Page 15 of Tracking Down the Lawman's Son

“Still no sign of the shooter?” Bree wanted to know.

Duncan shook his head, and the frustration of that was all over his face. “But there were other tire tracks on the trail so it’s possible the shooter parked there and then escaped after he or she fled.” He made eye contact with Luca. “There were some indications that someone had tried to set fire to the silver truck.”

Hell. Luca hoped no evidence had been destroyed. They needed anything and everything in that vehicle to help them make sense of what’d happened. He was hoping though that the making sense would start right now with Sandra.

“I’m going to Mirandize you,” Duncan said, shifting his attention to Sandra.

Sandra didn’t object. She only sighed as Duncan recited the warning. He followed that up by stating his name, the time and the names of others who were present. All very official, but it didn’t mean Duncan was anticipating that he might have toarrest Sandra for anything. This was just a legal formality and a way of covering themselves.

“I didn’t kill my husband,” Sandra said the moment that Duncan had finished. Her voice cracked, and more tears filled her eyes. Joelle handed her mother a box of tissues that she took from the table. “Cliff was alive the last time I saw him,” Sandra insisted.

“Start from the beginning,” Duncan instructed as he took the seat across from her. “You said you were kidnapped. When and how were you taken?”

Sandra gathered her breath. “It was November first of last year. Cliff had already left for work, and I went to my home office to try to do more searches on Brighton. She’d been dead for four years by then, and Cliff was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to find her killer. He wanted me to search through old social media posts to see if I could come up with something.”

Cliff had asked Bree to dig as well. And Luca. So, Luca could attest to his former boss being frustrated. It was understandable, too, that he would ask his wife to help since Sandra and Brighton’s late mom had been best friends.

“Someone knocked at the door while I was working,” Sandra went on. “At first, I thought it was Cliff, that maybe he’d locked himself out or forgotten something since he’d only been gone about twenty minutes so I opened the door without looking. A woman wearing a ski mask jabbed me with a stun gun. She dragged me out of the house and into a car, and then she gave me some kind of injection in my arm that knocked me out.”

Luca thought back to the scene of Cliff’s murder. There’d been no signs of a struggle. No signs of Sandra either, and her purse and phone had been missing.

“Describe the woman and the car,” Duncan said.

Sandra nodded, but then paused for a couple of seconds. “Like I said, she wore a mask so I never saw her face. But shewas tall, maybe five foot ten, and she had an athletic build. She didn’t have any trouble dragging me to the car. She just put me in and drove off.”

“But she took your purse, keys and phone?” Luca questioned.

“Yes. I had my phone in my pocket, and she got that right away and took out the SIM card. But she also grabbed my purse, and it had my keys in it.” She paused again. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about that, and I think she took my purse to make it look as if I’d voluntarily left. I didn’t,” she insisted. She repeated that while she made direct eye contact with Joelle, Bree and Slater.

“What happened after this woman kidnapped you?” Duncan pressed, clearly anxious to get some answers.

“I’m not sure how long I was unconscious,” Sandra admitted. “When I woke up, I was in a bedroom with log walls, and it was attached to a small bathroom. There was a window in the bedroom, but it’d been boarded up.” She stopped, shook her head. “Believe me when I say I tried to tear off those boards, but I was never able to do that.”

“Where was this place?” Duncan asked.

Sandra pulled in another of those long breaths. “I didn’t know at the time, but after I escaped in the silver truck, I realized the cabin was only about twenty-five miles from here. It’s off an old farm road between Bulverde and the Guadalupe River.” Her eyes went wide. “It’ll be in the GPS. I didn’t know where I was, but the GPS was working so I told it to navigate to Bree’s address.”

Duncan took out his phone and made a quick call to Woodrow, instructing him to check the truck’s GPS right away and then to have local cops go out to the scene immediately.

“Okay,” Duncan said to Sandra when he’d finished with the call. “Go back to the kidnapper. You’re sure you never saw her face, never got any indications as to who she was?”

“I’m sure,” Sandra insisted. She stopped, and it seemed as if for several moments, she got lost in the memories of what’d happened. “She only came in every three days or so, and one time she brought me a newspaper with the article about Cliff. That’s how I learned my husband was dead.” Her voice broke. “I read about in a newspaper that horrible woman brought me. Did she kill him?” Sandra asked.

Most of them shook their heads. Bree went with a verbal response. “We don’t know. We’re all investigating it. Did the woman ever say anything about Dad?”

“Nothing. Just that article. I asked...no, I begged her for more information. I begged her to let me go, to tell me why she was holding me. She never answered.” There was a world of genuine heartbreak in her words, and Luca didn’t think any part of it was fake.

“Did your captor stay there with you the whole time?” Duncan asked, obviously shifting the interview back to the abduction.

Sandra shook her head. “No, she wasn’t around that much. Like I said, she’d come every two to three days and always had on a mask. She’d put a bag of groceries in my room. Sandwich stuff and chips mainly. Toiletries, sometimes.” She wiped away more tears. “A couple of times, I tried to jump her when she came in, but she always had the stun gun with her and would hit me with it.”

“Not this last time though,” Luca reminded her.

“No,” Sandra murmured. She stopped when Duncan’s phone dinged with a text.

“Woodrow called the county sheriff’s office, and they’re sending out deputies now to check the cabin,” Duncan relayed after he read the message.

Good. The sooner they got there, the better, and with any luck, the kidnapper would still be there so they could arrest her.

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