Lethal Lawman. Carla Cassidy
yard work in the next couple of days, not for himself, but rather out of respect for his neighbors.
He opened the front door to the absence of sound, the absence of scent. There hadn’t been a sense of homecoming here for a very long time.
This was just a shelter, nothing more, a place to shower and occasionally grab a meal, but home had died with Grace. They’d had only one year together as husband and wife, but Frank would spend eternity with the weight of the guilt of her death on his shoulders.
He took off his jacket and flung it over the top of a living-room chair, then removed his holster and gun and emptied his pockets on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The brown-and-beige sofa was a sleeper, but he never made the effort to pull it out. It was covered with a white sheet and a bed pillow.
For the past three years the living room had been Frank’s bedroom. He’d been unable to force himself to return to the room that he’d once shared with Grace.
If he were smart, he’d sell the house, find another place to start over and call home, but so far he hadn’t been motivated to do the work to get the place market-ready.
From the living room he headed to the bathroom, where he started the shower, stepped out of his shoes, and then stripped off his slacks and shirt, his white briefs and socks, and threw them all into a waiting laundry basket.
As he stepped beneath the hot spray, he tried to keep thoughts of Marlene out of his head, but no matter how hard he tried she intruded. There was no question that he was drawn to her physical beauty, but he suspected he was also attracted to the very characteristics that put other people off. Her coolness, her tight control over her emotions, or perhaps it was a lack of any real emotions that he found oddly appealing.
Living with Grace had been filled with drama and emotion and passion. It had been invigorating, exciting and utterly exhausting.
If he ever decided to have any kind of a relationship with a woman again, he’d pick somebody like Marlene...cool, calm and an unlikely candidate to want anything deep or meaningful.
As he dried off he thought of that moment when he’d looked into her eyes and saw the hint of secrets, of something dark and haunting. Had he only imagined it? After all, she’d just had a break-in into her private quarters. Maybe he’d mistaken fear for something more mysterious.
In any case, he knew exactly what Marlene Marcoli wanted from him and it had nothing to do with any kind of a personal relationship. She and her sisters wanted their beloved aunt Liz found alive and well.
But with over a month of no contact and few clues to follow, Frank wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about the case.
They had one man in their sights who was a potential person of interest. Edward Cardell had been secretly dating Liz, and on the morning of her disappearance he had gone to a mountain cabin to spend a couple of days. The detectives had had dogs brought in to see if they could pick up any of Liz’s scent at the cabin, but they hadn’t.
That didn’t take Cardell off their list of possible suspects. As far as they knew, Cardell was the last person to speak to Liz before she disappeared. He’d had a secret relationship with her and was pushing for her to make it public. That much the detectives knew.
But had there been a fight that had escalated and had Edward killed Liz? Unfortunately, there was no evidence to support the theory.
As Frank pulled on a pair of boxers that he slept in and left the bathroom, he wondered who on his team would be the one to break the news to the Marcoli sisters that what the lawmen were doing now was more a recovery effort than a true search.
Although none of the three detectives had actually spoken the words aloud, Frank believed Liz Marcoli was dead and he knew his partners, Steve and Jimmy, agreed.
Chapter 3
She’d had the horrible nightmare again the night before. It was unusual to suffer through it two nights in a row, but Marlene suspected the break-in was what had prompted the night terror to once again disturb her sleep.
She now sat at the tiny table in her apartment, waiting for Larry Samson to arrive with a solid new door and strong locks. She’d already been downstairs to speak to Minnie, who had been horrified by the fact that somebody had broken into the apartment and angry when she’d told Marlene she thought she’d seen Michael Arello hanging around the building around four yesterday afternoon.
The strong possibility that it had been Michael was actually a relief. She could handle an angry kid who broke dishes and overturned plants to vent his anger. What she couldn’t handle was anything from her past leaping into her present.
She jumped and spilled her coffee as a knock fell on her door, even though she’d been expecting the arrival of Larry. It just went to show that she wasn’t as cool and calm as she wanted to be.
“Morning, Marlene,” Larry greeted her as she opened her door.
“Good morning, Larry,” she replied.
“Sorry about your problems last night, but I’m going to fix you up just fine. I’ve got a new solid-core door downstairs that nobody is going to come through and it’s got both a good solid key lock and a dead bolt.”
“Sounds wonderful to me.” She grabbed a paper towel and sopped up the spilled coffee. “Do you need me to do anything?”
“Not a thing, except stay out of my way.” Larry grinned, exposing a missing front tooth.
“That I can do,” Marlene replied. “I’m going into my bedroom. Help yourself to the coffee if you want any.”
“Will do, thanks.” He turned and disappeared from the door, his heavy work boots clomping on every step downward.
Larry Samson’s old red pickup was a familiar sight around town. Unofficially he was the handyman everyone used for everything from fixing faulty plumbing to repairing a wooden porch.
He had the kind of weathered, wrinkled face that made it impossible to guess his age. He might be in his fifties; he could be in his seventies.
Marlene knew he wasn’t married and that he lived in one of the cabins in the mountains that cradled the small town of Wolf Creek. He was as much a part of the small town as the Wolf’s Head Tavern, which was rumored to have been the first official business built to form the town.
Once in her bedroom she made up her bed and grabbed the laptop. Seated in the center of the pink bedspread, she turned on the laptop and found the files of recipes she had been keeping for years and continued to add to whenever a creative baking idea struck her.
There had been a time when these special recipes were meant to be the cornerstone of her own bakery on Main Street. The plan had always been that she’d work the store with Sheri until she had the seed money to start her own business.
Marlene’s Magic Bites—the place would have a pink-and-black awning over the door and inside not only big glass display cases for her goodies but also tall tables with stools for anyone who wanted to sit and enjoy their sweet bites inside.
Now it was a dream that would never be realized, a dream that had died, along with most of her soul, in Pittsburgh. She closed the file and instead pulled up the list of store inventory and made a note of what she and Sheri needed to order in the next couple of days.
By noon the new door was installed and she’d showered and dressed for the day at the store. Before leaving the apartment, she locked both the lower lock and the dead bolt, and pocketed the new set of keys. She was confident that there would be no repeat of what she’d walked into the evening before.
Although it was early for her shift at the shop, she had decided to go on in. She enjoyed the company of Sheri and their help, Jennifer and Abe, and the silence of her apartment had felt oppressive this morning despite Larry’s work on the door.
While she was relatively certain that the break-in had been the work of Michael Arello, the whole incident