Page 66 of The Woman By the Lake

FOURTEEN

Case File

Riggs

Late the next morning, Riggs pushed through the door at the sheriff’s department a couple minutes after Harry told him he’d be free to have a chat.

He gave a few nods to the deputies milling around.

But since all of them knew him because he’d done work on their houses, or their parents’ houses, or they’d gone to school with him, partied with him, drank at a bar with him, or they just lived in the same small town, no one stopped him as he made his way back to Harry’s office.

The door was open, and his friend’s eyes came to him from where he sat behind his desk, but Riggs still knocked on the doorframe, since Cade Bohannan and Rus Lazarus were sitting in the two chairs in front of Harry’s desk.

Bohannan was an MP native and retired FBI profiler who now did consultant work and taught courses.

Lazurus was Fret County Sheriff’s new detective. Also former FBI, he’d come to town the year before to track the Crystal Killer. While doing that, he’d fallen for a local, Cin Bonner, and now he was shacked up with her.

Riggs had known Cade his whole life, though Cade had spent a lot of his living elsewhere when he was with the FBI. But Riggs had always liked the man. He couldn’t say they were close buds, but there was mutual respect. On Riggs’s part, this was mostly because Cade had always treated him like Doc Riggs, not John Riggs’s son, and that meant something to Riggs, especially from a world-renown criminal profiler.

On the other hand, he’d only known Rus for a few months, and he called the man his friend. They’d shared beers while watching a game at Harry’s more than once. He was a good man, smart, funny, and making him better, he was a good friend to Harry. He had Harry’s back at work and, Riggs sensed, emotionally.

After Harry lost what he lost, he didn’t let many people in.

But he’d let in Rus.

“Am I interrupting something?” Riggs asked.

“We’re finishing up,” Harry said. “Grab a chair and join us, unless what you have to talk to me about is private.”

Riggs came in, nabbed a chair from the small conference table in the corner and turned it around toward Harry’s desk before he sat in it.

“No. Actually it’d be good to have you all here when we talk about this,” he shared.

The other men glanced at each other, and Riggs didn’t make them wait.

“Nadia, my neighbor,” he said the last just in case Cade didn’t know of her, “has had someone fucking with her.”

“Jesus Christ,” Harry muttered in a harassed way.

“Yeah. Scratching her windows in the middle of the night and banging together some rocks by where Whitaker’s stables used to stand,” Riggs explained. “I grabbed some surveillance stuff, heading back to install it after this. But thought you should have that heads up.”

Knowing him better than the other two in the room, it was Harry who demanded, “You get some video, you phone me.”

“I’ll try to stay in that frame of mind, and whoever’s doing this might not know what she’s going through right now. Even so, that shit is whacked. She’s not happy about it, and it’s arguable, but I’d argue I’m even less so.”

Harry didn’t take his eyes off Riggs, and Riggs got that, because, again, the man knew him well, so he knew Riggs would put himself in front of a bullet for his son, mother, sister or a good friend, but this protective streak with Nadia was telling.

Cade and Rus just exchanged a glance.

“How do you know it’s not Whitaker’s ghost?” Cade joked.

Riggs looked his way. “Rain washed away any tracks, but Nadia told me the scratching stopped when the storm came, and my guess is the same as hers. If there was such a thing, ghosts wouldn’t feel rain, so they wouldn’t give any fucks about it.”

“Excellent observation,” Rus muttered.

“Also gotta ask about the Whitaker investigation,” Riggs aimed that directly at Harry.

His friend’s brows went up. “Why?”

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