Chapter Five
Emmy unzipped her Tyvek coveralls as she walked down the porch stairs.
Cole jogged toward her. The temperature had dropped with the setting sun.
She felt the cold air chilling the sweat on her body.
The relief was short-lived. Her shoulder was throbbing.
Her lower back was tight. Her tailbone ached with every step. She had a hitch in her gait.
At least both of her knees still worked.
“Boss,” Cole said, and she temporarily blanked on everything that came after.
He’d always called her Mom or, when he was around other deputies, chief, because she had been the chief deputy for twelve years.
Boss had been what everybody had called her father.
Emmy turned her head. Looked down the street at Ginny Saddler’s boy. Late twenties. Hairline already receding. Pencil mustache. He was leaning against the side of his car sucking on a vape pen. He’d lost his father to bone cancer a year ago, then lost his mother to Jack Daniel’s shortly after.
“Mom?” Cole said. “You okay?”
She snapped herself out of it. “You find anything off those doorbell cameras?”
“Six people emailed files so far, but there’s nothing that helps us out, not even the sound of the gunshots. We’ve got sixty-five houses in the neighborhood and twenty-two doorbell cameras. Only eleven of them record to the cloud. Everybody else uses the live feed.”
That made sense. Most people in North Falls installed doorbell cameras to check their porch for packages and hide from Girl Scouts selling cookies. “I want you to watch everything again with your headphones at the station. There’s got to be something.”
“Yes, boss.”
She kneaded her fist into her back to work out the kink as they walked toward Drake Saddler, who took a hard hit off his vape pen while he waited for them.
He was dressed in a Falcons T-shirt, khaki shorts, and hunter green Crocs.
His brown hair was long in the back. The skinny mustache curved like a baby caterpillar over his thin lips.
He had a very wary look on his face, which made her think that this was going to be more of an interrogation than a conversation.
She’d met Drake a few times when he’d dropped off his mother for book club.
He’d always been polite but clearly uninterested in talking literature with a bunch of women over forty.
He said, “Hey, Miss Emmy.”
“You know what happened at Ms. Vickery’s house today?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Drake had caught her businesslike tone. He pushed away from his car. “My mom said you wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t hear anything.”
Emmy wasn’t surprised he couldn’t hear over the music. “Did you see anything?”
“No, ma’am.” He took a deep drag off his pen. His gaze went to Cole, then back to Emmy. His anxiety was palpable. “Nothing.”
“No other cars on the road?”
“No, ma’am. Most people in the ’hood are gone on Saturday afternoon. Chores and things.” He blew a plume of smoke out of the side of his mouth. The nicotine was doing nothing to soothe his nerves. “Sorry I can’t be more helpful.”
“You didn’t see any people out walking? Maybe one of the neighbors with a dog?”
“No, ma’am. Folks usually get that outta the way in the early morning or later at night.” He took two quick puffs on the pen. “I was driving. Looking at the road.”
“What’s going on here, Drake?”
“Nothing, ma’am. Like I said, I wish I could help you. If I think of anything, I’ll definitely give you a call.”
He tried to open the car door, but Emmy bumped it closed with her hip. Their eyes met for a moment. The metal pen clicked against his teeth when he jammed it back into his mouth. He left it there without inhaling, chewing it like a pacifier.
Emmy let her silence linger. He was so damn jittery it made her brain hurt.
He coughed quietly. Looked out over the street. He’d clearly seen something before the shooting—or someone.
“Drake, people who lie to me only lie for two reasons: they’ve got something to hide, or they’re hiding something for somebody else. Which is it?”
His hand shook as he took the pen out of his mouth. Sweat dotted his forehead.
Emmy realized she’d misjudged the situation. He wasn’t being cagey. He was scared. Which meant the person he had seen was someone who held a lot of power. Not Bill Garrison, who only threatened women. Maybe a cop. Maybe the Clayville Chief of Police.
Reggie Wilder would know the layout of Allison’s house. He would know where she kept her backup weapon. He would know how to stage a crime scene.
She nodded for Cole to give them some space. Watched the desperate way Drake’s eyes followed her son all the way back to Allison’s front yard.
“Drake, look at me.” Emmy waited for him to comply.
“I get that you’re afraid to say the man’s name.
Maybe you think you have a good reason. He might be somebody with a lot of power in the county.
I promise you that I won’t let him use that power against you.
Anything you tell me stays with me. I won’t even write it down. ”
He sucked on the pen. Held the swirl of chemicals in his lungs before doing a slow exhale.
She tried an easier question. “When you drove by here earlier, did you see a car parked in the driveway that didn’t belong?”
“No, he never—”
Emmy watched the panic take hold again. “He never parked his car in the driveway?”
Drake tapped the power button on the pen until it shut off. He jammed it into his pocket. Squared his shoulders. “I don’t have to talk to you. Not legally.”
“You’re right.” He was going to talk to her if she had to drag him down the street to his mother’s house and get Ginny to force him.
“But Ms. Vickery was murdered. Mandy’s still in surgery.
She’s probably not going to survive the bullet wound to her head.
Whoever you’re protecting came here to murder a woman and her child in their own home. ”
Drake looked away again. Tears wet his eyes. He swallowed with an audible gulp. Emmy could tell he was going to break. All he needed was a few more seconds for his fear to negotiate with his conscience.
When he finally relented, it was only by degrees. “He’s a bad guy, but I don’t think he’d hurt her. Not like that. Ms. Vickery, for sure. But not Mandy.”
She waited.
“I don’t know if he loved her, but he must’ve cared about her, right?” Drake sounded desperate for confirmation. “I mean, he was taking a huge risk just being with her. Mandy’s barely sixteen, right? Dude’s my age.”
Emmy’s mouth filled with bile before her brain had time to really process what she was hearing.
The entire case had just shifted. Reggie Wilder was almost two decades older than Drake.
He was giving her another suspect. Of all the scenarios Emmy had considered, Mandy being groomed by an older man had not been one of them.
“It’s hella risky, right?” Drake asked. “I know Ms. Vickery was retired, but she was a police officer. Chief Wilder used to park outside her house until a few weeks ago. You don’t keep seeing a girl like that unless you love her.”
Emmy had to clear her throat to speak. “Tell me what you saw.”
“I never even thought about it until Ms. Vickery asked me if I’d ever seen him hanging around the house. I didn’t wanna get in the middle of it, but she was really upset. Like, she was already crying before she got out of her car.”
Emmy kept her mouth shut so that Drake would keep talking.
“She said she was gone a lot, and her husband was always working, and she was worried ’cause she knew Mandy was skipping school at lunchtime and meeting some guy at the house, but she wasn’t sure who the guy was.
And I told her she could set up a camera or something and she said that cameras could be hacked, and she didn’t trust them.
She just wanted confirmation that he was here. ”
Emmy didn’t push for a name. “When did this conversation take place?”
“Two days ago.”
“Thursday?”
“Yeah, I was just getting home from work, so around five, maybe. She came to the house to talk to me ’cause she knows I go home for lunch and she thought maybe I’d seen something.”
“Did Ms. Vickery tell you why she was worried?”
He looked away. His fear started pulling at his conscience again. “She said that Mandy had bruises on her back like somebody had beaten her. That Mandy wouldn’t tell how they got there. That maybe she had a boyfriend who was hurting her.”
“Allison didn’t think it was Bill?”
“No, ma’am. She straight up said she knew it was somebody else.
That somebody had already warned her, but she needed to know how long it’d been going on.
” Drake’s shrug was more like a jerk of his shoulder.
“I wasn’t gonna say anything at first, but then Ms. Vickery told me about the bruises and—I mean that’s pretty bad, right?
Getting all bruised up like that. Mandy’s just a kid. ”
Emmy tasted bile again. “Drake, what did you tell Ms. Vickery?”
“That I’d seen the guy there a couple of times, but …
” Drake’s voice trailed off. His cheeks flushed.
He looked over her shoulder, then at the ground.
“I’m not weird, okay? I don’t drive fast. I go the speed limit.
And if something catches my eye and I see it, it’s natural to slow down, right? Human nature.”
“What did you see?”
He kept his gaze on the ground. “About two weeks ago, the garage doors were up, and I glanced over, and he had Mandy backed up against the storage shelves and he was touching her face, like, real intimate. Stroking her cheek, you know? And she wasn’t trying to stop him or push him away.
Her hands were on his shoulders. She was looking up at him like she wanted him to kiss her. She was obviously into it.”
Emmy ignored the voyeurism. Her focus was on the brazenness it took for a nearly thirty-year-old man to intimately touch the face of a sixteen-year-old cop’s daughter in broad daylight. “That was the first time you saw him with Mandy at the house, about two weeks ago?”