TO DIE FOR (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 8) - Willow Rose Page 0,59

been there—Detective Fraser and Detective Harder. The first one had grown a beard since the last time she saw him. It made him look sloppy. Lynn had never liked men with beards. She preferred them clean-shaven.

Like Jeff.

“What can I do for you today, Detectives?” she asked when they sat down. She felt how shaky her hands were and placed them in her lap so they wouldn’t see.

Detective Fraser cleared his throat. “We’re here about Jeffrey Johnson, your patient. Again.”

She tilted her head. “You know I can’t discuss my patients.”

“Yes, yes, we do know. But the thing is…” Fraser looked at Harder before continuing. “Well, the thing is…that it is now officially a murder case.”

Lynn stopped breathing. “A…a murder case?”

Harder nodded, then took over. “We found Joanna Harry’s body in a lake behind Jeffrey Johnson’s house.”

“We believe your client, Jeff Johnson, had kept her locked up somewhere, then later killed her. She was kept in a place with little to no sunlight and was terribly malnourished before her death, the autopsy showed.”

Lynn stared at them, barely able to breathe.

“Excuse me?”

“We think she might have been kept in a basement or something like it for quite some time. And then he decided to kill her.”

“I…I’m not sure I understand.”

“Her body was bruised, especially on the wrists, telling us she was kept in chains. She was found with blunt force trauma to the back of her head. She suffered several fractures to the skull, and we believe that is the cause of her death.”

“And you think my client…did all this to her?”

Fraser nodded. “Yes. He’s officially our main suspect, and we want to talk to him.”

“But he’s disappeared,” Harder said. “We haven’t been able to locate him. We went to his house with a warrant and didn’t find him or the basement.”

“But that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” Fraser said. “He might have had another place he kept her, and we were wondering if he ever spoke of another place, a summer house, a cabin in the mountains up north, or maybe a beach shack? Did he go anywhere to unwind?”

Lynn barely blinked. “I…not that I recall right now, but I will go through his file and all my notes and look, of course.”

They stood. Fraser handed her a card. “And then, we’d, of course, ask you to let us know if he shows his face here again. If he shows up to his next appointment, then please call this number. Keep him here until we can get here.”

Lynn nodded nervously while images of them on her patio table rushed through her mind—his hands on her breasts, his lips on her neck. She could still hear his heavy breathing in her ear, and it made her shiver.

“N-naturally, of course.”

Chapter 62

“I can’t really think of what exactly could have made her leave,” Bryan said and leaned back on the couch in his living room. We had been through all her childhood, her school friends, then later her co-workers from the hardware store where she worked, and all her close friends. Nothing seemed to stand out, and now the coffee pot was empty.

I leaned forward, rubbing my forehead while looking at my notes. “Wasn’t there anything that would give her a reason to want to disappear—anything at all? Did something happen to her? Her boyfriend Tommy died, but that wasn’t until after she had left, right?”

“It was six months after, actually.”

“I just have this feeling that it is somehow related to him,” I said, knowing we had been down this path before. “What’s happening now—I just can’t seem to connect the dots.”

Bryan’s gaze became distant, and he turned his head away. “There were days when I wondered if she had killed him. If she had come back to do it, or maybe stayed close by all the time.”

“Would Sarah be capable of something like that?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not the Sarah I knew, but…”

“But what?”

“She wasn’t completely herself before she disappeared. I got the feeling she wasn’t well.”

“And why do you think you had that feeling?”

He shrugged, then lowered his head. “No reason. It’s just a feeling; that’s all. She was different somehow.”

“How so?”

“She became introverted, pulled back and into herself. She wouldn’t talk to me or Tommy about it. Tommy came to me and said he was worried too.”

“Okay, okay, this is good,” I said. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

He looked at me. “As I said, it was just a feeling. I wasn’t even sure it was important, or if