Standing Fast. Maggie K. Black

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СКАЧАТЬ that you and your daddy are okay,” Maisy said, softly. “Like Queenie searches your house for things. Now, your daddy is going to help the police and you are going to come to school with me. We’ll have special strawberries and waffles for breakfast. Would you like that?”

      Allie stuck her lip out. “Queenie comes too?”

      Maisy looked down. A young beagle sat by her ankle. It looked up protectively at Allie in a way that told her that she wouldn’t be able to shake the dog, even if she wanted to. “Yes, of course. Queenie can come too.”

      “Queenie likes waffles.” Allie tucked her head against Maisy’s chest and she felt the young girl shudder in the safety of her arms.

      Chase met her eyes over Allie’s head again. “Thank you.”

      “No problem. We’ll see you later.”

      The pink-and-orange glow of a Texas dawn had deepened over the horizon. The first parents would be at the preschool ready to drop their kids off in a little over an hour. She started to turn away when she heard Justin calling her name. She looked back. The captain was striding toward them. Something glittered in his gloved hand. It was a sturdy gold cross, dangling on the end of a chain.

      He stretched the pendant toward her. “Before you go, one of our officers just found this buried under the floorboards in Chase’s house. I was wondering if you could identify it?”

      Her blood ran cold as suddenly as if she’d just plunged into ice. She nodded. Her mouth opened, but for a moment, no words came out. Justin Blackwood turned the cross over and the early morning light fell on the engraved words she’d so carefully chosen as a teenager years ago. I love you, Dad—Maisy.

      Her heart sank to a place that was worse than disappointment or even sadness. “Yes, that’s the cross I gave my father for Christmas when I was thirteen, a few months after my mother died. Despite our differences, he wore it under his uniform and never took it off. When the Red Rose Killer murdered him, somebody stole it from his body.”

      She could almost feel Chase’s gaze on her face, but she forced herself to turn away without meeting his eye. She didn’t even begin to know what to think. But the fact that it had now shown up in Chase McLear’s home made it a lot harder to hold on to the faint hope that the father of the little girl she now held in her arms wasn’t somehow linked to his murder.

      * * *

      “Stephen Butler, commissary cook!” Preston slapped the glossy photo of the corpse of one of the Red Rose Killer’s most recent victims down on the interrogation table in front of Chase. “Found dead behind a restaurant off base. Boyd Sullivan used his uniform and ID to sneak onto base after escaping prison. Did you lure him to the woods for Boyd? Are you responsible for this man’s murder?”

      “No, sir.” Chase’s jaw ached and his lower back twinged with the reminder that he hadn’t stood or stretched in hours. But he wasn’t about to let his bearing relax. They’d brought him in for questioning in the same track pants and T-shirt he’d been wearing when they’d arrested him. Being challenged by uniformed men while in his civvies made the humiliation he felt even worse. But he wasn’t about to give in to the temptation to slouch.

      An airman was an airman, even out of uniform.

      His eyes roamed over the glossy picture of the dead young man. The Red Rose Killer’s first set of victims before his arrest had been linked by a common thread—they were all people who’d treated him worse than he felt he’d deserved. A homecoming queen who’d broken his heart, a high school bully and a gas station attendant who’d fired him had been the first three people he had killed. A woman he’d once dated and her new boyfriend rounded out the five murders that he’d gone to prison for. But since breaking out of prison, his targets had been more mixed. Some seemed to be revenge killings, complete with a red rose and a note left on the body. Others, like poor Stephen Butler, seemed to have been killed for practical reasons, like gaining access to the base or the kennels. Preston had already covered the first set of victims and had now moved onto crimes committed since Boyd had broken out of prison.

      Captain Justin Blackwood stood stone-faced and impassive by the door, apparently content to watch as Preston conducted the questioning with the volume and aggression of an angry terrier that had cornered a rat. Chase wasn’t sure what that meant. Was the captain not as convinced of his guilt as the lieutenant was? He could only hope that the forensic team was taking the cut in Allie’s window screen, the torn picture and the footsteps in the dirt as seriously as Security Forces were taking their investigation into him.

      When Lieutenant Ethan Webb had met him in a coffee shop three and a half weeks ago and told him his name had shown up on Boyd Sullivan’s prison visitor list, Chase had been both shocked and indignant; his frustration at just how ludicrous the whole situation was had shown in both his tone of voice and his body language. He still kicked himself for that. Growing up, his grandfather, Senior Master Sergeant Donald McLear, had drilled into him that a man and a hero always kept his chin high and his emotions in check. But the idea that he’d do anything to help Boyd Sullivan had been both insulting and laughable. How could anyone think he’d want to spend one minute in the presence of that monster? He’d expected his name would be cleared immediately and that whoever had used his name to cover their tracks had picked him at random. Even the fact that his laptop had been stolen from his truck, along with his gym bag and toolbox, had seemed like a cruel coincidence.

      But any hope that he wasn’t being personally targeted, which had remained flickering in his heart, was completely snuffed out the second Captain Blackwood had held the late Chief Master Sergeant Clint Lockwood’s gold cross in Maisy’s startled face. The thought that it had been found under his living room floorboards chilled him to the bone. He’d been set up, no doubt about it, by someone who’d both been inside his home and had eyes on his truck. He didn’t know who and he didn’t know why. But one thing was certain—for the sake of his little girl, he had to clear his name.

      “Landon Martelli and Tamara Peterson,” Preston barked, as he slammed the pictures of two more of Sullivan’s victims down on the table. “Both were K-9 trainers and murdered by someone who opened the kennel doors, letting about two hundred dogs go free. You don’t have an alibi for the morning this happened, do you?”

      Chase fought the urge to cross his arms. “As I’ve stated before, I was on a video chat with a military contractor named Ajay Joseph, who I used to work with in Afghanistan, from four fifteen in the morning until my cell phone rang shortly after oh five hundred with an alert that Boyd Sullivan had escaped prison and let dogs loose on base. I paused the video call and went into the bedroom to answer my cell phone and spoke to Master Sergeant Westley James. When I returned to the living room, approximately eight minutes later, my daughter, Allie, was up and playing with Queenie and the video call had ended.”

      “But you have no way to corroborate that story,” Preston interjected.

      “That I was at home and on a video call when Sullivan broke onto base? No, I don’t. Because my laptop was stolen, along with my gym bag and toolbox, from my truck when I was off base and I haven’t been able to reach my contact.”

      Preston smirked. Yeah, Chase knew how weak his alibi sounded. It didn’t help that he hadn’t been able to reach Ajay since then. But he was an Afghan, an independent contractor and a coordinator between locals and the United States Air Force. Ajay wasn’t stationed on base, and off-base communication in his part of Afghanistan had been unstable.

      “Two dozen of the dogs Boyd let out of the kennels still haven’t been found, Airman,” Preston said. “Many of them had PTSD from serving their country and СКАЧАТЬ