The Woman Left Behind (Misted Pines #4)

Prologue

GUT

Harry

S hitty police work was one of the ugliest stains on society .

This was the thought Sheriff Harry Moran had as he sat in his ergonomic chair behind his desk at the sheriff’s department.

He was staring at the two files in front of him trying to ignore the email that was up on the monitor of his computer.

Those files were two of fifteen stacked on his desk.

Each of those files had one thing in common: the shoddy, lazy or corrupt investigation overseen by Fret County’s last sheriff, Leland Dern.

Dern was the man who came before Harry.

Which meant Harry was the man who had to clean up Dern’s mess.

Due to recent circumstances—the latest being a double murder that wasn’t properly investigated and an innocent man served prison time—a full and exhaustive, time-consuming and resource-heavy audit of every investigation under Dern’s tenure had been done.

There were shambolic cases they’d had no choice but to file away. The police work hadn’t been up to Harry’s expectations of his department, but there was nothing that pointed to an injustice being done.

Now, he and his team had to go back over those fifteen cases and hope what Harry expected—Dern playing favorites, taking bribes, looking the other way or preferring to go hunting rather than working—wouldn’t land them in lawsuits.

He was starting with these two.

He glanced at his monitor and felt his neck muscles tighten, which meant he again looked to the files and refocused.

They were the two cases that intrigued Harry the most, because the woman who had connections with both lived a block away from his department, only a five-minute walk from where he sat right there at his desk.

Lillian Rainier.

He’d lived in the town of Misted Pines his entire life, and because of his job, he knew or knew of a great many people in all of Fret County, and he’d never heard of her.

But Dern suspected, and investigated, her parents of a robbery sixteen years ago.

The investigation stalled, because Sonny and Avery Rainier had disappeared. And then, the case had simply died. Nothing else had been done. Not an interview, not a single follow-up of a lead.

A year later, Lillian married Willie Zowkower, a man Harry did know well.

Willie was a low-level gentleman dealer and a high-level charming asshole who currently had three outstanding arrest warrants in Fret County.

Recently, Willie had also disappeared.

And Lillian hadn’t reported her parents, or her husband, missing.

Harry’s gut was telling him something was up with Lillian Rainier.

And what was on Harry’s computer monitor was telling him whatever that was, it was something bad.

So, no. His gut wasn’t telling him anything. It was practically screaming at him to get off his ass, walk to her house and have a word.

Since Harry wasn’t lazy, and he thought of law enforcement not as a job but as a calling, he got off his ass in order to walk to her house and have a word.

It would be a good bet Harry had passed Lillian Rainier’s house thousands of times in his life, and he never noticed it.

Standing outside it now, he wondered why.

A small cracker box painted a pale yellow with white trim, sporting a green roof and a shocking-red door, there were profuse plantings of bronze, butterscotch and yellow button mums in appealing but mismatched terracotta pots dotted up the front steps and all over porch. An attractive fall wreath of leaves, berries and pinecones was on the door. A white picket fence rounded the property, and he could see the numerous rose bushes that likely ornamented that fence in the summer had been cut back in preparation for winter.

There were two Adirondack chairs on the porch. They were painted white and had yellow, brown and green plaid lumbar pillows upstanding against the back of the seats, a wooden table with a lantern resting on top between them.

No kitschy Sweater Weather! Or Happy Fall Y’all or Fall in Love! signs marred the neat, well-kept property.

As he opened the gate on the fence and stepped foot on her front walk, that feeling in Harry’s gut intensified.

Something was up.

Something was about to happen.

Something big.

He walked up the steps to that bright-red door.

He knocked.

He stood in his uniform and looked through the box of six square-paned windows at the top of the door, when he sensed movement inside.

And then there she was.

She opened the door.

The instant she did, the moment his eyes caught hers, Harry’s chest caved in, and his stomach curled up.

Yeah.

Something was about to happen.

Something big.

And he wasn’t ready for it.