Chapter Eight
With Lexa right beside him, Aiden hurried toward the front of the police station. And nearly smacked right into Owen.
“Chloe’s at my place,” Aiden quickly told him, and he showed him the camera feed.
“Hell,” Owen spat out. “Go there now and take a cruiser. I’ll arrange for backup.”
Aiden grabbed a set of the cruiser keys from the wall pegs just inside Owen’s office, and Lexa and he ran out of the building and into the parking lot. They didn’t waste any time getting inside the cruiser, and Aiden sped away. They needed to get to Chloe before she left.
But what the heck was she doing there?
Maybe if they got to her in time, they’d be able to get that answer from her. For now though, Aiden was mentally going back to the theory of Chloe faking her own death. The woman was certainly alive and looking well on his phone screen so that theory could damn well be true.
“I’ll put the camera feed on the dash,” Lexa said, taking his phone and pairing it with Bluetooth.
Within seconds, the feed appeared on the much larger monitor. Aiden could still see Chloe, but she was no longer standing. She had stooped down and was using her hands to rake away some leaves from the base of a tree.
Aiden continued to volley glances at Chloe while he drove out of town and toward the place he’d bought after he’d gotten out of the military. A former ranch that definitely wasn’t on the beaten path. In fact, his nearest neighbor was nearly a half mile away. Which meant Chloe almost certainly hadn’t stumbled onto the place by accident.
“I don’t see any injuries on her,” Lexa remarked.
Aiden made a sound of agreement. No injuries, but he also couldn’t see what she was doing either. She was still hunched down but had shifted so that her back was now to the camera.
“Has Chloe been to your place before?” Lexa asked.
“A couple of times with Brady,” Aiden said, trying damn hard to recall if she’d asked anything about his security system then. He was sure she hadn’t because that would have sent up a mental red flag for him. “Chloe didn’t do or say anything suspicious. She definitely didn’t seem to be scoping out the place to do whatever the fuck she’s doing right now.” And, yeah, there was frustration in Aiden’s voice.
Lexa nodded and kept watching. “What about the cameras? Would she be able to see them so she could try to avoid them showing what she’s up to?”
“No, the cameras are well hidden,” Aiden assured her.
He’d made sure of that.
Working for Strike Force meant he’d sometimes made enemies. After all, bad guys didn’t like to be caught and have hard justice served up to them. And Aiden had wanted to be certain that he would get a warning if one of the assholes tried to sneak onto his property. He just hadn’t expected the person who was currently doing the sneaking would be his good friend’s missing fiancée.
At least Chloe wasn’t dead, and that meant Brady and their other suspects were off the hook for murder.
Well, maybe.
“Try to zoom in on her face if she turns around,” Aiden instructed Lexa.
“You think it might not be Chloe?” she immediately asked.
“It sure looked like her.” Aiden paused and let the worst-case scenarios fly. “But it could be someone posing at her. Someone that her killer hired to make us believe she’s alive.”
“Like Brady or Wylie,” she said on a sigh. “Or Gillian.”
Yep. But of the three, this seemed more like something Wylie would do. This way, Brady would be off the hook for murder, and if Wylie had indeed killed Chloe, then it also got her out of his son’s life.
On the screen, the woman still didn’t look directly at the camera, but she shifted again, and Aiden got a glimpse of what he thought she might be doing.
“That’s ammunition and some kind of device,” he muttered. “I think she’s setting up a spot for a fire and cooking off more bullets.”
That caused some alarm to shoot across Lexa’s face. “How far is that from your house?”
“About a hundred yards. Bullets can definitely do some damage from that distance. And she might be planning to set more than one.”
But it seemed a strange way to try to kill someone. If that indeed was her intention.
A more direct approach to killing them would be to lie in wait on the side of the road and shoot at them as they drove by. That came with risks though. Risks that the vehicle would be bullet resistant, which the cruiser would be. And lying in wait meant Aiden potentially spotting and identifying the shooter. Chloe, or whoever the heck this was, wouldn’t want that.
At the reminder that someone could indeed be near the road and waiting to ambush them, Aiden continued to look around. The problem was there were too many damn places to hide. This was the Texas Hill Country after all, and nature was in abundance.
They were still three miles from his place when Lexa’s phone rang, and she frowned when she looked at the screen. “It’s from an unknown caller,” she said. “I don’t usually answer these.”
But she took this one on speaker, no doubt because she thought it might be connected to their investigation. And it was.
“Deputy Mullen,” the man said the moment he was on the line.
Hudson.
Her frown deepened. “How did you get my number?” she asked.
“It was in my sister’s contacts,” he snapped out, his words rushing together. There was also a frantic edge to them. “I need to know what’s happening. I was on Main Street at the diner, and I saw two Outlaw Ridge cruisers flying out of the parking lot. Did you find Chloe?”
“I can’t discuss an active case with you,” Lexa told him.
“Did you find my sister?” he shouted, and this time, there was more than just an edge of anxiety. “Oh, God. Did you find her body?” The question dissolved in a hoarse sob.
“When and if we find anything that I can share with you, I’ll let you know,” she replied. “In the meantime, just go home.”
“I’m not going home,” Hudson snarled. “I’m following the second cruiser.”
“Shit,” Lexa grumbled under her breath. “Don’t do that, Hudson. You could put people in danger.”
Yeah, including himself if any of that cooked-off ammunition went his way. His vehicle likely wouldn’t be bullet-resistant.
“If she’s dead will you finally arrest the sonofabitch?” Hudson went on, clearly ignoring everything Lexa had just said. “Will you finally put that bastard fiancé of hers in jail?”
“Go home, Hudson,” Lexa repeated. “If you come near the cruisers, you’ll be arrested for interfering with an investigation.”
The line went dead, and on a huff, Lexa texted Owen to let him know that Hudson might be on his tail. Hopefully, Hudson wouldn’t get in their way, especially if those bullets started flying.
Aiden took the final turn toward his house, maneuvering the cruiser onto the narrow dirt and gravel road lined with trees. It was also a steep incline since his house was basically in a valley. Below them, he had a bird’s-eye view of the house, the pastures, and the tree line where the woman was still fiddling around with something on the ground.
On the monitor, Aiden saw her head suddenly whip up. Probably because she’d heard the cruiser’s engine. She didn’t waste any time standing. But she didn’t run. Didn’t hide.
Just the opposite.
She came away from the tree and started running across the pasture toward his house.
“She’s keeping her head down,” Lexa pointed out.
Yeah, she was. Maybe that was intentional so they wouldn’t be able to tell whether or not this was Chloe. But it was also possible she was just watching where she was stepping.
“If she’s set off a timer on that ammo, she’s taking a huge risk by being out in the open like this,” Lexa muttered.
Again, he agreed with that, and Aiden made his way down the hill, pulling to a stop in front of his house. Since the woman was still too far away for him to get a closer look at her, he just kept watching the monitor.
And he saw her stop.
Again, her head snapped up, and she made a sweeping glance around her, taking in the cruiser. Maybe taking in something else, too.
“What does she have in her hand?” Lexa asked, zooming in on that.
It was hard to tell, but Aiden thought it might be a large cell phone or…hell, some kind of detonation switch.
“Don’t get out of the cruiser,” Aiden instructed and continued to watch the woman.
She looked at the thing she was holding. Looked at them, too, keeping her head angled in such a way that it was hard to see her entire face. Then, she turned and started racing back toward the trees.
Damn it. He couldn’t let her get away.
Aiden threw open the cruiser door. Lexa did the same. “Stop,” she shouted to the woman. But she continued to run, sprinting into the cover of the trees and disappearing.
It was a risk to go after her, but he didn’t need to spell that out to Lexa. She’d been a cop long enough to know what could happen here. If the bullets started, they’d have to get down.
Lexa and he raced toward the fleeing woman, darting around the side of his house.
Just as all hell broke loose.