Physical Evidence Read online

  “I didn’t know they trained civilians for anything other than future agents.”

  “I was with the Bureau for almost three years before I left to work with the Colby Agency.” She had to find a way to change the subject before it went any further. “What about you?” she forged ahead. “What did you do before becoming the sheriff here?”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  Alex chewed her lower lip, digging deep for all that she knew about the sheriff. “You’re a third generation sheriff of Raleigh County. Your older brother tried the hat on for part of one term, but didn’t find the job to his liking. As his chief deputy you were appointed to the position after that. You’re up for election next year. But you’re not worried because the Haydens have run this county for more than fifty years. You’ve never been married and your social life stinks.” Startled by that last part, Alex held her breath in anticipation of his retaliation.

  He looked as startled as she felt. “I’m flattered you find my life so fascinating.”

  Surprised that she’d defused his anger instead of fueling it, she went on, “I always like to know who I’m up against.”

  He lifted one tawny eyebrow a tad higher than the other. “Is that what we are? Against each other?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Now he was digging. “You think I had something to do with the deaths of your two deputies, and I know I didn’t.”

  “I see,” he snapped. “You must have forgotten to tell me that you’d regained your memory of the events that night.”

  Well, Alex mused, it certainly didn’t take much to inch his temper back up to the boiling point. “No, it’s just instinct, I suppose.”

  He nodded, doubt written all over his face. “Like the instinct you have about Gill and Jasna?”

  It was her anger that did the climbing this time. “Exactly.”

  “Look.” He leaned closer, deliberately filling her personal space with his male arrogance. “Just because the folks in Chicago believe in those instincts of yours, doesn’t mean I do. Down here, Ms. Preston, we operate on hard evidence, not speculation.”

  Alex smiled, a gesture totally lacking humor. “It’s macho, I’m-the-law guys like you, Sheriff Hayden, that made me walk away from the Bureau. I think maybe the testosterone screws up your ability to see the obvious.”

  She cursed herself. She hadn’t meant to say that. But she’d certainly hit his hot button with that one. A muscle flexed in his tense jaw and his nostrils flared. He was royally ticked. Alex felt oddly exhilarated by his reaction. Her heart pounded. Her pulse leapt. If verbal sparring with the man gave her this much of a rush, what would kissing him do for her? As if she’d stated the question out loud, his gaze dropped to her mouth. Her breath caught.

  He was closer…Alex couldn’t say whether she’d moved or he had, but she could feel his warm breath on her lips. Could feel the pull of his muscular body.

  The door opened. They jumped apart. It was Peg.

  “Sheriff, Roy, Willis and Dixon want to know if you’re ready for their briefing?”

  Mitch blinked away the spell he’d somehow fallen under. He felt disoriented. “Give me a minute, Peg.” She nodded and turned away but not before he saw the question in her eyes. Peg hadn’t missed the tension she’d interrupted.

  “Is this about Miller and Saylor?” Alex demanded, drawing his reluctant attention back to her.

  Mitch forced his wayward impulses back into submission. He’d almost kissed her. Would have kissed her if Peg hadn’t interrupted. Damn. He couldn’t let this crazy attraction get any more out of hand. She was a suspect and his only witness in this case. He had to get a grip. Not to mention that anyone outside his office who’d bothered to look would have seen them.

  “This is about a lot of things. I’ll have Peg call you in when we get to the part that concerns you.” He looked anywhere but directly at her. He wasn’t sure he could mask what she’d made him feel.

  “We had a deal,” she countered. “You’re not supposed to leave me out.”

  Mitch rounded his desk and shuffled through the items stacked on the middle of his blotter. “I have something else for you to do in the meantime.” He passed a large padded envelope to her. “These are the personal effects related to your investigation that were found in your rental car.”

  Slowly, as if wary of his motivation, she reached for the envelope. “Have you looked at them?”

  His gaze fixed on hers. “No. Peg put it on my desk while we were out. I guess Forensics sent it over. You can tell me what you find.” Mitch had reviewed the inventory list. Nothing the envelope contained grabbed his attention. Maybe allowing her to review the contents first would help him earn her trust. Besides, if the techs had found anything important they would have told him.

  She stared at the envelope in her hands as if she feared it contained things she didn’t want to know. “You can use Dixon’s office.” Mitch moved to her side and ushered her from his office. “Peg, show Ms. Preston to Dixon’s office. She needs to do a little work without interruption.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mitch watched as Peg settled Alex at Dixon’s desk. His chief deputy’s office was directly across the reception area from Mitch’s. Since all the inner walls of the offices were glass, he could keep an eye on Alex while he and his men conducted their briefing. And Dixon’s office didn’t have any windows facing the outside for Mitch to worry about. She should be safe there for a few minutes. Dixon, Willis and Roy, Mitch’s cousin, sauntered out of the breakroom, coffee cups in hand.

  “Let’s get this done,” Mitch said by way of invitation into his office.

  “Where’s that pretty P.I.?” Roy asked as he settled into one of the chairs in front of Mitch’s desk.

  Mitch took his own seat. “She’s going over some material in Dixon’s office.”

  All three of his deputies glanced toward the office in question. “When are you going to let one of us have a turn at guarding the little lady?” Willis wanted to know, his question dragging their reluctant gazes back to Mitch.

  Irritation swelled inside him. “Tell me what you’ve got, Dixon.” Mitch didn’t bother to answer Willis’s question, because he wasn’t about to trust Alex’s safety to anyone else. He squashed that little voice that taunted him with suggestions of ulterior motives. He had no ulterior motive. Just because he was physically attracted to her didn’t mean anything. Hell, he was a man. What man alive wouldn’t be attracted to her?

  The next hour was spent going over every detail of what they knew so far regarding Miller’s and Saylor’s murders. The autopsy report on Jasna Bukovak was still not available. So they had nothing new on that front. Nothing but mounting evidence that pointed to Alex Preston. Evidence that made no sense, had no foundation and didn’t quite connect.

  “I want you to keep pounding the pavement,” Mitch instructed. “Someone had to see or hear something. An assassin didn’t just walk into that hotel, kill one of my men and then walk out without encountering another human being.”

  “Should we put out an appeal for information on channel 6?” Dixon offered. “A reporter called this morning offering to do a special segment on the investigation.”

  “That’s worked in the past for Davidson County,” Willis added hopefully, clearly excited about the possibility of garnering his five minutes of fame.

  “Let’s not go down that road just yet,” Mitch said, noting the letdown in both Willis’s and Roy’s eyes. “We don’t want to let our man know just how little we’ve got at this point.”

  “What if our man is a woman?” Roy suggested.

  All eyes shifted toward Dixon’s office and the woman working there.

  “I’m not ruling out anything at this point,” Mitch said, pulling their attention back to him. “But until she remembers what happened, we’ll just have to keep beating the bushes.”

  Peg, who had obviously been listening from her desk just outside the door, stuck her head into Mitch’s office. �
�I have a suggestion, Sheriff.”

  “Let’s hear it.” Mitch motioned for her to enter. “Lord knows we’ve pretty much hit a dead end.”

  “Hypnosis,” she said succinctly. “It worked for my husband.”

  She’d lost Mitch. “Hypnosis? What do you mean it worked for your husband?”

  She braced her hands on her wide hips and looked at Mitch as if he should know what she was talking about. “You know my Ronnie used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day,” she reminded impatiently. “He got himself hypnotized and now he doesn’t smoke. It was that simple.”

  “Hey, Peg,” Dixon piped up, straightening in his chair. “That’s a great idea. They do it in the movies when someone can’t remember something. A few minutes under hypnosis and they remember everything, clear back to a former life.”

  “I think I saw that movie,” Willis added, nodding his agreement.

  “Can they really do that?” Roy looked as taken aback as Mitch felt.

  “Sure they can,” Peg insisted. “Dr. Letsen did my Ronnie’s and it worked like a charm. Do you want me to call and make an appointment for her, Sheriff?”

  The thought of someone messing with Alex’s mind didn’t sit too well with Mitch. “Let me think about that, Peg. I appreciate the suggestion.”

  “Letsen can help her remember. I’d bet money on it,” Peg said adamantly before returning to her desk.

  “She might be right,” Dixon allowed. “We don’t have anything to lose at this point.”

  “I said I’d think about it.” Mitch immediately regretted his sharp tone. The three deputies stared in bewilderment or accusation at him now. Or hell, maybe it was his guilty conscience nagging at him. He’d let Alex get too close, let it get personal. And he knew better.

  “Well.” Dixon stood. “While you’re thinking about that, we’ll get back out there and see what we can find. I’m certain we’ll get a break soon.”

  Willis and Roy got to their feet, as did Mitch. “Thanks, Dixon.” Mitch hesitated a moment, then added, “Give Talkington a call. Ask him if he has checked into Gill’s college days and any missing young women from the area where he attended school like that profiler suggested.”

  Dixon looked more than a little confused at the abrupt subject change. “All right, Sheriff. You think maybe the profiler was right about the killings in Davidson County not being his first?”

  He couldn’t say what possessed him to go along with Alex’s theory when he hadn’t necessarily agreed with the original profiler’s, but somehow he did. Mitch hadn’t considered Gill clever enough or his methods sophisticated enough to be a seasoned killer. But Alex obviously saw something Mitch didn’t. “Let’s just say that I think the possibility is worth looking in to,” he admitted.

  Dixon shrugged. “I’ll give him a call.”

  “I’ll bet we find out he killed that Bukovak girl, too,” Roy added sagely. “That bastard’s crazy as hell.”

  Mitch definitely agreed with that summation. He just wished he could convince Alex.

  “Hayden, there’s something—” Alex halted abruptly just inside Mitch’s office door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…” Her words drifted off as she surveyed the expectant faces around her.

  She’d obviously been too busy looking at the notebook in her hands to notice that his meeting hadn’t ended.

  “Alex Preston, I think you already know Deputy Russ Dixon,” Mitch said.

  She nodded.

  “Ma’am.” Dixon inclined his head in acknowledgement.

  “Over here are Deputies Arlon Willis and Roy Becker,” Mitch continued. Willis, to Mitch’s annoyance, only stood there without saying a word or nodding or anything, his mouth hanging open in abject awe, but Roy gave her a two-fingered salute.

  Alex’s attention paused on Roy. Several moments passed with her looking directly at him as if she were trying to decide if they’d met before. Mitch imagined that she suffered that uncertainty with most every new face she encountered.

  “Thanks, gentlemen,” Mitch announced, breaking the awkward tension resulting from Alex’s continued stare. “We’ll touch base again about this time tomorrow unless one of you comes up with something new between now and then.”

  Dixon merely grunted his agreement as he headed for the door. Alex stepped aside to allow the deputies to pass. Roy hesitated next to her.

  “You’re looking much better, Ms. Preston. If you’re feeling up to any backtracking, let me know and I’ll be glad to take you around to any place you think might help you remember what happened that night.”

  “Thank you, Deputy Becker.” She smiled faintly. “I appreciate the offer.”

  “Thanks, Roy,” Mitch ground out, unreasonably annoyed with his flirting.

  “Anytime, Sheriff.” Grinning, he winked then sauntered away.

  “You found something,” Mitch said when Alex continued to stand there and stare after Roy.

  Her forehead scrunched in concentration, Alex crossed the office to stand in front of Mitch’s desk. “He seems familiar to me,” she said distractedly.

  “I don’t know how much you remember from that morning, but he and Willis are the ones who got to the scene first. Roy never left your side until the medics arrived.”

  Alex frowned thoughtfully. “That must be it.”

  “What’ve you got there?” Mitch asked, drawing her attention back to the reason she’d come into his office in the first place.

  She blinked, then stared down at the notebook in her hands. “This,” she said finally. “This is the casebook I kept on the Bukovak investigation.” She lifted her gaze to his, confusion and worry reigning supreme in those amber eyes. “I always keep one for every case I work. They’re usually pretty complete. But several pages have been ripped out of this one.” She flipped through the first few pages of the spiral notebook. “And then I get to the afternoon before…before Miller’s murder and something’s wrong.”

  Mitch tensed. Maybe he should have looked in that envelope first. There hadn’t been any casebook listed on the inventory. Forensics didn’t usually make mistakes like that. “Oh yeah, and what would that be?”

  She chewed that lower lip the way she always did when she was deep in thought. The gesture made Mitch want to reach out and touch those full lips, and then to smooth that frown line from her brow.

  “I kept a detailed log of everyone I interviewed and of my meetings with Jasna.” She looked up at Mitch again. “I met with her that day. There’s nothing here that would point to giving her reason to lose hope.” Alex shook her head slowly from side to side. “She wouldn’t have killed herself like that. I know it. Someone wanted it to look like she’d committed suicide, that’s all.”

  Mitch blew out an impatient breath. “So now we have three murders and a missing person, is that your assessment?”

  Certainty replaced all other emotion in her eyes. “Yes, it is.”

  “I have to have evidence. I can’t operate on conjecture.”

  “Someone is trying to set me up,” she said quietly. “Whoever it is, he wants it to look like I killed Miller, and he wants to make it look as though it had nothing to do with Marija’s disappearance. It would be so easy considering Gill has killed a half-dozen young women we know of, and Jasna is dead, to just assume Marija was one of his victims. Whoever is doing this knows I can’t prove that Marija was pregnant unless I find her.”

  “So you feel the real killer has gone to all these elaborate efforts to set you up all because you were trying to find Marija?” That just didn’t sound feasible.

  “That’s right,” Alex argued, obviously reading the disbelief and condescension in his tone. “Why else would someone take my notes? There are so many pages missing. It looks as if he went through and took the pages that would be the most incriminating.”

  Mitch laughed then. Now she was accusing someone of stealing select pages from her notes. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to destroy the notebook altogether? “And just who would have the k
ind of motivation required to go to all this trouble to cover up one missing girl?”

  “I can’t answer that yet. Your uncle is the key player with the most to lose.”

  Mitch gritted his teeth to hold back the irritation that roared through him with that comment.

  Those amber eyes locked with his. “Everything after 5:00 p.m. the day before I was found in Miller’s car has been ripped out,” she said, her tone deadpan. “But the last entry, the five o’clock entry, says I intended to pay you a visit. Did I come to your house that evening? Is that how I knew where you live?”

  Chapter Six

  Alex followed Hayden into the small market on the corner of Commerce and Main. He’d said he needed to pick up a few things if they planned to eat tonight. Though her appetite remained nonexistent, he didn’t appear to have suffered any setbacks in his. She touched her forehead and tried yet again to remember what had taken place the night Miller was murdered. Nothing came beyond what she’d already recalled. A man wearing a black ski mask. The same man beating her unmercifully. She frowned at the remembered pain of slamming into the tree trunk that had sent her into oblivion that night.

  The voice. She’d heard a man’s voice, but no voice she’d heard since triggered any recognition.

  Hayden’s angry voice echoed in her ears. Somehow she kept getting the memories of heated words with him mixed up with whatever happened that night.

  Alex studied her host and wondered again at his somewhat hesitant response to her question about whether or not she had spoken with him the evening before Miller’s murder.

  He’d admitted to their meeting. He’d even gone on to tell her that they had argued about her investigation into his uncle’s personal life. She remembered clearly now that Sheriff Hayden had put the word out that no one should talk to her. And they hadn’t. Alex had been furious. Their eventual confrontation had been vehement, though she still only remembered tiny snippets. According to Hayden, she had left in a huff and he hadn’t seen her again until the next morning when he arrived at the crime scene.