Chapter 1 #2
“I didn’t say he was missing.” He flushed.
He didn’t know this professor, and he certainly didn’t want to air all his problems with his brother.
Or that he’d been practicing tough love, hoping Scott would hit rock bottom and reach out to him.
Except it hadn’t worked, and recently he’d felt an urgency to locate his brother.
“I . . . had cut off contact with him and lost track of where he was living. I only engaged the investigator recently.” He stiffened at her questioning gaze.
She was waiting for why, but why was none of her business.
“I see. Well, if you find your brother—”
“Dr. Martin!”
A man hurried toward them holding his small daughter tight against his chest. The sheriff had identified him earlier as the victim’s husband, Jim Coleman.
Nick’s gaze shifted to Taylor, and the naked longing in her eyes rocked him.
A knife twisted in his heart. He’d seen that look before in his wife’s eyes when she’d talked about wanting children.
“Thank you, Doctor.” Jim grasped Taylor’s hand, pumping it.
“Nothing to thank me for—just doing my job.” Taylor nudged a rotted branch with the toe of her shoe. Dank spores blew over the rotting leaves, filling the air with their musty scent.
Jim hugged his daughter closer. “No. You’re the only one who believed me. You saved my daughter and my wife.”
Little Sarah blinked open her eyes and pulled her thumb from her puckered lips. “Will Mommy be okay?”
The child’s chocolate-brown eyes stared up at Taylor, her brows knit together. Alarm darted across the professor’s face. “I—”
“I told you, honey. She’ll be fine.” Coleman smoothed a strand of blonde hair from her eyes. “She’s going to the hospital . . . I promise. They’ll make her all better.”
It was plain Taylor didn’t want to mislead the child, but as Sarah continued her doe-eyed gaze, Taylor sucked in a breath. “I’m sure your daddy’s right.”
“Thank you,” he mouthed, then nodded and hurried to his car.
“You did the right thing,” Nick said.
Taylor exhaled a long breath. “I don’t know. What if she doesn’t make it?”
“She could definitely use a miracle.”
This time there was no mistaking Taylor’s pursed lips.
Taylor stared at the ground, seeing the image of Beth Coleman lying in the wet leaves, blood staining her cashmere sweater.
Miracle? That meant she’d have to pray, and if she thought it’d do any good, she would.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God or that she didn’t believe he answered prayers for some people. He just didn’t answer hers.
“Sorry to have to leave you, but I have work to do.” She turned to walk up the hill where Dale was wrapping up the investigation. “If you find your brother, call the sheriff, please,” she called over her shoulder.
“Wait, I’d like to discuss Scott with you.”
Something in his voice halted her. What was it he’d said? He’s the only family I have left. She glanced at the third finger on his left hand. A wedding band. The sad eyes. “Your family, what happened to them?”
“What?” Nick took a step back.
Taylor rubbed the burning in her neck. She was too tired to be standing here having this conversation with Nick Sinclair, and it wasn’t like her to be so direct, but something about Nick made her want to know.
Besides, it was too late to take back her question.
She lightened her tone. “You said Scott was all the family you have left. What happened?”
He kicked at a dirt clump, and mud smeared across the toe of his cowboy boot. “My wife . . . died over two years ago, my parents a long time before that. I have to find Scott.”
Their deaths explained his acquaintance with grief. And she understood grief. It also explained why he felt he had to find his brother. “I have to finish up here, but if you want to stop by the university tomorrow, we can talk. Just call me first.”
She rattled off her cell number, then wondered if she should have. It might be an invitation to disaster, given the way her heart kicked up a notch when he looked at her with those eyes.
He jotted her number on a card and snapped a short salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
As Taylor walked the short distance toward the command center, a coroner’s hearse crept along the logging road with the kidnapper’s body.
His suicide meant no answers to some of her questions about why he kidnapped Beth Coleman and her daughter.
A shadow crossed her heart. She half halted, the skin on her neck prickling.
Someone was watching her.
She scanned to the left. One of the men who’d helped with the search ducked his head. She started toward him, noting his longish hair and camouflage hunting jacket. As she got closer, his fingers flew over his phone. Texting. Not stalking her.
Just peachy. Was she destined to suspect every scruffy male who glanced her way? Taylor retraced her steps.
“Ready to take me home?” she asked when she found Dale.
“Give me a minute with Zeke.”
“Sure.” As long as Taylor didn’t have to deal with the prickly Zeke Thornton. Dale’s chief deputy challenged her on every idea she came up with, always asking why, and if she was honest, he probably made her better. But he could be so irritating.
Taylor leaned against the sheriff’s cruiser as the minute stretched into forty-five, and the gray twilight turned into nighttime dark. The kind of dark where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The kind of dark that made her think of her dad. The kind of dark she hated.
Finally, Dale returned, and Taylor slid into the passenger side and fastened her seat belt, inhaling the stale odor inside the aging patrol car that had seen too many cups of coffee and onion-topped burgers.
Thoughts of her dad lingered. Tomorrow she would delve again into her search for him, but at this point, all she had was a cold trail that was getting colder.
Dale’s voice cut into her thoughts as he pulled the Crown Vic onto the highway. “You did a good job today. You worked that crime scene like a pointer hunts quail. You didn’t give up.”
“Yeah, but with Ralph Jenkins’s death, we can only guess why.
” Still, the sheriff’s words soothed the aches in her body.
At times she felt like a bird dog on the hunt, sniffing through evidence, looking for the connection between victim and assailant hidden beneath the surface 75 percent of the time.
Today her instincts homed in on the father’s past and scored a direct hit.
Except, something bothered her about the case, but nothing she could put her finger on.
She sighed. It was probably that she couldn’t question the kidnapper.
“I wish Coleman had told us sooner about that wreck fifteen years ago.” The kidnapping and shooting appeared to be Jenkins’s revenge for the death of his wife and girls in an accident that hadn’t been anyone’s fault.
“Well, you were dead-on right.”
Yeah, she had great instincts when it came to other people.
So why was finding her father so difficult?
And on more than one level. She unwrapped a lemon drop, then popped it in her mouth, the candy tart on her tongue.
Her cell phone rang, and she glanced at the ID.
“Do you know anyone with a 901 area code?”
“Not off hand,” Dale said.
She answered, putting the phone on speaker. “Martin.”
“Dr. Martin? This is Nick Sinclair. Scott’s brother.”
“Yes?” She should have known giving him her number would prove to be a mistake.
“I know it’s late, but I’d really like to talk to you about my brother tonight.”
“I’m busy right now. And I don’t want to discuss him over the phone.” She checked her watch. Nine-thirty. She never went to bed before midnight, anyway, and this might be an opportunity to get information on Scott. “However, I’ll be home shortly, and I can give you thirty minutes.”
“That’d be great. I won’t stay longer than that, I promise.”
After giving him her address, she hung up and turned to the sheriff. “Can you hang around?”
“Sure. I have a couple of questions for him myself.”
Taylor slipped the phone in her pocket. What could be so urgent to Nick Sinclair that he couldn’t wait until tomorrow?
She thought of the poem. Could he have slipped it in her jacket?
No, he hadn’t been around for the other “presents.” “What’s your take on the poem? Do you think it’s Scott Sinclair?”
“Possibly. What’s more important is why you think it’s him.”
“I didn’t until I received the black roses.
I had no clue who was sending me candy.” In late March, every week a box of Godiva chocolates had been placed on her desk.
No one ever saw the gifter, but Taylor figured one of the male students had a crush on her.
That happened sometimes with a student and a professor.
Then in late April, the black, long-stemmed roses appeared.
“Those roses sure fit that strange getup he wears,” Dale said. “What do the kids call it? Goth?”
“Yeah.” Scott always showed up in class wearing a black T-shirt under a black Nike jacket with a hoodie, black jeans, and black tennis shoes. And jet-black hair.
“Those photos, though. They put a different slant on the situation, and now this note really changes it. I’ll bring him in for questioning again.”
The photos had arrived right after the roses. Shots of her shopping, jogging, at the pharmacy, at a ball game, Taylor doing everyday tasks. Just knowing whoever took the pictures lurked that close sent a shiver through her body.
Dale had questioned Scott after the photos arrived, but the only connection to him had been the black roses, and even that had been tenuous. Several stores in the area sold the flowers, and none of the clerks identified Scott. With no concrete evidence, the sheriff couldn’t hold him.
“I can usually size someone up pretty quick, and Scott Sinclair didn’t strike me as dangerous,” Dale said.