Lethal Lawman. Carla Cassidy
both of them gone now. It was getting late, she was exhausted and she wanted to make arrangements for Larry Samson to come first thing in the morning and replace the door with solid locks.
She’d be fine for the night with the dead bolt locked. This entire evening just felt ugly, and she’d had enough ugliness in her life to last throughout eternity.
She stood in hopes that it would be an indication that she was done for the night. She pulled her much-shorter dark-haired sister into a quick embrace. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. It’s all under control.”
Roxy gave her a tight hug in response and then stepped back. “Okay, I know Frank will take good care of you. Call me if you need anything.”
“You know I will,” Marlene assured her, although they both knew Marlene probably wouldn’t.
As Roxy said goodbye and clomped back down the stairs, Marlene turned and looked at Frank pointedly. “I guess that’s my cue.” He got up from the table and walked toward the door. Marlene remained in place, not wanting to get close enough to smell the pleasant spicy-scented cologne she’d noticed emanating from him earlier.
“I’ll probably check in with you sometime tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be here until about noon or so, and then after that I’ll be at the shop.”
“Then I’ll talk to you at one place or the other,” Frank said, and with another surprising smile that shot an unexpected burst of warmth through her, he left.
She locked the door behind him and leaned against it. She closed her eyes and tried to will away thoughts of Detective Frank Delaney.
From the moment her aunt Liz had gone missing and the case had been assigned to Detectives Steven Kincaid, Frank Delaney and Jimmy Carmani, Frank had been under her skin.
His low, deep voice shot a secret thrill through her, a gaze of his eyes made her feel as if he were attempting to breach the defenses she’d erected so high.
There was no way she intended to let him in. There was no way she intended to even let her sisters in completely. She’d come back to Wolf Creek as damaged goods and nobody would ever get close to her again.
* * *
It took Frank exactly ten minutes to find Michael Arello after leaving Marlene’s apartment. The kid was an easy find. He was with a bunch of his buddies playing pool in the back area of the Wolf’s Head Tavern.
Frank didn’t miss that twice Michael had targeted the Marcoli family. The fact that both times he’d been caught stealing food was definitely odd.
And Frank didn’t like odd, especially when there was a woman who’d been missing for over a month and Michael had been caught stealing food for more than one person twice now. Although why a twenty-two-year-old would kidnap a sixty-five-year-old woman and keep her hostage for this length of time was beyond imagining.
Frank motioned to Michael with a simple nod of his head. The tall, dark-haired man walked toward him slowly, with eyes that darted everywhere but at Frank.
“Yeah?”
“How about, ‘Can I help you, Detective Delaney?’ Now, let’s try it again.” Frank kept his voice low and with more than a hint of steel.
“Can I help you, Detective Delaney?” Michael asked with just enough attitude to irritate Frank but not enough to call any more attention to it.
“As a matter of fact, you can. You can tell me what you’ve done today from the moment you woke up this morning to this very minute.”
“Is this some kind of a joke?” Michael asked. As Frank merely stared at him expectantly, Michael cast his gaze to the left and expelled a deep sigh. “I got out of bed around ten and then spent most of the day looking for a job. I finally ended up here a couple of hours ago to have a few beers and enjoy some pool time with my buds.”
“I’d think it would be easier to get a job if you hadn’t stolen from the previous two jobs you’ve had. You got a problem with the Marcoli sisters?”
Michael’s gaze met his briefly and then again slid to the side. “Not particularly.”
“What about Marlene? You got a problem with her or did you get it all out of your system when you were trashing her apartment?”
Michael took a step backward, his body tense, and Frank knew instinctively that the kid was responsible for the mess at Marlene’s.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael mumbled.
“I think you do, and you’d better hope that we don’t pull any of your prints off the broken dishes we gathered as evidence. My advice to you would be to stay as far away from the Marcoli family as possible.”
“I’ll take that advice. Are we done here?” Michael asked.
“For now,” Frank replied. He watched as the young man ambled back to his friends. Even though instinct wasn’t evidence, Frank would bet his badge that the person who had been inside Marlene’s apartment earlier had just walked away from him.
Minutes later as Frank got into his car to head home he made a mental note to himself to check further into Michael Arello’s life. He wanted to know why the kid was stealing food when Frank knew his parents were doing fine and he was certain there was always enough to eat in the household.
He glanced at his watch, surprised to discover that it was nearly eleven. It was too late to talk to the Arellos tonight, but first thing in the morning he intended to speak to Michael’s parents and see if they knew what was up with their son.
Right now it was time for him to head home. It was time to take a shower and get the scent of Marlene Marcoli out of his head, time to go to bed and probably suffer the nightmares that had plagued him since his wife’s death three years ago.
As he drove toward the small ranch house he’d bought five years before, he thought about everything that had happened over the past month.
Many lives had changed the day that Liz Marcoli had gone missing from her house. There had been no signs of foul play, but the three nieces she had raised as her own children had known something was dreadfully wrong.
As the days passed with no word from Liz, it became equally apparent to Frank and his two partners that something wasn’t right, as well. It just wasn’t normal for a sixty-five-year-old woman to walk away from her life and her loved ones without a word, and with her car in the driveway and her purse containing her wallet with all her identification and credit and bank cards left in the house.
To date her finances hadn’t been tapped and there had been absolutely no leads. It was as if she’d just gone “poof” and disappeared into the air.
Not only had Liz gone missing, but during the past four weeks Roxy, the eldest of the three Marcoli sisters, had her life threatened by, of all people, Stacy, the ex-girlfriend of Frank’s partner Steve. That particular threat had been removed when Frank had been forced to shoot Stacy to save Roxy’s life. Steve and Roxy were now a couple and Steve had been reunited with his seven-year-old son, who had been kidnapped by Stacy and had been missing for two years.
So far that was the only positive that had come out of this case. Liz was still missing and they’d only recently uncovered the cold case of another woman, Agnes Wilson, who was around the same age as Liz and had simply vanished from her home two years before.
Remembering that cold case had done two things...it had galvanized the detectives to compare the two cases and hope that they found some similarities that might lead them to Liz Marcoli, and it had discouraged them in reminding them of their failure to find out what had happened to Agnes.
Frank pulled into his driveway and from the shine of the nearby streetlamp noted that the lawn needed tending, the shutters at the windows needed painting and there was a general air of neglect about the place.
The soul weariness that always assaulted