Читать книгу Battle Tested - Janie Crouch - Страница 14

Chapter Six

Steve stared down at her belly for a long time. He finally looked up at her face again.

There were so many questions in his eyes she hardly knew how to start answering them all.

His hand gently touched her stomach, so that’s where she started.

“Yes, I’m pregnant. Six months.”

It wasn’t terribly difficult math, so she let him work out for himself that the baby was his. She didn’t want to say it outright, because she wasn’t sure if he would even believe her. They hadn’t parted on the greatest of terms, after all.

He studied her for a long time without saying anything. Rosalyn just stood there. She was as surprised to see him as he was to see her.

“I just identified your dead body,” he finally said.

Okay, maybe not quite as surprised.

“My twin sister,” she whispered. “Lindsey Rose. I didn’t know she was dead until today. I was coming into the police department when I saw you leaving.”

She’d been skeptical about going to the police station anyway, knowing the Watcher would probably be waiting for her there. When she saw Steve exit the building, she’d been totally thrown.

What was he doing there?

Steve was the last person Rosalyn expected to see. His presence had to have something to do with Lindsey’s death. Why else would he be here from Colorado?

“Have you been following me from the police station?”

“Yes.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. “Why? To tell me about the baby? Why did you run when I saw you at the bar?”

He fired off the questions faster than she could answer them. Not that she knew how to answer them anyway.

She hadn’t expected to see Steve. She’d been about to cross the street into the police station, knowing her sister was dead and the Watcher had found her again.

She was six months pregnant, alone, frightened and grieving. She’d pushed back the terror, so her only thought had been identifying her sister so Lindsey could have a proper burial.

Then Steve had walked out the door. He’d looked so strong. So capable of handling anything life threw at him.

Rosalyn had gotten in her car and followed him without even meaning to. When she saw he was going to the same hotel and then the same bar where they’d met, she’d felt a little hope inside.

Maybe he didn’t hate her.

Maybe she could tell him about the baby.

Maybe she could tell him about the Watcher and everything that had happened.

She needed help.

But when his eyes had flown to her at the bar, obviously suspecting trouble, she’d panicked. She’d run—well, run as fast as her body would let her—to get away.

But she hadn’t gotten away. He’d caught her and said—

He was law enforcement?

“You’re a cop?”

He took a step closer, obviously trying to use his size to intimidate her. “You didn’t answer my questions.”

She couldn’t get into the entire story now. They were too out in the open. “I will answer your questions, but not out here. You told me you were in management before.”

Steve shrugged. “I never said what sort of management I was in. And I want answers to my questions before I arrest you.”

“Arrest me for what?”

“How about the theft of nearly $200 six months ago?”

Rosalyn’s face heated. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t have any other choice. I was desperate. My whole time with you I was pretty desperate.”

That wasn’t the right word, or at least she should’ve phrased it differently, she realized when he stiffened and stepped back. She hadn’t meant that she’d spent time with him because she was desperate, but he’d obviously taken it that way.

“I guess your little souvenir from our time together—” he gestured at her belly “—wasn’t what you wanted, then. Is the baby even mine?”

“Yes.” She took a step toward him without even meaning to. “I know you probably don’t believe me, but you’re the only man I’ve been with for a long time.” The only man she’d allowed herself to trust in a long time.

“Yeah, well, once the kid is born, there are paternity tests that are probably in our best interests to complete.”

Rosalyn knew she shouldn’t be hurt given what had happened between them but she couldn’t help it. “Of course. I don’t expect you to just believe me.”

Now that the Watcher had found her again, she needed Steve’s help whether he believed her or not. She had more than just herself to look out for. Steve didn’t know the entire situation but at least she knew she could trust him.

Steve ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I’m not trying to be an ass. You’ve caught me off guard on multiple levels here. But I need some answers.”

“Okay. I have a room at a hotel a few miles from here. Let’s go there.”

* * *

ROSALYN WAS ALIVE.

Rosalyn was alive and pregnant. Steve could hardly get his head around the first part, much less the second.

She was sitting right in front of him in a pretty scary run-down hotel room they’d driven to in her car, eating a packet of crackers. He was sitting in the desk chair that he’d pulled over and placed right in front of the bed just watching her. Like her eating crackers was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

Did she need more food than that? Was she taking care of herself? Had she been seeing a doctor throughout her pregnancy to make sure everything was okay?

Was the baby honestly his? They had used protection. But he knew accidents still happened.

He wanted to believe her when she’d said yes. She’d taken off her jacket and he could more clearly see the outline of her stomach under the T-shirt she wore. There was very definitely a baby bump. Not one that had her waddling or anything like that, but very definitely pregnant. Someone as petite as Rosalyn couldn’t hide it.

He wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about her pregnancy but had so many other questions to ask that those got pushed to the back burner.

Steve sorted through important information for a living, made decisions on where Omega’s Critical Response team would go and what they would do, based on his reading of a situation. Knowing what questions to ask to get the information he needed was his job. And lives depended on his ability to do it well.

But damned if he knew where to start with Rosalyn.

The dead body seemed the most reasonable place.

“So the woman I identified in the morgue—”

“Like I said, my identical twin, Lindsey Rose Mellinger. My mom—in a fit of soberness—thought it was quite clever.”

Rosalyn and Lindsey Rose. “The reversal of each other. Well, almost.”

She nodded. “Yeah. And it ended up being true in just about everything. We were twins, but we were complete opposites. Very different from each other except for how we looked.”

“When was the last time you saw your sister alive?”

Tears came to Rosalyn’s eyes, but she brushed them away. “At least a year and a half ago. We’ve never been close but grew even further apart as adults. Lindsey was in and out of drug rehab all the time. She still lived in Mobile.”

“And that’s where you’re from?” Steve already knew the answer to that but wondered if she would lie.

“Yes, but I haven’t lived there for nearly a year.”

Steve wondered where she’d been for the past six months, but he’d get to that.

“Do you know anything about your sister’s death?”

She shook her head. “No, but she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

“What makes you say that?”

This time the tears overflowed before Rosalyn could wipe them away. “Lindsey was in Pensacola because I asked her to meet me. We were supposed to meet at a restaurant a few blocks from here two days ago, but she never showed up.”

She gave him the name and address of a local café. Lindsey’s body had been found inside her car very close to that area.

“Lindsey’s pretty flighty,” Rosalyn continued. “I thought she’d just gotten the day or time wrong. Or that she was high again. I didn’t know she was dead until a waiter showed me a tiny section of the local paper that stated the police were looking for information about a deceased Jane Doe who looked exactly like me.”

Rosalyn stood up and grabbed a tissue from the box on the small desk. “I was coming by this afternoon to identify the body when I saw you.”

“You said she did drugs a lot, so what makes you think she was murdered? Don’t you think it’s more likely something happened with her drug abuse?”

“Normally, yes.” She sat back down. “But I suspect foul play because she was meeting me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Rosalyn’s blue eyes bore into him. “You saw her body, right?”

Steve nodded.

“I’ll answer your questions, I promise. But first please tell me, was she murdered?”

Steve couldn’t see any good in lying to her. “Yes, I’m sorry. She was strangled in her car.”

Rosalyn began to cry quietly, holding her face in her hands. Steve moved to sit next to her. No matter what had happened between the two of them, he would never deny comfort to someone who had lost a family member.

“I had hoped you would tell me something different. That it was related to drugs,” she finally said.

“I don’t understand why you don’t think it would’ve been.” In Steve’s experience, when regular people heard a family member had died, they did not assume it was murder. And if Lindsey had been involved in illegal drugs, Steve didn’t know why Rosalyn didn’t assume the murder wasn’t centered around that.

Because Rosalyn knew something. Something she wasn’t telling him.

“Rosalyn.” He tilted a finger under her chin so she was looking directly at him. “Tell me. Whatever is going on, I need you to tell me.”

She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her.

“I can’t.” Another tear slid silently down her cheek. “I can’t risk you too.”

Steve stared at the tiny woman—tiny, pregnant woman—determined to protect him. Why would she care about him if he was just someone she had scammed and robbed? Either way, he was getting to the bottom of all this.

“I can take care of myself, Rosalyn. Just tell me what’s going on.”

At first he didn’t think she was going to answer, but finally she did.

“For the past year someone has been stalking me.”

Steve sat up straighter. “Stalking you how?”

“Mostly he leaves notes. Ones he slides under my door while I’m sleeping at night.” She shuddered. “Although on occasion he has emailed, texted or called me.”

He’d been in law enforcement long enough to take stalkers very seriously. Especially ones who were close enough to leave notes under doors. That meant they were close and probably deadly. “What types of messages?”

“Never anything threatening. Not even ‘We’ll be together forever’ stuff. Usually just little comments about something that has happened in my day.”

Odd for a stalker, making it about her rather than about him. Stalkers were usually caught up in their own fantasy world and tried to make their victims a part of that.

“And you reported it?”

“Yes. I told my family first about a year ago. They just accused me of wanting attention. I decided to move across town, just to get rid of the weirdo, hoping that would stop it all.”

“But it didn’t?”

“The first night I moved into my new apartment, someone slid a note under my door.”

Steve frowned. The guy had been following her closely. “Did you go to the local police?”

“Yes, I talked to them in Mobile, but I had thrown a lot of the letters away, so they didn’t believe it was anyone wishing to do me harm.”

It was easy to be frustrated with the Mobile police for doing nothing to help Rosalyn, but the truth was, funds were always limited in local departments. If the notes weren’t threatening Rosalyn in any way, it would be easy to not give them or her much attention.

She stood up and began walking back and forth.

“It got so bad that after about a month I chose to just leave town. I had a pretty big savings account, so I quit my job and decided to go somewhere different. Anywhere different. I didn’t have a moving truck, didn’t grab a bunch of suitcases—I just got in my car one morning and left.”

She stopped walking for a minute.

“I ended up in Dallas. Thought it would be a cool town to vacation in while I was losing my annoying little follower. Thought I had done it too, until the second night. Another note under my door mentioning the crème brûlée I had eaten at dinner.”

She wasn’t looking at him, but he could hear the fear in her voice.

“I left just minutes later. Drove all around to make sure no one was following me. Ended up in Shreveport. I went straight to the police station.”

It wasn’t the best of plans, since nothing had happened in their jurisdiction, but Steve didn’t tell Rosalyn that. She would’ve been better off going to the Dallas police.

But a note that mentioned a dessert probably wouldn’t have been taken seriously there either.

“Nobody wanted to listen to me, but this one detective, Johnson, offered to meet me after he got off his shift. I told him everything, and he helped me. Or he tried.”

“What did he do?”

She began rubbing her hands on her legs, a nervous gesture he didn’t think she was aware of.

“I showed him what notes I had kept. He told me to keep them all, and any I got from now on, in a box. And he gave me a notebook and showed me how to keep track of everything that the Watcher did.”

He reached over and grabbed her hands so she would stop the rubbing. “The Watcher?”

“Yeah, that’s what I call him. I’ve kept everything since Detective Johnson showed me what to do.”

“And did he do anything with it? Did it go any further?”

“Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack the next day.”

Steve’s head snapped up. “Was he old?”

“Maybe fifty. And in pretty good shape.”

“That’s a damn unfortunate coincidence.” And probably a devastating blow for Rosalyn, to have found someone who wanted to help, then died.

“I thought so too until I got an anonymous email the next day about a drug that caused heart attacks.”

“What?”

“The Watcher killed Detective Johnson. He’s killed everyone I’ve told about him. I’m afraid you’ll be next.”