Holding Out for a Hero Read online

  “Soon,” the dog’s owner said to Ryan with a quick glance to her stomach, “you’ll have someone to play with who’s even better than a puppy.”

  Ryan didn’t look convinced.

  “Boy or girl?” the man asked.

  “Girl.”

  “Must be an exciting time for you,” he observed. Shelley had no response, just an empty, festering feeling that took her breath away—right when she needed it most. The back pain had her closing her eyes. She squelched the tears. She wasn’t even sure which of her many messes she wanted to cry about this time: her ex-husband, missing and wanted by the police, her father’s worsening Alzheimer’s or the loneliness that dogged her steps.

  After a minute, she opened her eyes and cleared her throat, her mind scrambling for a response. She didn’t need to bother. Tall, dark and bushy knew a messed-up female when he saw one. He took about three steps back, his eyes guarded. “There’s such a thing as too much excitement. You all right?”

  “I’m fine. We’re running late. Ryan, come on. Time to go.”

  Ryan, however, had left the sidewalk and was hurrying toward the large front window of the house whose sidewalk they were standing on: the newlyweds’. Shelley’d waved a brief hello a time or two but never stopped to chat. If you didn’t count Mr. Dupont, tall, dark and bushy was the first neighbor she’d spoken more than a greeting to, apart from Bianca.

  Not really a successful encounter for either of them. The man and his pet were already at the next house. Not looking back.

  “Ryan, wait!” She skipped the walkway and rushed across the grass and around the back of the red Prius in the carport.

  Ryan peered inside the house—a short, unafraid Peeping Tom—and asked, “Asleep?”

  Great—just what Shelley needed. She didn’t want to deal with the woman waking up and seeing two people looking in the window as if they were spying. “Come on, Ryan. We need to get to your school. Then you can have something to drink.”

  Shelley carefully bent down, her hands cupping Ryan under his arms, and started to scoop him up. Since his father disappeared, Ryan spent half his time being clingy and the other half being angry. She was doing her best to deal with both, but she’d had only a little over a year to practice. Ryan was Larry’s son, but Larry had gotten full custody when Ryan’s mother went to prison.

  So many secrets in her ex’s life.

  Ryan, giggling, struggled and pulled away. She understood. The mommy in her wanted to swing him high, tickle his stomach, get him laughing, maybe laugh herself. Ryan escaped her fingers and turned back to the window.

  Shelley followed and stepped closer to the window. Judging by the blood and open, unblinking eyes, the woman who lay on the floor wasn’t asleep. She was dead.

  Worst of all, Shelley recognized the man standing behind the woman.

  Larry Wagner, her ex-husband.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I JUST MET Shelley Wagner face-to-face.” Oscar Guzman sat on his bed, Peeve content and panting at his feet, and spoke via phone to Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Townley. Currently, Townley was Oscar’s boss at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before that, during Oscar’s military service, Townley had been the second lieutenant who’d given Oscar most of his orders. Of all the men Oscar had served with, he respected Townley the most. So much so that when Townley requested Oscar be pulled from a long-term assignment for this under-the-radar case in small-dot-on-a-map, New Mexico, Oscar said yes before he’d known the specifics.

  Of course, Oscar had spent a summer of his childhood in this small dot and had an aunt here. He had contacts in Sarasota Falls and could get close to Shelley Wagner without her suspecting who he worked for and what he wanted: her ex-husband, Larry Wagner.

  “She was walking her son to preschool.” No surprise there. Since his arrival, Oscar had tracked her routine. Two weeks ago she’d made things amazingly easy by moving into a garage apartment just five houses away from his aunt’s bed-and-breakfast.

  “I thought we were going to avoid contact for now,” Townley said.

  Oscar thought about Shelley and just how hard, in the flesh, she’d been to avoid. For a moment, when he realized she was heading his way but also her son was doing a nosedive aimed at Peeve, he’d been unable to move.

  She’d been wearing white capris, a huge red shirt and sandals. Her toes had been painted the same red as her shirt. Cops noticed things like that.

  Even more, red-blooded men noticed things like that.

  Pregnancy, if anything, only made her more beautiful.

  But he’d not been in his cop persona. He’d been an overtired dog walker thinking about a big breakfast and his bed. “She must have been running late. Usually she’s gone when I walk Peeve.”

  “Anything unusual happen?”

  “No, not really. Ryan wanted to pet Peeve. She and I exchanged pleasantries. I acted like I didn’t have time. She acted like she wanted to get away. After a moment, I watched her hightail it back to her apartment. Funny, I thought she was taking the kid to preschool. Maybe she forgot something. Anyway, it was bound to happen, us meeting. We’re living so close.”

  Townley waited a couple of beats before saying, “You’re right. Do you think there was something unusual about her being late?”

  “I do. Before this, she left at the same time every morning with a variation of only three minutes.”

  Anyone else would have laughed. Not Townley. He’d taught his soldiers about punctuality. “Okay, let me know if anything changes.”

  Punching the off button, Oscar lay down on his bed, sweats still on. He stared at his police uniform over the chair by the window. He was bone-tired and intrigued. He was still amazed that he worked for one law-enforcement agency and was undercover for another one.

  The graveyard shift was a tough one, but he’d done worse.

  Shelley Wagner wasn’t what he remembered or expected.

  He’d known her briefly as a kid, but he’d not seen her in sixteen years. Nor had he kept track of her, so reading about her and studying her photos from before Larry Wagner’s departure had been informative. Ten years ago, she’d been a driven high school student; six years ago, she’d been accepted into every college she’d applied to; and two years ago, she’d come home to spend one more summer with her family.

  From what he could tell, nothing had derailed her until her parents’ illnesses and her misfortune of meeting LeRoy Saunders, also known as Larry Wagner, and by a few other names—some even the FBI probably didn’t know.

  He wasn’t sure why this morning’s encounter had him on edge. He’d never hesitated to think the worst of people; military intelligence had a way of wringing empathy and sympathy out of a man. He stretched out on the bed. He’d reported the encounter, knew where she was, and needed sleep. Still, his mind continued going over the scene and what was happening in the neighborhood. There’d been a black cat sleeping on the top of one of the parked cars. A child’s scooter had been tossed carelessly in one yard. A white car had driven down the road, not in a hurry.

  Hours later, a light knock on the door woke him. The sun still brightened his windows, and he was due back to work in an hour. Peeve was long gone, no doubt given freedom the first time he whimpered at the door. Oscar was going to have a hard time separating Peeve from Aunt Bianca. Or would it be Aunt Bianca from Peeve?

  “Oscar! Get up,” she yelled from downstairs. Aunt Bianca didn’t know how to whisper. She’d not been in the military, but she could take on any drill sergeant when it came to giving orders.

  He headed for the hallway bathroom, and after splashing water on his face, he went down the stairs to the kitchen, where Aunt Bianca waited.

  “I have chicken on the table.”

  It was never that simple. Aunt Bianca usually had some household maintenance detail she’d like
him to attend to, or worse. Tonight was the or worse.

  “Abigail Simms’s granddaughter will be in town this weekend.” Bianca sounded very matter-of-fact.

  Oscar didn’t take the bait. Instead, he finished his first helping of chicken.

  Aunt Bianca was patient. She gave him a second helping before adding, “She’s here for Abigail’s birthday.”

  “That’s nice,” Oscar said.

  “I told Abigail that you had some free time Saturday and that you might be convinced to take her granddaughter for a ride on that bike of yours.”

  Funny, when Oscar first arrived on his aunt’s doorstep, she’d hated the motorcycle.

  “Death machine,” she’d called it.

  Now it seemed the death machine was okay as long as she could connect it to a little matchmaking.

  “I’m doing some undercover work this weekend,” he said, heading to the pantry to look for dessert.

  Aunt Bianca placed an elbow on the table, crooked her hand and placed her chin in it, looking at him and waiting. His mother did the same thing when she wanted an answer.

  Bianca loved that he’d joined the police department, never dreaming that strings had been pulled and procedures ignored. Even chief of police Tom Riley had no clue his new rookie wasn’t a rookie at all.

  Somehow the deception felt wrong. He tried to blame it on keeping secrets from his aunt, but he’d grown to respect Riley and wished the man was privy to all the details.

  His FBI boss, Townley, insisted on the assignment. “This legitimately gives you access not only to the files but also to the people who wrote them. If we can prevent Larry Wagner from conning even one more person, your role will have made a difference.”

  Townley had that right. So far, Larry Wagner, Saunders, Templeton, whatever name he was working under, had conned a lot of people. He was an equal opportunity crook and didn’t care who he was taking advantage of.

  That he’d married Shelley and left her pregnant without any remorse said it all. He was a man without a conscience, and his crimes were escalating. Sarasota Falls—a town with two squad cars and six officers—had been taken, from face-to-face fraud to account hacking. If acting as an officer, low man on the totem pole, working eight at night until eight in the morning, was what it took to bring Wagner down, Oscar would willingly do it.

  Chocolate-chip cookies discovered, he headed back to the kitchen.

  “You’re not working the whole weekend,” his aunt protested. “You need some time to play.”

  “I’ll play when I’ve closed a few of these cases.”

  Mainly Shelley Wagner’s, a woman who operated alone and who appeared to be a good—albeit hovering—mother.

  “But—” Aunt Bianca started.

  He put his plate in the sink and gave his aunt a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll let you know when and if I need a date, but believe me, I can find my own girl.”

  “By the time you go looking,” Aunt Bianca muttered, “you’ll be too old to do more than watch television and complain about your health.”

  “You’ve been talking to my mother again,” Oscar accused her.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, he sat at his desk, finishing up his last report when his phone rang.

  “Hi, Mom,” he answered, earning a few smirks from other officers in the room.

  His mother filled him in on his sister’s latest antics as well as his brothers’ accomplishments. She segued to a funny story about his uncle Rudy’s garage, and finished by saying how excited she was that he had a date this weekend with a neighbor’s granddaughter.

  Ah, the phone call was the result of a joint effort between his aunt and his mother.

  “I’m at work, Mom, and need to finish up.” Since his return stateside a year ago, his mother had been trying to make up for lost time. She continued a moment more about family matters and then signed off. Oscar had just a few more things to do before he could go. Just as Oscar was closing up the last open file on his computer, thinking about getting to his aunt’s place and sleep, Lucas Stillwater came in, a Snickers bar in hand. On the small Sarasota Falls police roster, he was long-term, having been with the department for over twenty years, and he hadn’t been young when he joined.

  Lucas now worked the day desk and no longer patrolled. The most pressing job he had was visiting schools and discussing Stranger Danger. He paused by Oscar’s desk to say, “Hey! Riley just called. We found a DB, and you’ll never guess where.”

  Oscar waited. Lucas liked to play guessing games, which Oscar didn’t have time for. Stillwater talked too much and worked too little. It hadn’t always been that way. At least, that was what Oscar had heard. According to Chief Riley, Stillwater’s retirement was merely months away, and his goal was keeping alive and out of trouble. Oscar squinted at the computer screen and responded, “Where?”

  “Vine Street. Right down from where you are.”

  Oscar’s fingers stilled. His aunt had a few older neighbors. He hoped it wasn’t Abigail Simms from across the street. But...

  “That young couple fairly new to the town,” Stillwater continued. “She’s a schoolteacher. Her husband manages Little’s Supermarket.”

  Something heavy formed in Oscar’s chest. It moved to his stomach, started to churn. This wasn’t good.

  “The last name’s Livingston. She...”

  The chair squealed against the floor as Oscar scooted away from his desk. Candace indeed lived three houses down from him and had hung around with his little sister when they were in school. Candace and her husband, Cody, had moved here nine months ago when she secured a teaching job. Cody managed Little’s Supermarket, a chain owned by Candace’s father. Oscar stood, reaching for his badge and touching the sidearm already secure in his holster.

  Lucas let out a low whistle and bemoaned, “We still haven’t gotten over the excitement of Larry Wagner and making the national news. Now this. Chief Riley’s not going to be happy.”

  Oscar didn’t care.

  Candace murdered?

  She represented what was good and right in the world.

  He had to pause a moment, get his bearings and ask the right questions. “Who reported this?”

  “We got a call from Crime Stoppers.”

  Anger, white-hot and immediate, sent Oscar to the door.

  “Bailey and Riley are already on site.”

  Officer Leann Bailey was all the help Oscar needed. Right now Chief Riley thought Oscar was wet behind the ears, good only for traffic stops and petty crimes...but this was different. Personal. Riley might take lead investigator, but Oscar would be alongside him for this, never mind the hours. He’d known Candace most of his life, and she was all of twenty-three and had been married just over a year. Who would take her life? She and her husband, Cody, didn’t seem to own anything of real value. True, her dad was a millionaire a few times over, but Candace and Cody preferred to make it on their own. Before taking the assignment here, he’d even driven up and joined her and her husband for a couple of barbecues in their backyard. Twice she’d tried to fix him up with a coworker. He should have gone, just once, to make her happy. Now...

  Oscar paused as he opened the door. “They know time of death?”

  “Just that it was yesterday morning,” Stillwater said.

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Head trauma. Some sign of a struggle. Husband probably did it. Supposedly he’s out of town. They haven’t been able to—”

  It took Oscar ten minutes to drive to his neighborhood. Already police tape cordoned off the house. He parked his motorcycle the next house down from Candace’s and swung one leg over the seat. He couldn’t proceed, though, because suddenly cotton billowed in his throat.

  This was little Candace. He’d taken her to her first dance because the boy wh
o’d invited her had backed out at the last minute, and Oscar’s little sister, Anna, had come crying to Oscar. Oh, his brothers had teased, but in the end, Oscar’d had a great time. He and his brothers had waylaid the date-breaker a few days later and made him aware that Candace and Anna were not in his little black book unless he wanted a big black eye.

  The memories made it hard to move.

  It occurred to Oscar that, except for fellow soldiers, this was the first death he’d be working of someone he loved. And now he was glad his case had sent him to the Sarasota Falls Police Department.

  But to make a difference here, he’d have to convince himself to walk past the cordon tape, into Candace’s house, and ask Riley for the facts.

  Oscar could see the facts displayed over the front yard. This was a house, cared for by two individuals building a home.

  He took off his dark glasses, momentarily blinking at the sudden brightness. When his eyes adjusted, he noted a tiny lizard crawling on top of the gray block fence next to the carport. It was probably hoping for a scent of oranges, maybe the hint of an early spring breeze. No such luck. As if realizing the futility, the lizard scurried off and disappeared into a hole in the dirt.

  What had it seen? Heard?

  Nothing it was willing to share with law enforcement.

  The neighborhood was quiet, as if nature knew there’d been a disturbance and was now withdrawing—like the lizard—leaving them to investigate the disruption.

  Next to the front door, two chairs boasted bright blue cushions. They appeared new but had been used. Candace’s tennis shoes were under one of them. She’d obviously been playing in the mud again, pretending to garden. She’d complained last week about “everything dying.”

  And now she was dead.

  A tiny table was situated between the two chairs. On it, a pair of gardening shears sat with the same black, lumpy mud on its blades as on the bottom of the shoes. Maybe she’d been digging with the shears instead of using a trowel. There was also a pair of flowered gloves that surely were too big for Candace’s small hands. He’d watched her one day, on her knees in the sodden yard. She’d wanted perfection, every rock moved, every weed eliminated. Her fingers had gone through the loose dirt, pushing tiny holes into sections, reinventing space and filling it back in with something that would grow: new life.