Page 99 of A Deeper Darkness
Sam rushed back to the table. “She saw the shooting.”
Maggie and Xander both stared at her.
“Ask her,” Sam said. “Ask her.”
Maggie frowned, but sat Jen back on her lap. “Honey, the other night, your birthday night, you read that scary book and had a bad dream, then you called for me. What was it about?”
“That wasn’t a bad dream, Mommy. Across the street, there was a shooting star in the window, and then someone left.”
She stuck her thumb in her mouth and started humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Maggie pulled her thumb from her mouth gently. “Sweetie, the someone who left. Did you recognize him?”
Jen shook her head. Maggie tried again.
“Was it a him? Or a her? Could you tell?”
Sam glanced over at Xander, whose face was intent with interest. He doesn’t know, she thought. He really doesn’t know who killed them.
The realization that Xander had been telling the truth almost made her collapse in relief. For some reason, she so wanted to believe this man. She wanted to believe him in the very worst way.
Was it Donovan? Did Xander remind her of him? Or was it the things Donovan had written in his journal that made her feel like she knew Xander? Parts of him, at least.
Or was it the way his eyes probed into her like he was trying to share the universe’s thoughts with her?
Flustered, she turned away, but heard Jen’s answer. “It was a him.”
Maggie sighed, and Xander sucked his breath in through his teeth. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jen answered. “He had short hair and made a big shadow across the street. I thought he was coming to get me. Do you know the bad man?”
Xander glanced at Maggie, then over to Sam.
“Yes, sweetie. I think I do. And I promise, he won’t ever come near you again.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Savage River Lodge
Detective Darren Fletcher
The sun was gone. Defeated, Fletcher had agreed to hunker down for the night. His sense of honor was in tatters. He was so worried for Sam he could barely breathe. As darkness had enveloped the search team, they decided a staging point would be necessary, and found the nearby Savage River Lodge, a beautiful stone-and-timber retreat that Fletcher had half a mind to check into and never come back out again.
The forest service guys were stretched out over a table to his right, looking at a topographical map, estimating times and drawing circles with their protractors, then tapping things into their computers. They were attempting to figure out how far Sam could have gone on foot, working on the assumption, however faulty it may be, that she hadn’t been shoved in a car. Or put on a horse. Or dropped off a cliff.
All he could do was wait. On the streets of D.C. he knew what his place was, what he could do. Out here, in the woods, he didn’t stand a chance. He’d never been much of a nature guy. Outside of the odd Boy Scout camping trip with Tad, trips that Felicia increasingly took in his stead as the boy grew up, he’d never spent any time in the woods. He wasn’t a hunter or a fisher. He was a cop. A jog down by the river was as exotically outdoors as he ever got.
He’d been stupid to think he could control the situation. Alexander Whitfield was a seasoned soldier, capable of hiding in plain sight, and that knowledge made Fletcher even angrier. He’d been played. They’d all been played.
But something in his gut told him Whitfield wasn’t his man. He was so far off the grid that calling attention to himself by murdering his old friends seemed out of character, at least the little bit he’d been able to profile from Whitfield’s record and Sam’s translations from Edward Donovan’s journal.
Now, Margaret Lyons was another story. A woman scorned is a powerful thing. According to Taranto, Perry Fisher was the father of her kid. Maybe someone in her chain of command had figured that out and was using that knowledge to scuttle her career, and things got out of hand. Croswell could have found out and confronted her. She snapped, walked him across the street to the house she knew was empty, shot him and played dumb until morning, when Fletcher and Hart came knocking on her door.
A plausible theory, sure. But where did Donovan fit into that? Lyons had been at work at her law firm when Donovan was shot. Three people had seen her and confirmed.
Karen Fisher was still a good choice. Assuming she was playing the reporter for her own personal gain… She could have been using Taranto to ferret out the real story, and Donovan and Croswell were trying to keep it quiet.
Shit, if he just knew who’d been the actual shooter in the friendly fire. That would help narrow it down.
