The conversation seemed to move in a blur around him. He nodded at the right places and then, when the subject shifted off the topic and people started saying goodbye, he felt himself stand and walk out the front door. He wasn’t even sure if the conversation had wrapped up or if he’d said anything before leaving. He’d just known he’d had to get out of there before he’d said something he regretted.
He pushed through the front door and out onto the porch. The warm and dark June night surrounded him. School would be out in days and summer was almost here. Velvety darkness pressed in on all sides, filled with nothing but the faint whisper of wind rustling in the trees and the threat of impending rain. His fists clenched. For the first time, in a long time, he wanted to yell at the world.
Are you out there, Shiny Man? The words ripped through his mind in a silent shout. Are you watching me? Who are you? What do you want? Why are you taking my home, my family and my life from me?
But the words that blazed through his mind never crossed his lips. Instead he dropped down onto the swing, let his head fall into his hands, and prayed.
I’m trapped, Lord. Everything I could even think to pray of seems impossible to ask.
Desperate. That was how he’d felt when he’d first landed in Kilpatrick, alone in a town where he’d known no one and nothing. That was how he felt now.
He heard the creek of the door behind him and knew Jess was there before she’d even spoken.
He glanced up at her without raising his head. “What do I do?”
“Tomorrow or next week, I don’t know,” Jess said. “But I can think of one practical thing you can do tonight.”
“I’m open to suggestions.” It had been a rhetorical question when he’d asked it, but anything beat lying awake worrying. He found himself hoping that she’d cross the porch and sit beside him on the swing again. Instead she crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall.
“I think you should go back to the bookstore and your apartment,” she said, “and do a visual sweep of it like you used to. You had this way of pacing a crime scene in the middle of the night and seeing things others had missed.”
He looked up. “Because I was an obsessive and stressed-out insomniac who didn’t sleep.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But you were also really good at what you did. Nobody could get inside the mind of a criminal like you could, and that wasn’t just the coffee. You know this town. You know who the Shiny Man could be. But the whole time you were in the bookstore after he attacked, you were either taking care of Patricia, the kids or me. You need to go back there as a detective. Even if you don’t find anything or see something you didn’t see before, it could still jog your memory.”
He let out a long breath. She wasn’t wrong.
“Just go,” she added. “I’ll stay here and watch the kids.”
“No.” Travis stood. “I want you with me. You’ve always been a great detective, and I’m beyond rusty.”
Not that he much liked the idea of leaving the kids. But they were fast asleep and it was a safer option than bringing them along. Thankfully Seth was able to set up a video camera feed from the kids’ room, allowing Travis to keep an eye on them.
Rain had already started falling lightly by the time Travis pulled the truck down the long, unpaved driveway and out onto the road. He glanced at Jess in the passenger seat beside him.
“For the record, I know your team isn’t wrong,” Travis said, “and neither are you. I can’t stay somewhere where there’s a target on my back, and I can’t adopt the kids, become their legal guardian or even take them with me. I just hate it. Okay? I hate what’s happened. I hate what could happen and I hate the position it puts you in.”
“Nobody blames you for hating it,” Jess said softly.
He clenched his jaw and looked straight ahead.
“But you do blame me for not wanting to go back to being an undercover cop though, right?” Travis asked. “I will go over your entire file on the Chimera and your plan to go undercover. I’ll give you any feedback and insight I can, and I’ll pray for you all day every day. But I’m not going back to that life.”
They kept driving. The world was black outside his windows. Raindrops splattered against the darkened windshield. He glanced down at his cellphone and the video feed of Willow and Dominic sleeping peacefully in their beds. Then Travis’s eyes went back to the road ahead.
Lord, I’ve never loved anything in the way I love these kids. Please, help me protect them.
A car pulled onto the road behind them, low and dark, with only one headlight. It was rare to see another vehicle on the road this late at night and this car was trailing far too close behind them. Travis held his breath and tried in vain to see the figure behind the wheel. The car turned onto a side road and was gone.
“It’s just that you seemed to really love your job,” Jess said after a long moment. “You were motivated, you were focused, and you always kept me on track. Nobody cared about the work more than you. You brought all this heart into the work and you were amazing at it.”
“You’re right,” Travis said. “I was motivated. I was good at it. And I thought I loved it. But I didn’t see how it was killing me inside or what it was doing to me. Maybe it was right for me then, but God wanted to lead me to better. I loved working with you. But I hated myself.” His shoulders rose and fell. “Can you forgive me for wanting to rescue just two kids when there’re hundreds out there I could be helping to save?”
She startled. “It’s not my place to forgive,” she said, “and I’m the last person to judge anyone for not wanting to be in this line of work. It’s hard.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the seat. “Did I ever tell you I was engaged to be married once?”
“No.” Who in their right mind would’ve ever let a woman like Jess get away?
“It was a very long time ago,” Jess said. “I was nineteen. He was a few years older and didn’t want me to go into the police academy, because he was in med school and thought it would be too hard on our relationship if we both had big careers. As the wedding got closer, it became clear that he wanted me to be a housewife. He told me I had to choose between him and being a cop.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, rolling her shoulders back like she was tossing off a weight. “I told him I loved him, but I felt called to law enforcement. He canceled the wedding.”
The buildings of Kilpatrick moved past the window. Pain stabbed at Travis’s heart. “I’m so sorry.”
She held up a hand, palm forward, as if trying to push back any sympathy he might be feeling.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He was clearly the wrong person and, if anything, it hardened my resolve to spend my life rescuing as many people from as many bad situations as I could. If I had a family, I’d still be going after criminals like Chimera, I’d just be doing it from a different angle or a different way that didn’t have me in the direct line of fire.” She blinked and looked out the window. “Why did we pass the bookstore?”
He winced and did a careful U-turn on the empty small-town street. A shiver ran up his spine as he suddenly realized he’d been so involved in Jess’s story that for one fleeting moment he’d forgotten where he was.
Forty minutes later, Jess stood in Travis’s study and watched as he paced like a caged animal around the space. The skies had opened in the past few minutes, sending sheets of rain beating against the building. Thunder rumbled in the air punctuated by spikes of lightning that split the night. Tension crackled around the room and seemed to encircle Travis like an invisible force field, and Jess wasn’t sure why. He’d been tense in a way she couldn’t put her finger on ever since she’d told him the story about her failed engagement. She didn’t know why.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“That we’re not going to be able to get any usable fingerprint or DNA from this chaos,” Travis said. He stopped and waved his hands through the air as if drawing an invisible circle around the mess. “The Shiny Man was wearing gloves, a jumpsuit and a respirator mask. It’s like he’d spent hours online researching how not to leave evidence.”
“Remember the man in Aurora who murdered three women?” Jess asked.
“You mean, Mr. No Evidence?” Travis snorted derisively. “The guy who practically drenched his crime scenes in bleach to destroy DNA? I can still remember the chemical smell. And how he sat there in the interrogation room and smugly tried to tell me that since there was no DNA evidence, I’d never get a conviction.” He shook his head. “Like the fact his car and apartment were covered in bleach wasn’t suspicious.”
If she remembered correctly, it had taken Travis four hours to get a signed confession.
Travis glanced at his cell phone, and she followed his gaze. Willow was curled up in a tiny ball, but Dominic had tossed his blankets off and now lay on his back like a starfish. Both kids were fast asleep.
“So what does your gut tell you about the Shiny Man?” she asked.
“Nothing new,” Travis said. He set the phone down on the desk with the screen visible. Thunder roared outside, momentarily drowning out Travis’s voice. “He wants something. The fact he trashed my study makes that clear. The fact he challenged Patricia means he might’ve also had a personal beef with her. The way he questioned you implies he also knows me personally and was surprised by the sudden appearance of a woman in my life he didn’t know. His Shiny Man getup implies this wasn’t an impulse decision and he put a lot of thought and planning into it.”
And he hadn’t been counting on Jess.
Thunder crashed again, moments after the last burst and harder than before. The lights went out, plunging the apartment into darkness except for the pale glow on Travis’s cellphone. Her hand shot to her weapon as she steeled herself. Then a tiny yellow light flickered on ahead of her in the darkness and she could see Travis’s face in the flame of a lighter.
“The power grid’s not the best around here,” he said. He bent down and rummaged around on the floor. “Thankfully, I have a few candles.”
She watched as Travis moved through the darkness, pulling round candles from the wreckage, lighting them and setting them on the shelf, where they created small pools of light in the darkness.
“We need a list of potential suspects,” she said. “Anyone who the Shiny Man could be. Names we can look into. People we can investigate. Who has motive to hurt you, those kids or Patricia? What’s up with District Chief Gordon Peters? Why doesn’t he like you?”
“I don’t honestly know,” Travis said. “But we definitely got off on the wrong foot when I dozed off at the wheel and crashed into a tree. He was against my joining the volunteer firefighters and sometimes makes cryptic remarks about running a background check on me. But my witness protection identity should be solid and problem free. The only black marks on my name are some speeding tickets, which is kind of ironic considering I got plenty of those in real life, too. As far as I know, he was never married and had no kids. He always seemed sweet on Patricia.”
“Any romantic interest?” she asked.
“Between the district police chief and Patricia?” he asked. “Maybe, but if so, she shot him down.”
She made a mental note to ask Seth to take a look into Travis’s faked background to see if there was anything else there Chief Peters would have a problem with, as well as running a check on the chief himself. “Have you racked up any other enemies in town? Any animosity among the other firefighters?”
“No,” Travis said. She watched as he closed his eyes. “Judging by the security footage that Seth was able to pull, Shiny Man’s initial target was Patricia. She’s a sixty-eight-year-old female. One marriage, to a cop who died of a heart attack twelve years ago. One child, a son, who died while working a roadside check stop, along with his wife, who was also a cop.” His eyes snapped opened. “So, we look into all three of their professional records. Any one of them could’ve arrested somebody who’s held a grudge or has a family member who did. The fact it took them so long to make a move could be because they were behind bars.”
Jess felt a smile turn on her lips. “Good start, Detective. Who else? Think motives. Anyone stand to gain financially from her death?”
“Just me.” He shrugged. “If she’s left me her property in trust for the kids. Although, the baker next door, Harris Mitchell, has tried to pressure her several times to sell the bookstore. He can be a bit pushy and wants the property to expand his business. He threatened to sue her once over a fallen tree that did some damage to his property. But it was really a minor thing.”
“And the baker’s daughter, Cleo, went with Patricia to the hospital,” Jess said. “Any other business dealings?”
“Not that I know of,” Travis said. “One woman who has a local candle and incense shop was annoyed Patricia wouldn’t stock her stuff. But again, it’s petty stuff.”
“Anyone in town with a criminal record?” she prompted.
He watched the rain pound against the window for a long moment then he turned back.
“No,” he said. “But there used to be. Braden Garrett. He’s twenty-four, has a drug problem and multiple arrests for minor things. He used to date Cleo and he was a nasty piece of work to her. She’d run to Patricia for help when his temper got out of control. Once when Patricia heard Braden yelling at Cleo outside the store, she grabbed a shotgun from behind the counter, marched out, pointed it at him and told Braden if he ever threatened Cleo again, she’d shoot him.”
Jess whistled. “And why haven’t we interviewed him?
“Braden left town almost two years ago,” Travis said. “Nobody’s heard from him since. I think Cleo’s now dating Alvin, the new kindergarten teacher. His fiancée left him recently when she got a great job overseas. Life in a small town is a veritable soap opera.”
He glanced back at the cell phone, and his face paled. “The camera’s gone dead.”
“It’s probably just a power outage. Call Seth.”
Thunder crashed outside again, dragging her attention back to the window. Lightning flashed for a split second, illuminating the world outside. A gasp rose to Jess’s lips.
The Shiny Man was standing on the fire escape, watching them.