Page 5 of Tracking Down the Lawman's Son

“Manny Vickery,” she quickly provided. “He owns the Hush, Hush bar in downtown Austin. It’s one of those not-so-secret trendy gin joints. Not seedy though, and I didn’t uncover anything illegal going on there.”

“But someone tried to kill both him and you,” Slater was equally quick to point out.

Hearing it spelled out like that gave her a new jolt of fear and worry. Bree wanted to believe it was all a really bad coincidence. Or an accident. If it’d only been Manny’s incident, she could have believed that, but coupled with hers, both attempts had to be intentional.

But who had done this?

It was something she needed to find out and soon.

“What did Manny say when he called you this morning?” Slater asked.

It wasn’t hard for her to recall it since she’d mentally gone over the conversation several times. “Manny told me he was driving to the bar from his house, which is apparently in a rural area about twenty miles outside of Austin. He was on an isolated road when a silver truck rammed into his car from behind. The truck had one of those rhino bumpers and tried to push him off the road. Manny said he managed to keep control, and the driver of the truck sped off when another car came along.”

“Did he get the license plate?” Luca wanted to know.

She shook her head. “He said he was too shocked by what’d happened to even think of looking at the plate.”

“Was he hurt?” Luca pressed.

Bree shook her head again. “And his car only had some minor damage. He reported it to the local cops,” she added since Bree knew that would be Luca’s or her brother’s next question. “Manny said he’d spoken to the cops right before he called me. He wanted to know if someone was after him because he was gathering those receipts for me. I said I wasn’t sure. And I’m not,” she quickly tacked on to that. “I’m not sure of a lot of things.”

“You were on your way to see this Manny Vickery when someone tried to run you off the road?” Luca pressed.

Bree nodded. “And, yes, I’ve considered that Manny knew I was coming so he could have said something to someone who was waiting for me. Or he could have done it himself if he lied about being attacked and wants me to back off the investigation.”

They sat in silence for a moment, all of them obviously processing this. “I’ll need to check your car,” Slater finally said. “If the silver truck broadsided you, there could be some paint flecks we can use to try to trace the vehicle. I’ll need to check the bar owner’s vehicle as well.”

Luca stopped the cruiser at the end of her driveway, and he turned in the seat to face her. “I’ll also make some calls and see if anyone’s brought in a vehicle like that for repair. I could ask around, too, to see if anyone spotted it in the area.” He paused. “You didn’t want to say anything about this in front of Dr. Bagley. Why?”

She had so hoped not to get into this, but Bree doubted Luca was just going to drop it, and if she tried to stonewall him, it might make him dig for the answer on his own.

“Because Nathan has been pressuring me to go out with him, and I didn’t want to give him any excuse to...insinuate himself into my life.”

She stopped, groaned, and knew she obviously had to spell that out a little better.

“As you know, Nathan and I briefly dated a couple of years ago when I was home for the summer, and when I broke things off, he didn’t take it well. He kept calling and texting, kept sending me flowers. When I went back to Dallas, he showed up at my office there, and I had my version of a showdown with him. I made it clear he’d better back off.”

As expected, Luca and Slater cursed. It was Luca who responded though. “And you didn’t tell us he was stalking you?”

“No, because it stopped.” Bree locked gazes with Luca’s intense brown eyes and went ahead with her explanation. “Added to that, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable blabbing to you because of our history together.”

Luca’s jaw tightened. “It’s not blabbing. It’s reporting a stalker to a cop.” He stopped, muttered more profanity. “If you didn’t want to tell me, you could have gone to one of the other deputies. Or to the Dallas PD. You should have said something both back then and today. By that, I mean, you could have asked for another doctor instead of being treated by a man who stalked you.”

She’d considered doing that. Mercy, had she, but Bree had just wanted to get the stitches and get out of there. She certainly hadn’t wanted to dish up any of what’d happened since it would have ended up being juicy gossip. Even though she had no idea what was going on, Bree figured it was best to work this quietly behind the scenes.

“There’s more,” Bree went on, and this part was not going to be easy. “After I saw the woman I believe was Brighton on the video, I expanded the search to other cameras in the vicinity. Of course, most had been erased since it was over five years ago, but I found this.”

She pulled up a picture on her phone and realized her hand was shaking when she held it up for Slater and Luca to see.

“It’s footage of that same fight outside the Hush, Hush, but it was filmed by another customer who also posted it on social media.” She paused. Had to. “I examined the footage frame by frame and saw this.” She used her fingers to enlarge the still image she’d culled from the video.

“Hell,” Slater said, and he not only moved in even closer, he took the phone from her, repeated his single word of profanity and then handed it to Luca.

Luca shook his head. “That’s your mother.”

Yes, it was, and when Luca handed her back her phone, she took yet another look at it. Because she was in the mix of the other bystanders, only her face was visible, but it was enough for Bree to see the familiar short brown hair, and the eyes and mouth that were so much like Bree’s own features.

Either her mother had a doppelgänger, or that was indeed Sandra McCullough.

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