Some sociopath who killed for the thrill of it. He’d heard of such people.
Or killed to get back at Miles Ryan?
He was a sheriff; he’d made enemies. He’d arrested people and testified against them. He’d helped send scores of people to prison.
One of them?
The list was endless, an exercise in paranoia.
He sighed, finally opening the file, finding himself drawn to the pages.
There was one detail about the accident that didn’t seem to fit, and over the years Miles had scribbled half a dozen question marks around it. He had learned of it when he’d been taken to the scene of the accident.
Strangely, whoever had been driving the car had covered Missy’s body with a blanket.
This fact had never made the papers.
For a while, there were hopes that the blanket would provide some clues to the identity of the driver. It hadn’t. It was a blanket typically found in emergency kits, the kind sold in a standard package with other assorted items at nearly every auto supply or department store across the country. There’d been no way to trace it.
But... why?
This was the part that continued to nag at Miles.
Why cover up the body, then run? It made no sense. When he’d raised the matter with Charlie, Charlie had said something that haunted Miles to this day: “It’s like the driver was trying to apologize.”
Or throw us off the track?
Miles didn’t know what to believe.
But he would find the driver, no matter how unlikely it seemed, simply because he wouldn’t give up. Then, and only then, could he imagine himself moving on.
Chapter 6
On Friday evening, three days after meeting Miles Ryan, Sarah Andrews was alone in her living room, nursing her second glass of wine, feeling about as rotten as a person could feel. Even though she knew the wine wouldn’t help, she knew that she’d nonetheless pour herself a third glass just as soon as this one was finished. She’d never been a big drinker, but it had been that kind of day.
Right now, she just wanted to escape.
Strangely, it hadn’t started off badly. She’d felt pretty good first thing in the morning and even during breakfast, but after that, the day had nose-dived rapidly. Sometime during the night before, the hot-water heater in her apartment had stopped working and she’d had to take a cold shower before heading off to school. When she got there, three of the four students in the front of the class had colds and spent the day coughing and sneezing in her direction when they weren’t acting up. The rest of the class seemed to follow their lead, and she hadn’t accomplished half of what she’d wanted to. After school, she’d stayed to catch up on some of her work, but when she was finally ready to head home, one of the tires on her car was flat. She’d had to call AAA and ended up waiting nearly an hour until they showed up; and by the time she got back to her apartment, the streets had been roped off for the Flower Festival that weekend and she’d had to park three blocks away. Then, to top it all off, no more than ten minutes after she’d walked in the door, an acquaintance had called from Baltimore, to let her know that Michael was getting married again in December.
That was when she’d opened the wine.
Now, finally feeling the effects of the alcohol, Sarah found herself wishing that AAA had taken a little longer with her tire, so she wouldn’t have been home to answer the phone when it rang. She wasn’t a close friend of the woman’s—she’d socialized with Sarah casually, since she’d originally been friends with Michael’s family—and had no idea why the woman felt the urge to let Sarah know what was going on. And even though she had passed on the information with the proper mix of sympathy and disbelief, Sarah couldn’t help suspecting that the woman would hang up the phone and immediately report back to Michael how Sarah had responded. Thank God she’d kept her composure.
But that was two glasses of wine ago, and now it wasn’t so easy. She didn’t want to hear about Michael. They were divorced, separated by law and choice, and unlike some divorced couples, they hadn’t talked since their last meeting in the lawyer’s office almost a year earlier. By that point, she’d considered herself lucky to be rid of him and had simply signed the papers without a word. The