Dying Echo A Grim Reaper Mystery - By Judy Clemens Page 0,74
I should ask you that.”
He glanced around, as if afraid someone would see them together. Or maybe afraid they wouldn’t.
“I’m not going to assault you,” Casey said. “I just want to talk.”
“You are assaulting me.”
“No, I’m keeping you from reaching for your gun.”
“What gun?”
“Please. Who wears a sweatshirt in Texas on a day like this?”
“Don’t take it.”
“I’m not going to touch it. Like I said, I want to talk.”
“About what? I don’t know you.”
“Exactly.”
“What?” He licked his lips and glanced at his phone, where it lay on the ground.
“No one’s there,” Casey said.
“What?” He was like a broken record.
“You weren’t really talking to anyone on the phone. So there’s no one there.”
A flush crept up his neck, and blotchy red spots stained his cheeks. Up close he looked younger than Casey had originally thought. His lips were a dark pink, and pale freckles were scattered across his nose and cheekbones. He blinked rapidly and straightened his shoulders as much as he could while she still held his arm. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“That’s really the way you want to play it?”
He glanced around again, shifting from one foot to the other. “I don’t understand.”
Casey sighed. “Look. You were following us. I caught you. Now is the time when you tell me why you were doing that.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.” He clenched his jaw, reminding her of those toddlers she’d seen.
“I could make you.” She squeezed harder.
He winced. “You can’t. And you’ll get in trouble.” Again with the toddler thing.
“Who are you going to tattle to?”
His chin trembled. “My boss.”
“Your boss? Who’s your boss?”
He pinched his lips together.
She moved forward so he could see into her eyes. His were unreadable behind his sunglasses. “Look, I’ll let you go, but if I see you reaching for your gun it won’t be pretty. Trust me on that.”
He hesitated for only a few seconds before nodding.
She allowed him to yank his arm away, and he rubbed it.
“Yes, my boss sent me. And now I see why.”
“Look, I didn’t want to hurt you. But I also didn’t want to get shot, and didn’t want some weirdo catching me at a bad time.”
“I’m not a weirdo.”
“So who are you?”
He made a slight move, and Casey grabbed his arm again.
“Hey,” he said. “I just want to show you something. Not my gun.”
She narrowed her eyes, but let him move.
He pulled up his sweatshirt to show her a badge clipped to his belt.
Great. “You’re a cop?”
He nodded, and gave her a very toddler-like smirk. “Which means you are in very big trouble.”
Chapter Thirty
“I didn’t know he was a cop,” Casey said for the fiftieth time. “All I knew was he was following us, and I didn’t want to get shot.”
The woman on the other side of the table, one Chief Roseanne Kay, watched Casey with flat eyes. She wore a police uniform, dark-blue-rimmed glasses, and a hairstyle that could only be described as, well, short. What there was of her hair was salt-and-pepper, with just a little more salt. She finally blinked. Once. “You assaulted a police officer.”
“Well, he hadn’t introduced himself, had he? In fact, he was going out of his way to not look like law enforcement. Jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt. If anything, I guess the sunglasses should have given it away, but you can’t blame me for assuming regular Texan citizens might actually use those to block the sun. You can’t charge me for something I wasn’t even aware of.”
“Actually, I can. But the question is, do I want to?”
She had the power. She was the chief. Which meant she’d been on the job when Elizabeth Mann had disappeared.
“What I want to know, Ms.—” The chief made a show of looking over Casey’s license yet again. “—Kaufmann, is it?”
Casey hadn’t corrected the information printed on the license. She was too annoyed.
“—is what you are doing in our little town.”
“You know,” Casey said, “you could’ve just asked, instead of sending a child to spy on me.”
The chief’s mouth twitched, but Casey wasn’t sure if that was from humor or irritation. “Or you might have just come to us.”
“Is that the law now? You visit a town and have to check in with the cops before doing anything else?”
“It’s not the law. But it might make things easier if you’re looking up an old crime. The police do try to protect and serve.”
“How do you know what I’m looking up?”
“Little birdies told me.”
Uh-huh. “I had my reasons for doing this on my own.”