Francesca Brown slipped her feet into her favorite slip-on sandals, the ones with rhinestones along the strap that went across her toes, and took her mug filled with salted caramel tea out to the wraparound porch her grandfather had built fifty years ago. Taking a sip of the steaming tea, she frowned. The air was a bit cool for the end of August, probably due to the near constant precipitation and cloud cover they’d had for the past four days. The rain showed no signs of letting up. She had errands to run in town. While she relished observing a good storm from the safety of her porch and enjoyed listening to the drops land on the roof above her, driving in it was a different matter altogether.
At least the thunderstorms that had pounded on Sutter Springs had dissipated. Sutter Springs was a small town on the outskirts of Berlin County, just a stone’s throw from Columbus, Ohio. It was a large tourism attraction for those who wanted to learn about the Amish culture. In Sutter Springs, the Amish and non-Amish lived and worked side by side. When she’d first moved here after she’d married, she’d fallen in love with the town. Since she’d been widowed, she had considered leaving the house she’d shared with her late husband and possibly moving elsewhere.
She couldn’t do it, though. This was her home. The one place she felt completely free to be herself.
Sighing, she lifted her mug for another drink. The tea halted halfway to her lips. Fran blinked then narrowed her eyes to bring the perimeter of her lawn into focus, desperate to deny what her mind insisted it saw. Her breath hitched in her throat. A pair of dark shoes, toes pointed toward the sky. From across the yard, it was difficult to make out any details of the footwear. Letting her eyes sweep past the shoes, she tried to get a glimpse of the body attached to them, but visibility was poor in the current weather conditions. She’d have to take a closer look. Setting her mug on the railing, she peered around. When she didn’t see anyone else, she took a deep breath and carefully trod down the five steps and onto the sodden grass. The wet blades tickled her sandal-clad feet. Within seconds, her trendy, short fluffy black curls were plastered to her skull and her jeans and cotton sweater were soaked. She ignored the sensation.
Some things were more important than comfort.
Plodding across the lawn, she brushed a hand across her forehead to move the hair out of her eyes and approached the body. She reached behind and plucked her cell phone out of her back pocket. Whether or not she needed an ambulance or the coroner, she needed to call in the situation and request assistance.
Dialing 9-1-1, she held the phone to her ear and continued to stride closer.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” A soothing voice, just a touch too perky, answered the call.
She let out the breath she’d been holding. Good. Someone she knew. The familiar voice crackled down the line. The signal was horrible in the downpour.
“Leslie, this is Francesca Brown. I have a body in my front yard. I’m not sure if he’s dead or alive yet.”
“Is the scene safe, Fran?” the dispatcher asked, concern thickening her voice.
“Yes. I don’t see anyone else around.”
By this time, she’d reached the man on her lawn. He wasn’t much more than a kid, his dark eyes staring blankly up at the sky, untroubled by the rain pelting him. She didn’t need to touch him to know he was dead, but she squatted beside him and pressed her fingers to the pulse point on his cold neck.
“He’s dead.”
“You know the drill. Stay on the line. I’m notifying both the police and the coroner.”
Fran agreed, resigning herself to remaining outside in the cold rain until someone arrived. She sighed. Fran was a forensic artist contracted with half a dozen police departments in the surrounding area outside Berlin, Ohio, including the Sutter Springs Police Department. She had seen dead people more times than she could recall. It wasn’t unusual for her to be asked to reconstruct an image from a skull, and while most people might find it gruesome, Fran had become mostly immune to the macabre aspects of her job. She focused on helping her law enforcement colleagues bring closure to families and justice to criminals. It brought its own kind of satisfaction.
She had no trouble dealing with dead people at work. When a dead body showed up on her front lawn, however, that was a different story.
Glancing again at the face, she frowned, his image nagging at her memory. She had seen his face before. But where? Skimming his features, she paused at the distinct jagged scar on the left side of his jaw. Suddenly, she knew the identity of the deceased young man and exhaled sharply as if she’d been struck in the stomach.
“Leslie, I am nearly certain the dead body is a missing person named Jared Murray.”
“The son of the federal judge George Murray? The kid who disappeared several years ago?”
“That’s the one. He vanished almost six years ago.” She’d never forget. It had been her first case after her husband, Sean, had died following a hit-and-run accident. At her chief’s direction, she had gone to the hospital to do a composite of the attackers, and presumed kidnappers, with the judge who’d been attacked in his vehicle when his car got a flat tire on his way to a political event. According to the judge, his seventeen-year-old son had been with him. The judge had been left for dead. An anonymous 9-1-1 call had been received from the judge’s phone, but when the police and ambulance arrived on the scene, the phone was lying on the ground and the judge was out cold. Jared was gone. He’d never returned home and none of his neighbors or friends had seen him since he’d left the house with his father earlier that morning. The assumption was that he’d been kidnapped. When no ransom demand was made, everyone feared the worse.
Including Fran.
It was the first time she’d been inside the hospital since her husband’s death.
Sean had come into her life when they’d sat next to each other in a forensics class during her sophomore year at college. He’d loved numbers and logic and was a true crime junkie. It hadn’t taken him long to decide to channel those interests and become a forensic accountant. She’d never forget his grin the day the FBI had hired him.
He’d been very dedicated to his work. She’d been so proud of him, right up until the day she’d got the call that he’d been rushed by ambulance to the hospital. She’d taken off at a run and hopped into her car, breaking every speed limit posted to get to him. She’d been at his side in the hospital when he’d died. His last words to her were I made a mistake. Don’t trust him.
She’d never figured out what his mistake was or who she couldn’t trust. Both questions had haunted her.
Going back into the hospital after Jared’s disappearance had nearly put her into a tailspin. Fran prided herself on keeping her cool at all times, but that day, she’d come close to having a panic attack in the hospital elevator. It had taken all her courage and years of training to tamp the anxiety down and complete her job.
She hated hospitals.
“Notifying Chief Spencer as well,” Leslie announced, her voice accompanied by the sound of clicking keys.
Fran settled in to wait, scanning the area for any signs of whoever had left Jared here, in her yard. Poor kid.
Crack!
A bullet smashed into the ground at her feet.
Fran choked back a scream and burst to her feet. Dashing to the house, one of her sandals flew off her foot. She stumbled. Righting herself, she left the shoe and hobbled awkwardly up her steps. A second bullet smashed her abandoned mug when she ran past. Some of the shards hit the porch and others landed on the grass. Tea dripped from the railing.
Fran crashed into her house and slammed the door, leaning against it. Over the roar of her heartbeat, she heard Leslie yelling. Her hand still clutched her phone. “I’m okay, Leslie, but someone was shooting at me!”
“Stay in the house and lock all the doors. Help is on the way.”
Bolting the front door, she ran to the back and repeated the process. Shaking so hard her teeth chattered, she returned to the living room and crouched behind the overstuffed recliner, her back pressed up against the wall. No one peering in the windows would be able to see her tucked into her hiding place.
A few minutes later, an engine purred on the driveway.
“Leslie,” she whispered into the phone, “there’s a car on my driveway.”
“Hold on.” More clicking of keys. Then she heard Leslie’s voice. “Fran hears a car in her driveway. She’s barricaded inside her house.”
“Tell her it’s me. I’m parked outside her front door.”
“Fran, I have Dane on the line.”
“I heard him. I’m on my way out now.” She stood from her hiding place and strode to the closet. She needed real footwear. Shoving her bare feet into tall rubber boots, she made her way back out to the front porch. The coroner’s SUV was a welcome sight.
Sirens shrilled up the long driveway then two Sutter Springs Police Department cruisers arrived. She relaxed when her friend Lieutenant Kathy Bartlett unfolded her lanky frame from behind the wheel of the first vehicle. No more bullets rained down, so she hoped the danger had passed. Kathy and the two officers from the second cruiser began to search the yard. When they waved that the area was clear, Dane Lenz, the coroner, exited his vehicle and headed over to the body.
Fran left the porch and made her way to Dane’s side, shivering. She should have grabbed a coat. Between the rain and the shock of being used for target practice, she was chilled to the bone. Wrapping her arms around herself, she tightened her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. They chattered anyway. Neither she nor Dane spoke. They arrived at the body and he immediately went to work. She remained near enough to answer questions, but not so close that she interfered with his duties.
The next moment, her muscles tightened again when a fourth vehicle slid in behind the coroner’s.
A tall beanpole of a man exited. Piercing blue eyes glanced at her from behind wire-rimmed glasses. A Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap covered his shocking copper hair, worn slightly longer than military length in a messy fade. His immaculate grooming highlighted the sharp lines of his jaw. Although he’d completed his training and could have probably grown a short beard, the most she’d ever seen on him was a five-o’clock after a long day’s work, and that was once years ago. He’d always sported the clean-cut look.
FBI Special Agent Tanner Hall. He’d worked with Sean on several cases in the past, but Fran had never met him until he’d come to Sutter Springs on a case two years ago. She’d done her best to avoid him. His presence had been too painful for her.
But she’d never forgotten him. Would he know who her husband had warned her about? She’d never asked. What if she didn’t like what he said about Sean? She liked to think he was on the side of good. But what if he wasn’t?
If he was at the scene of this crime, it must mean the FBI had an interest in it. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he showed up at the scene where the body of a missing youth had been discovered. How had he gotten there so fast? Would working with him give her the opportunity to answer the questions that kept her awake at night?
Tanner’s gaze clashed with Francesca Brown’s and his stomach tightened. She looked the same as he remembered, although with her hair plastered against her head and the way her amber eyes stared at him, she reminded him of puppy who’d been kicked and had learned to be wary. Briefly, his mind flashed to the images of the pictures that had littered Sean’s desk and shelves. In most of them, she’d been laughing, her lovely face alight with joy.
He saw none of that vibrancy now. Shaking his head, he brought his focus back to the matter at hand.
Someone had shot at her. The broken ceramic cup on the porch could so easily have been her, the dark liquid seeping off the railing, her blood. She had come so close to being killed.
He forced his mind away from such thoughts. She was fine, just cold. Her late husband had been a colleague and a friend. He’d want Tanner to look out for his wife and put the criminal behind bars where he couldn’t harm her. Thoughts of Sean always made him feel guilty. Tanner hadn’t figured out that Sean was a target in time to save him. He promised himself he wouldn’t fail again.
He’d seen too many people he knew injured or killed in the past fifteen years. Some people got used to the loss. Tanner never did.
Fran turned her head and her eyes met his. He searched them for signs of shock. She shivered, and her olive-toned skin was unnaturally pale, but she appeared to be holding her own.
When her eyes cut from him to watch the coroner approach, he sighed. A couple of years ago, he’d been in the area and had asked her out to dinner. Not romantically. Just because he’d been a colleague of her husband’s and felt bad that he’d never taken the time to get to know the woman his good friend had married. She’d been polite in her refusal but had made it clear she wanted no part of anyone from Sean’s past. He’d shrugged and accepted her position with minimal regret. Sometimes you had to give people space. Although he hoped it wouldn’t make it awkward to work together now.
What she didn’t know was that Jared Murray had been spotted alive several days ago. His sighting had reopened a federal case, and Tanner’s boss, the special agent in charge, or the SAC for short, had assigned Tanner to take point, as he was already in the area. Now Jared had showed up dead on Francesca Brown’s lawn.
When he’d heard that shots had been fired, nothing would have kept him away. At some point, he’d need to have a real conversation with her. While he didn’t want to pain her, he’d become convinced that Sean had been murdered. What he didn’t know, and what he hoped his late colleague’s widow could shed some light on, was why a good man had been targeted and run down in the middle of the day on a busy street.
Tanner strode across the yard, waterlogged earth squishing beneath his hard-soled black shoes.
He squatted next to the coroner, a foot from where Fran stood in faded jeans and sparkly pink rubber boots. Removing his gaze from her legs, he refocused on the dead body in front of him.
“Cause of death?”
Dane Lenz glanced up. He was an older man with the face of a storyteller. Right now, harsh lines carved his skin on either side of his mouth. Tanner had met him two years earlier.
“Stab wounds. Multiple.” Dane lifted aside the jacket the young man wore to display his bloody T-shirt. Tanner sighed.
“He’s been missing for a long time,” Fran murmured, her voice like warm butter.
Tanner hesitated. They were law enforcement. And Jared no longer needed to hide. “Actually, he hasn’t been missing. At least, not like you think.”
“Explain, please.”
He met her eyes. “You remember his father was arrested for involvement in arms dealing?”
She nodded, her amber eyes wide. “Right. When the police searched his car after his attack, trying to find some indication of who assaulted him and kidnapped Jared, they found evidence linking the judge to illegal activities. I remember pitying the poor wife. She left town soon after that.”
He nodded. “Right. What no one knew at the time was that Jared hadn’t been kidnapped. When they got a flat tire, Jared got out to change it. He was at the back of the car, bent down, when the men approached. They didn’t see him. He heard what they were saying about his dad and realized his father had been a participant in several gun-related deaths. He hid under the car until the men had left, and then called the police. As a key witness, he was taken into federal custody and put into protective care. Both Jared and his mother were given new identities. After his mother disappeared a few months ago, he took off and stopped calling his handler. We’re still trying to determine why he left. Did he get tired of the Witness Protection Program, or was he searching for his mom? Or did he have other reasons?”
She nodded. Fran had been a forensic sketch artist since she was twenty-five. He knew she’d been in the field for nearly ten years and was aware that sometimes the safety of the people they protected meant details were sealed.
“Hold on a minute. We need a drawing.” Fran ran back in the house and returned with a sketchpad and a thick graphite pencil. She stood near the steps, sketching. Of course, a crime scene sketch. Many departments didn’t have the resources to include a crime scene sketch. But none would turn down a drawing to supplement any photos. While photos captured a chunk of the scene at a time, a drawing was a scaled representation of all the known parts. Done well, a labeled illustration would allow those viewing it to see the relationship between objects, such as structures, weapons or blood spatter, and help to create a timeline. They also were invaluable during interviews as it gave the viewer access to all known factors at once.
Kathy Bartlett approached her. Tanner pushed himself to his feet and joined them. The police lieutenant nodded at him.
Fran ignored his presence, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth as she completed the drawing. “There.” She held out the sketchpad. It was a typical crime scene drawing. Nothing fancy. Just lines for the perimeter of the yard. She had identified where Jared had been found and put in points for where the two bullets had landed.
“We are finished with the preliminary search.” Kathy took the drawing for a moment and snapped a picture of it with her phone. “I’ve called in the CSU to come and do an intensive sweep.”
Ohio’s crime scene unit would canvas the area more thoroughly.
Fran sighed. “I should probably dress and come into the station. I don’t want to be here while they do that. And I have some sketches I need to complete anyway.”
Tanner took a second glance at the sketch. “How close were you when that mug shattered?”
He hadn’t meant to ask that. But his mind couldn’t get past the image of her taking a bullet and bleeding out on the porch. He didn’t know how Jared came to be on her front lawn. But he knew that Jared and Sean had met in connection with the judge’s case. Jared’s appearance here couldn’t have happened by chance.
“I was only a few inches away. Had I not tripped on my sandal coming off, I might have been hit.” Fran’s voice remained steady, but the corners of her lips tightened. She might try to hide it, but it had shaken her.
Tanner swallowed hard. She’d come too close to death.
The smile she aimed at Kathy was the first sign of true warmth he’d ever seen from her. But he knew from Sean’s picture collection that she hid a deeper, warmer side. What would it take to bring that side back into the open again?
Why was it his business anyway? He was there to work a case, not to play counselor to his late friend’s widow.
Tanner assisted Dane with loading the stretcher and carrying Jared to the coroner’s vehicle. He felt a little bruised emotionally. Jared had been a kid when he’d met him. A sweet boy most of the time, but he’d had his belligerent moments. Most teens did. Still, when he’d taken off, it had come as a complete shock.
Dane used the turnaround built into the top corner of the drive and headed out. He passed two SUVs on their way in. Tanner recognized the woman driving the first vehicle and nodded at her. She nodded back. When she parked, she and her team exited and began putting on gloves and taking their tools out to begin the search.
The crime scene unit arrived. Tanner returned to Fran and Kathy. They had stopped chatting and were watching the growing number of people moving about. Fran’s expression became grimmer each moment. At least the rain had slowed to a light drizzle.
“I’m going to clean up and get ready to leave.” Fran turned and went into the house without meeting his eyes again. It didn’t appear to be deliberate avoidance. The woman’s focus was legendary.
“Since he’s a federal witness, this is all linked to a federal case. I need to be kept in the loop at all times,” he informed Kathy.
Unlike her friend, Kathy smiled at him. “I get it. Jack and Nicole will be happy to see you.”
Jack Quinn used to be his partner. That was before he’d married Lieutenant Nicole Dawson and they’d started a family. He had left the Bureau to head a department in a nearby security office. Some days, Tanner wondered if his friend hadn’t made a better choice than he had.
The smile dwindled from her face. “I am sorry about Jared. He’s so young.”
Twenty-three was young.
“I need to know what Jared got involved with. Or who.”
“Lieutenant!”
They pivoted to face the woman calling out. She was near the thick hedges in the corner of the yard. “We have something.”
Kathy and Tanner strode over to where she stood.
“What do you have, Brenda?” he asked.
The crime scene investigator parted the bush with her latex-gloved hand, uncovering an open backpack. Inside the backpack, they saw clothes, protein bars and several bottles of water. And a toy horse. Jared had been a city dweller. He’d never been interested in horses, not even as a child. There was no reason for him to have a toy horse in his bag. Not if he had been traveling alone.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” Kathy demanded in a hoarse whisper.
Tanner took over. “We act like it does.” He raised his voice and called out to the rest of the team roaming around the property. “Okay, people. There might be a second victim. Possibly a child.”
The murmur of voices hushed and all the faces looking at him grew grim. It was bad enough knowing a young man had been murdered. It was even worse knowing they might be searching for the body of a child. The searchers set out, their shoulders and jaws set. If there was any hope of finding a child alive, every law enforcement officer would scour each inch of the grounds. It might take a while. Fran’s front yard was an acre, if not a little more.
The screen door squeaked. Fran stepped onto the porch. She watched the proceedings for five seconds before she descended the stairs and moved to his side. The light floral scent of her shampoo tickled his nose. He had no doubt that she’d approached him only because he was closer to the house than Kathy. She’d never showed any preference for his company before.
“What’s going on? Everyone looks intense. Has something happened?”
He nodded, unsurprised. As a forensic artist, Fran had honed her observation skills. Details such as the change in postures, tensions and facial expressions wouldn’t escape her notice.
“Unfortunately, yes. The crime scene unit discovered a backpack with a toy in it. We think there may be a child around here.”
He hadn’t said “a body” on purpose. Tanner wanted to retain hope, as unlikely as it was, until it was proved futile. He’d seen a lot of evil in his career, but he’d also seen some good. He chose to hope.
Fran’s hands flew to her mouth. Giving him a single nod, she left his side and joined in the search. Every set of eyes helped.
While he explored, he sent up a silent prayer for help. He hadn’t been a praying man very long. In fact, it wasn’t until Jack had married and told him how his faith had helped him heal from his sister’s death that Tanner had given faith more than a passing consideration. Lately, though, he’d started to see God’s hand in his life.
His prayer was raw, and it wasn’t fancy, but in his heart, he knew God heard him.
Questions raced through his mind. Why would Jared have been with a child? And how had he ended up here, on Fran’s front lawn? And why had someone shot at Fran? How was she connected with his case?
Copyright © 2024 by Dana Roae