Wedding Takedown. Geri Krotow

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      You’re aiding the enemy.

      A worm of guilt crept into her serenity and she let out an exasperated breath. Ever since last Christmas, when she’d delivered a bouquet of flowers to Zora, not realizing they were from a serial killer, her mind had been on overdrive. It was too easy to think that the rumors about the new mayor were true—that Tony Charbonneau was some kind of criminal who’d found a way to get rid of the previous mayor and get himself elected in short order. Even if the accusations against the previous mayor proved false, it didn’t mean the new mayor was anything but lucky or extremely ambitious. Perhaps a bit of both.

      And his wife had high-end tastes, which at times bordered on eccentric, usually in response to the most recent episode of her favorite reality TV series. She’d even send Kayla a video clip of one of the shows, demanding that her bouquets have the same shape. Kayla liked how her unique requests kept her on her artistic toes. It was easy to fall into the routine of everyday arrangements, and Kayla wanted to offer her customers something they couldn’t find anywhere else.

      The barn was dark but the LED light at the side entrance flooded the area as if it was daytime. Kayla was familiar with the building since she’d provided flowers for several weddings and graduations here over the past few years, first as a freelancer, taking contracts and storing flowers in her garage and kitchen refrigerator, and then after the shop opened, she’d been able to handle more volume.

      The barn looked forlorn and dark in the spring night. Rob usually left a couple of lights on inside, on timers, but with his other job managing a dairy farm, he had his hands full. It was easy to let something small slip his mind. Kayla knew the feeling all too well.

      Like how they’d put the most colorful aster blooms, normally more available in the fall, in Mrs. Vance’s bouquet, when Kayla knew darn well that the woman would see them as plain old mums. She hadn’t been expecting Mrs. Vance to label them harbingers of death, however.

      Her van bounced up the worn path through the field beside the large white barn and she winced as she hit a deep rut. She pulled off the muddy path and onto a dry patch of dirt. Better to walk a few hundred yards to the barn than risk wrecking her van in the dark. Spring thaw had a way of turning the hard clay soil of South Central Pennsylvania into thick, sucking mud not dissimilar to the mud fields she’d seen in the Netherlands as a child. Back when Dad had worked at the Hague and Mom had taken long hours away from her job as a private contractor to take Kayla and her siblings, Melody and Keith, on long sojourns through Europe.

      Her favorite had been in the tulip-growing region of the Netherlands. Holland had opened her nose and her eyes to the brilliance of bulb flowers, from hyacinths to parrot tulips. She hadn’t been happy as a child unless there was dirt under her nails from helping her mother plant rows and rows of bulbs, seeds and rose bushes.

      Her parents had indulged her when she proclaimed she was going to be a florist and own her own shop. They’d breathed an audible sigh of relief when she’d been accepted to Penn State and majored in horticulture. They assumed she’d end up in research.

      Instead her passion for dirt and flowers grew. But rather than being streamlined like a standard Dutch tulip, she’d behaved like the sprawling parrot tulip with its petals falling haphazardly, spreading her interests into the cultivation of hybrids while running her own florist shop and design studio.

      As she killed the engine, she thought she heard something high-pitched above the regular shutting-down noises. She paused. The van was only eighteen months old and she was so not in the mood for it to be in need of repair. She prayed the rut hadn’t ruined her front-end alignment or jiggled anything else loose.

      Forcing away the annoying thoughts, she got out and her feet immediately sank into the squishy mud. Her bright fuchsia rain boots kept her feet warm and dry.

      She clomped through the mud, selecting the key to the barn by feel from her key ring. It had a large soft cushiony frame around the top. She walked past a sedan and wondered if someone else was here.

      “No! You can’t do this—” A woman’s voice, loud and strident.

      A gunshot, punctuated by a woman’s scream, sounded in the still night, rooting Kayla to the spot.

      She had heard something high-pitched a few moments ago. Screaming.

      The sound of items crashing inside the barn unfroze her feet and her mind with them. The van was too far away for her to make it there, start the engine and drive off before whoever had fired the gun would know she was there.

      Call the police.

      She ran to the side of the barn, ducking low from the view of the side door. The door’s window glowed with the kitchen’s bright fluorescent lights. She made out the bulky figure of a man through the slatted blinds but couldn’t risk taking a closer look. Not if she was going to be of any help to the woman whose screaming she’d heard.

      That gunshot and scream hadn’t been like in the movies. It was real, scary as hell, and she knew she could be on the receiving end of a bullet if she didn’t play this right.

      Crawling on her knees to avoid detection, she squeezed between a tractor pull and a pile of hay bales. She worried that her van was too far down the drive and too much in plain view of anyone who left via the driveway. Did the shooter own the car she’d walked by?

      She wanted to run for it and drive away but she couldn’t risk the noise of her engine starting. Her logo was emblazoned on the van, making an anonymous getaway impossible. It would be a siren call to whoever had fired that shot to come after her, too.

      Shivers wracked her. From shock or an adrenaline rush, she had no idea as she hunkered down and willed herself to be one with the damp squishy ground and prickly hay bales. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and quickly dialed 911.

       Chapter 2

      Detective Riordan Ortega pressed the gas pedal to the floor as he sped along the farm road that led to the Weddings and More Barn. Rio wanted to get to the call before the other SVPD units made it.

      He liked to be the first on the scene to any major crime in town. It had nothing to do with who’d called in the gunshot, and everything to do with his instinctual sense of the ticking clock when it came to crime. The sooner he got the investigation under way, the better chance of catching the culprit.

      Silver Valley had always had its share of crime but lately things had been different—busier than he’d ever experienced since joining SVPD a decade ago. They’d just wrapped up the “Female Preacher Killer” case last December, only to be involved full-time in the embezzlement case against the former mayor. Tying up the loose ends on three murders by the serial killer had occupied all his time, and he’d been grateful that the Treasury Department had come into play for the mayor’s case. Because of the embezzlement charges and large amounts of money at stake, the Secret Service had been alerted and then pulled in their former boss, the US Department of Treasury. Secret Service was under Homeland Security these days but Rio still worked with many of the agents he’d met when he’d started on SVPD. Rio loved his job and knew he was good at it, but making sense out of columns of numbers wasn’t something that turned him on.

      Unlike Kayla Paruso.

      Shit. Kayla.

      She’d called in the emergency. A shoot-out right now, so close to the mayor’s daughter’s wedding, СКАЧАТЬ