s dad always told him that being a man meant accepting responsibility. When Lou wouldn’t stop poking around in the Gray investigation, Tyler knew he had to take action. His dad was always protecting Tyler. It’d been his turn to protect his father. He’d failed, though. Lou had lived.
A wail of a siren brought his attention back to his current creation—and destruction. The windows blew out in a shower of broken glass, and Tyler couldn’t hold back an exultant laugh. He’d done that. The garage owner cried out and shifted away from the building, the forgotten hose still clutched in her hand. She stared at the fire, her face and body lit by the flames, as water poured from the hose and pooled uselessly around her feet.
The fire trucks pulled up to the curb just seconds before the sheriff department SUV arrived. Tyler’s dad climbed out of the driver’s seat, his gaze scanning the tree line. Even though Tyler knew he was hidden, he couldn’t stop himself from shrinking farther behind a pine, instinctively trying to avoid that piercing gaze.
The wind picked up, making the flames shoot higher into the night sky. Since Tyler’s gaze was locked on his father, he saw the sheriff’s jacket flap open, revealing a black top that wasn’t his uniform shirt. As if he’d felt his son’s eyes on him, Rob glanced down and then zipped his coat, the tan one with “Sheriff” emblazoned on the back.
As his dad headed toward the fire chief, Tyler gave the fire one last longing glance before disappearing into the trees.
* * *
