Standing Fast. Maggie K. Black
flanked by officers. Anger burned in his eyes, mixed with a quiet desperation bordering on panic, like a wounded animal desperately scanning the snare that had just trapped him. “Look, Chase can’t be working with Boyd Sullivan. I’m almost certain of it.”
The lines of Justin’s brow furrowed deeper. “Again, do you have any evidence to back that up?”
“No.” Her chest fell. She had a hunch and nothing more.
Was her blind faith of Chase’s true nature any different than Yvette’s had been about Boyd?
A frightened and furious wail seemed to break through the early morning air and rise above the chaos. A cop in flak gear was carrying a squirming and pajama-clad Allie out of the house. She recognized him. Lieutenant Preston Flannigan was the slightly pushy single father of one of the boys in her preschool.
“No!” Allie squirmed, fighting against the firm arms holding her. “Stop! No! I want Daddy!”
Sudden tears rushed to Maisy’s eyes. “What’s going to happen to Allie?”
“That’s up to Chase. We’ll be taking him in for questioning. Hopefully, he has someone who can take her. If not, we’ll arrange for a base social worker.”
A stranger? She knew the social workers on base were wonderful people who did a difficult job, but still, she couldn’t imagine how hard it would be on little Allie to understand where she was going and what was happening to her. She glanced at Chase. His face had paled with an agony that seemed to rip her own heart in half. No, she couldn’t just stand there and watch this happen. She took a step toward the little girl. “Allie, it’s going to be okay.”
Allie’s tearstained face turned toward her. “Maisy! I want Miss Maisy!”
Her little arms shot out, and Maisy felt her arms instinctively wrap around the child.
“Justin, I’ll take her to the preschool with me, if Chase is okay with that. She’s one of my students and watching her the extra hour before school starts is no trouble at all. I know her and she knows me.”
Concern rumbled in the captain’s voice. “Are you sure?”
Maisy’s eyes glanced from father to daughter. “Absolutely.”
“All right.” He led her through the crowd until they reached Chase. “Maisy has offered to take care of your daughter while you come in for questioning. Is that acceptable to you?”
Chase turned toward them and gratitude filled his gaze. “Yes, thank you. Please, don’t let her out of your sight. There was a prowler outside of my home this morning. They cut the screen on her bedroom window.”
Was that the same person she’d seen skulking in the bushes? She wanted to ask him more and tell him what she’d seen, but with Security Forces all around and little frightened Allie in her arms it would have to wait. “I’ll keep her safe, Chase. I promise.”
“Thanks,” he said again. “She’ll need to get dressed and changed. Plus, I haven’t fed her breakfast yet. She’s recently been refusing to eat cereal if milk touches it, but she’s okay with fruit...” His voice trailed off, as if his mind was struggling to figure out what else he should tell her.
“Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “I’ve got a change of clothes for her in her cubby at the preschool. I bought some fresh fruit yesterday and I have frozen waffles and yogurt on hand for breakfast.”
The number of students who’d been having problems both eating and sleeping had increased since the Red Rose Killer had broken onto the base. She heard Allie’s babbling voice at her ear, and the toddler took Maisy’s face in both of her hands, turning the preschool teacher’s gaze away from Chase. Allie looked at her seriously. “Police broke my house, Maisy.”
“The police are just searching your house to make sure that you and your daddy are okay,” Maisy said, softly. “Like Queenie searches your house for things. Now, your daddy is going to help the police and you are going to come to school with me. We’ll have special strawberries and waffles for breakfast. Would you like that?”
Allie stuck her lip out. “Queenie comes too?”
Maisy looked down. A young beagle sat by her ankle. It looked up protectively at Allie in a way that told her that she wouldn’t be able to shake the dog, even if she wanted to. “Yes, of course. Queenie can come too.”
“Queenie likes waffles.” Allie tucked her head against Maisy’s chest and she felt the young girl shudder in the safety of her arms.
Chase met her eyes over Allie’s head again. “Thank you.”
“No problem. We’ll see you later.”
The pink-and-orange glow of a Texas dawn had deepened over the horizon. The first parents would be at the preschool ready to drop their kids off in a little over an hour. She started to turn away when she heard Justin calling her name. She looked back. The captain was striding toward them. Something glittered in his gloved hand. It was a sturdy gold cross, dangling on the end of a chain.
He stretched the pendant toward her. “Before you go, one of our officers just found this buried under the floorboards in Chase’s house. I was wondering if you could identify it?”
Her blood ran cold as suddenly as if she’d just plunged into ice. She nodded. Her mouth opened, but for a moment, no words came out. Justin Blackwood turned the cross over and the early morning light fell on the engraved words she’d so carefully chosen as a teenager years ago. I love you, Dad—Maisy.
Her heart sank to a place that was worse than disappointment or even sadness. “Yes, that’s the cross I gave my father for Christmas when I was thirteen, a few months after my mother died. Despite our differences, he wore it under his uniform and never took it off. When the Red Rose Killer murdered him, somebody stole it from his body.”
She could almost feel Chase’s gaze on her face, but she forced herself to turn away without meeting his eye. She didn’t even begin to know what to think. But the fact that it had now shown up in Chase McLear’s home made it a lot harder to hold on to the faint hope that the father of the little girl she now held in her arms wasn’t somehow linked to his murder.
* * *
“Stephen Butler, commissary cook!” Preston slapped the glossy photo of the corpse of one of the Red Rose Killer’s most recent victims down on the interrogation table in front of Chase. “Found dead behind a restaurant off base. Boyd Sullivan used his uniform and ID to sneak onto base after escaping prison. Did you lure him to the woods for Boyd? Are you responsible for this man’s murder?”
“No, sir.” Chase’s jaw ached and his lower back twinged with the reminder that he hadn’t stood or stretched in hours. But he wasn’t about to let his bearing relax. They’d brought him in for questioning in the same track pants and T-shirt he’d been wearing when they’d arrested him. Being challenged by uniformed men while in his civvies made the humiliation he felt even worse. But he wasn’t about to give in to the temptation to slouch.
An airman was an airman, even out of uniform.
His eyes roamed over the glossy picture of the dead young man. The Red Rose Killer’s first set of victims before his arrest had been linked by a common thread—they were all people who’d treated him worse than he felt he’d deserved. A homecoming queen who’d broken his heart, a high school bully and a gas station attendant who’d fired him had been the first three people he had killed. A woman he’d once dated and her new boyfriend rounded out the five murders that he’d gone to prison for. But since breaking out of prison, his targets had been more mixed. Some seemed to be revenge killings, complete with a red rose and a note left on the body. Others, like poor Stephen Butler, seemed to have been killed for practical reasons, like gaining access to the base or the kennels. Preston had already covered the first set of victims and had now moved onto crimes committed since Boyd had broken out of prison.
Captain Justin Blackwood stood