last twenty-four hours and, of course, hanging out with her son.
As usual, as they drove the three blocks from John’s house to theirs, Max insisted they play their game. He described in minute detail the front yard of a house they passed. He noticed a basketball half-hidden in the bushes, a red-and-white bicycle against the beige house and a patch of dry grass beneath a large pine tree.
“Awesome, Max,” she exclaimed when he’d finished.
“You have to be good at that kind of stuff if you want to be an FBI agent, don’t you, Mom?”
“That’s right, but you also have to get good grades and make good choices when you’re growing up. But you know, Max, you don’t have to be an FBI agent. You’re so smart you can be anything you want to be if you work for it.”
“I know, but I want to be an FBI agent like you,” he replied.
By that time, they had arrived at their house. Max went into his bedroom to play one of his video games while Amberly started frying burgers for dinner.
As she worked, she couldn’t help it that her mind went back to Cole Caldwell. She’d gotten mixed messages from him all afternoon. There had been moments when she’d caught him staring at her, when she’d felt the heat of male interest emanating toward her. But they were brief moments followed by coldness and an edge of resentment.
She told herself she didn’t care how he treated her, what his thoughts were of her. All that mattered was that they somehow figure out how to work together to discover who was killing the young women in Mystic Lake.
As she flipped the burgers and then made a quick salad, her thoughts moved from Cole to the crime. The dream catchers confused her.
It was a dichotomy for the killer to brutally stab three women to death and then hang a dream catcher above each victim as if to assure them happy dreams throughout eternity. What did it mean? What did the dream catchers mean to the killer?
After dinner, several games of Go Fish and a bath for Max, she tucked him into his bed for the night. “I’m sorry I won’t be around this weekend,” she said as she touched the owl pendent hanging around his neck.
“It’s okay. Me and Dad will have fun. We always do. Now, tell me a Granny Nightsong story before I go to sleep.”
“Granny Nightsong thought the wind was an old man who, when grouchy, blew. On a windy day, she’d yell at the old man, telling him to hush his mouth, to stuff a sock in it.” Max giggled at this, and the sound wrapped around her heart and squeezed it tight.
“She was funny.”
“She was funny and wonderful, and I wish she would have lived long enough that you could have grown up with her. She would have loved you so much.”
Max nodded, his eyelids beginning to droop. “Are you working on an important job now?”
“Very important. I’m helping a sheriff find a bad guy. His name is Sheriff Cole Caldwell.”
“Sheriff Cole… If I don’t be an FBI agent, maybe I’ll be a sheriff.” His eyes drifted closed and she knew he was asleep. Still, she remained seated on the edge of his bed, drawing in the scent of childhood, of little boy…that scent that belonged to Max alone.
She and John might have gotten a lot of things wrong between them, but Max had been nothing but right. He was her heart, her hopes and dreams.
She finally got up from his bed and left his room. She went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, threw a bag of red licorice on the table and then began to spread out the crime files.
There was no question that she was looking forward to tomorrow night and meeting up with Jeff Maynard and some of his friends at Bledsoe’s. Amberly had good instincts about people, and they might be more apt to talk to a woman than to a sheriff.
Going back to the first murder of Gretchen Johnson made sense to her. That was where the killer established his pattern, that’s where a possible personal connection could be found between killer and victim.
Cole had surprised her with his assertion that he go with her to the bar. There had been times during the afternoon that she’d thought he wanted her anywhere else but close to him.
He could go with her tomorrow night if it made him feel better, but