Page 16 of No Safe Place

Whatever they were hiding, wow, was it a doozy.

She eyed Officer Davis.

“Is Sergeant Tyler around?” Colleen said.

“I think he might be, but he’s, eh, really busy,” Officer Davis said.

Colleen slowly looked around the deserted alcove. Then turned and looked out at the deserted parking lot out through the glass of the door. The bunny was still out there, she saw, working on a dandelion now.

Yeah, you look really jammed up here, she wanted to say as she turned back.

But she bit her tongue. Her last performance report at the firm had labeled her “inflexible.”

Don’t be inflexible, Colleen thought.

Think happy thoughts. Think happy flexible thoughts.

Colleen grasped the phone tighter, leaned forward, and dug in.

“Actually, I came all the way up from New York City for this,” she said pleasantly. “I could wait if Sergeant Tyler is busy. All day really. I have nothing else to do. And it really won’t take but a moment. I just have one question to ask him. Just one, I promise.”

“I’ll, um, I’ll see,” Officer Davis said, scurrying away from the booth.

“Yes? Hi. What is it? I’m actually in the middle of something,” Sergeant Tyler said sheepishly as he appeared behind the glass.

Sergeant Tyler was frumpy and middle-aged. With his unshaved cheeks and thick glasses, he looked much more like a back-office mailman than a cop.

He was also having trouble looking Colleen in the eye. But she remembered her nice conversation with him. He seemed like a good guy.

“Thanks so much for your time, Sergeant. Just one question. When did the state prosecutor’s office— No, wait, let me rephrase that. When did you learn the state prosecutor reopened the case?”

The sergeant stared at her.

“It was within the last half an hour, right?” Colleen said pleadingly.

He stared some more.

“I don’t recall,” he finally said as he nodded very slightly at the same time.

And then he gave Colleen a wink.

She winked back with a grateful smile.

Games it was, then, Colleen thought, and her smile disappeared as she hung up the phone.

16

President Cushing’s stepdaughter’s house was a charming refurbished Victorian, all the way at the other end of Beckford from the college.

Just after noon, Cushing came up on it fast, too fast. He cursed as the tires of his speeding Volvo XC90 made a slight barking sound as he hard braked his brand-new eighty-five-thousand-dollar SUV off the street into the U-shaped driveway.

Rush, rush, rush, he thought as he came to stop and threw it in Park and leaped out.

He’d been at a lunch meeting with the social justice club, just done with soup, when he was interrupted by a text from his stepdaughter, Ashley.

With her husband, Jake, away on business, Ashley had gone to visit a friend in Boston with his stepgrandson, Carter, overnight. But they had hit traffic or something and couldn’t get back in time to feed her dog, Lady, and give it its medicine and let it out to do its business.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said as he took the porch steps two by two.

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