Chapter Five #4
But most of the people she and Sara retrieved weren’t logical, and that was what made them easier to catch. Panicked people made terrible choices. They often fell back into routines that felt safe, making their movements predictable.
Like Wendy using a credit card to buy medicine for her child. It was such a normal thing to do, using a credit card. But it was a slip that allowed Elle and Sara to catch a lot of skippers.
Wendy had to have known the credit card use would be flagged, that it would give away her location. But maybe the young woman thought that by the time anyone knew she’d used it, she’d be far away.
But Wendy wasn’t far away. Not if she was sticking with Reece, and not if he’d been watching Elle and Sara. He had to be close by.
Unless he actually was camping east of Willits on his grandparents’ old property with the illegal pot growers.
Unless he hadn’t killed Dianne Foster.
The thought had been plaguing her off and on since Clarke had told them of the innkeeper’s murder. What if someone else had killed Dianne Foster? That someone else was responsible made as much sense as Miller being the perpetrator.
And it lessened her own guilt. Just a small side benefit.
Either way, it didn’t change the job she had to do, which was to retrieve Reece Miller for skipping bail. If he had killed Dianne Foster, that was Clarke’s job to investigate.
Not mine.
She also wondered if there was a way to revisit the property guarded by the two men with rifles. Miller could have been a hundred feet away behind that fence, but they wouldn’t know because they hadn’t been able to look.
She sucked in an excited breath as a thought occurred. A drone with a camera could look.
A drone could fly over and do reconnaissance safely.
Now, that was a good option. She reached blindly for her phone so that she could search for drones. Maybe they could drive over the mountains to the Walmart and buy one.
She sighed. She wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. Her brain was all wound up in drones.
She rolled to her side and tapped her phone screen, lighting up the darkness. Best low-cost drones for spying, she typed. Because if those men with rifles shot their drones out of the sky, they didn’t want to spend a fortune on them.
She was deep into her drone research when the bathroom door opened, releasing steam and the scent of Sara’s shampoo.
From the corner of her eye, Elle watched as Sara appeared, toweling her short hair. She was wearing shorts and a tank top and Elle shivered just looking at her.
Sara was leaning against the bathroom doorframe, watching her. But Elle wasn’t going to beg Sara to speak to her, so she returned her attention to the drones.
“Are you happy, Elle?”
Elle’s head snapped up, Sara’s question catching her off guard. “What?”
Sara perched on the side of Elle’s bed. “I asked if you’re happy.”
“I…” She gave her head a shake. “Why are you asking me that?”
Sara shrugged uncomfortably. “After Todd died, you seemed so lost.”
Elle nodded warily. “I was lost. You reached out and gave me a new start.”
“And now I’m wondering if I did the right thing. Do you like fugitive retrieval or are you doing this because you feel you owe me something? Because you don’t owe me anything, Ellie. I’m serious.”
Elle frowned. “Are you firing me?”
Sara huffed out a breath. “No. I’m not firing you.
You do a good job, but you seem conflicted at times.
Like today. You wanted to tell that Clarke guy everything about our investigation.
You have this innate sense of right and wrong, and withholding information from a detective on a murder case falls into your wrong camp.
I worry that I’m making you feel like you have to compromise your convictions.
I would never ask you to do anything that makes you feel… dirty.”
Elle blinked at her. “Oh. Well…” She trailed off, unsure of what to say. Then Sara reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze, and Elle was able to draw her first easy breath all day.
“Do you miss being a lawyer?” Sara asked.
“Sometimes. I helped women needing restraining orders or escaping domestic violence or divorcing abusive men. Looking back, maybe I was trying to help myself. Deep down, I knew that I shouldn’t stay with Todd.
I thought I could handle him. I fell for all the apologies after he blew up.
” She made a face. “I let him give me the cold shoulder.”
Sara winced. “Like I’ve been doing to you tonight.
I’m sorry, Ellie. I will do better with that, I promise.
But you help people in this job, too. Think about the people we bring back for trial.
The people they’ve victimized get justice, or at least they get to face the person who’s wronged them in court.
If we didn’t bring those skippers back, the victims would never get that justice. Or closure.”
“I’m not unhappy, Sara. But I sometimes disagree with your no-cops rule.”
Sara tilted her head, studying her. “You want to tell Clarke about our search in Willits.”
She had earlier, despite his cutting remark about saving his neighbors from people like her. “I think it depends on whether or not Reece Miller killed Dianne Foster. If he did, then yes, we should. If he didn’t, we shouldn’t. But we can’t know yet who killed her.”
“How do we resolve this?”
Elle handed Sara her phone. “What if we search that area with the illegal growers again, but we do it safely, from the sky? I was looking at drones with cameras, but the ones you can get off the shelf in a store only seem to have a range of two to three miles and we walked farther than that.”
“We did. It was at least five miles. But that’s a good idea. If we can see Miller’s campsite, we can tell Clarke that we’re taking him into custody and Clarke can file charges against Miller after San Francisco is done with him. If there’s evidence, of course.”
“Of course. How do we get a drone with a bigger range?”
“I’ll ask Felicia to find us one. I don’t know how to fly it, but she should know someone who can.” Sara nodded. “Maybe even a drone with a heat sensor.”
Elle winced. “Um, I checked those. The really good ones cost nearly ten thousand dollars.”
They’d only make fifteen thousand by bringing Miller in. The reward for the missing painting would be another thirty grand, but an expensive drone would still eat most of their profit.
Sara choked. “Okay, well, let’s see what Felicia can find for us regardless. Once you know that the area with the growers is clear, your conscience will be clear, too. And, as a bonus, you can give Clarke the guys who ran us off last night. He’ll get a collar and you’ll be able to sleep.”
Elle smiled at her. “Thank you.”
Sara smiled back. “I really do want you to be happy.”
Elle drew her in for a hug. “I am. I really am.”
Sara patted her back. “Except?”
She knows me too well. “I’m…attracted to Ronan Clarke.”
“I knew it,” Sara crowed. “Felicia owes me ten bucks.”
Elle shook her head, somehow unsurprised that Sara and Felicia were betting on her. “I’m not in the market for a relationship.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t look. He’s totally your type.”
He totally was, but she didn’t want to think about it.
“Let’s go to sleep. You can call Felicia in the morning, we’ll find a nice place for a pancake breakfast, and then we’ve got an early date staking out the pharmacy.”