Page 4 of Tracking Down the Lawman's Son

Still, she should have trusted her gut. If she had, she would have been more careful. That had to stop. Careful had to be at the top of her priorities because of Gabriel.

“All right,” Slater said a few moments later. He was making a visible attempt to rein in the big brother stuff. “Tell us why you think this truck driver maybe followed you and then rammed into your car.”

Bree dragged in a long breath. Where to start? There were so many pieces to this so she decided to go back to the beginning.

“I’ve been investigating Dad’s murder,” she said, knowing that in itself wouldn’t be a bombshell. They were all investigating her father being gunned down by an unknown assailant eleven months ago.

A date that she had no trouble recalling.

Because it was also when she’d gotten pregnant with Gabriel.

She’d ended up at Luca’s that night, and they’d both been in shock and grief-stricken not just over her father’s murder but her mother’s disappearance. Her mother, Sandra, had simply vanished without a trace, and there was the worry that she, too, was dead. Or that she’d killed her husband and fled. That theory had some juice since her mother’s wallet, phone and car had gone missing as well. None of the items had yet been recovered.

Both of those possible scenarios had shaken Luca and her to the core, and with their defenses down, they’d fallen back into their old routine of landing in bed.

“What does Dad’s death have to do with what happened to you today?” Slater pressed.

“Getting there,” she muttered and returned to the beginning. “As you know, Dad called me the day before he was killed. I was a legal consultant for the state prosecuting attorney back then, and Dad wanted me to check through my resources to see if I could find any info on one of his cold cases.”

“Brighton Cooper,” Luca readily supplied. “The young woman who was murdered five and a half years ago.”

She made a sound of agreement. It didn’t surprise her that Luca would remember that. Or know how much the unsolved murder had troubled her father. Luca had been a deputy for over a decade and had been on duty when the twenty-three-year-old waitress had been found stabbed to death in her apartment in Saddle Ridge. The case had gone cold, but the sheriff’s office, and especially her father, had continued to investigate it.

Her mother, Sandra, had done some unofficial investigating as well since Brighton had been the daughter of Sandra’s late friend, and Sandra knew that Brighton was often impulsive and prone to getting into trouble. Brighton also had a track record of getting involved with the wrong men.

Something that Bree could definitely relate to.

“Dad was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to find anything new on Brighton,” Bree went on, “and he knew I had access to a lot of different databases and law enforcement resources. He wanted me to see if anything about Brighton popped.Anything,” she emphasized.

“Did you find something?” Luca asked.

“Not then. And maybe not now, either,” she added in a mutter. “After Dad was killed, I continued to dig though.”

It was hard for her to spell out, but the digging felt as if she was helping to fulfill her father’s last wish. Added to that, diving into work temporarily helped her set aside the grief and her worries about her missing mother. Well, it had when she wasn’t using those databases to hunt for her mom. Something she did at least weekly in case anything new turned up.

“For months, I did facial recognition searches, a lot of them, looking for any sign of Brighton,” Bree went on. “And yesterday, I saw a woman I believe could be her on security camera footage of a fight outside a bar in Austin. The footage was recorded two nights before she was murdered, and the only reason it hadn’t been erased was because the footage was used in a civil lawsuit.”

“Brighton was assaulted in this bar fight?” Luca immediately wanted to know.

“No, if it was indeed her, then she was a bystander, along with about a dozen or so people who were trying to break up the fight that started inside the bar and then moved out onto the sidewalk. It was one of the men involved in the fight who filed the lawsuit.”

A lawsuit he’d lost and then had posted the footage on social media.

“I contacted the officers who were called in,” Bree continued, “but neither of them took a witness statement from anyone matching Brighton’s description so I’m guessing she left before they arrived on scene. The man who filed the lawsuit didn’t remember her either.”

Bree’s phone rang, and she groaned when she saw her sister’s name on the screen. Joelle would have almost certainly heard about the accident by now and would want to know how she was doing. And Bree would tell her. First though, she had to finish filling in Slater and Luca so she let the call go to voicemail.

“Using facial recognition, I matched another face in the bar crowd footage to a bartender and contacted her,” Bree went on, trying to hurry since they’d be at her house soon, and she had so much to tell them. “She didn’t recall seeing Brighton so I dropped by the bar and spoke to the owner to ask him to give me receipts for that night. He said it would take a while since it was years ago but that he’d get them for me.”

“We checked Brighton’s credit card,” Slater reminded her. “And she hadn’t recently charged anything at a bar.”

Bree made a sound of agreement. “I wanted to see if I recognized any names of customers who might link to Brighton.”

“Did you?” Luca asked.

“I don’t have the list yet. But this morning I got a call from the bar owner, and he said someone tried to run him off the road.”

Both Slater and Luca cursed. “I want his name,” Slater demanded.

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