Love at First Sight - By B. J. Daniels Page 0,54
knelt down to inspect it more closely.
Pretty Patsy Wetsy, she thought with a start. She’d had a doll just like it.
Carefully, she reached in and started to lift the doll out, then jerked back with a muffled cry as she saw something that froze her blood.
JACK LET HIS EYES adjust to the moonlight. Exhaustion pulled at him. Weary from everything he’d learned, sick from all that he still didn’t know or understand, he crouched behind a tombstone and waited for the killer to make his move. He didn’t have to wait long.
A dark shape leaned out from behind one of the mausoleums. The shot breezed by so close, Jack thought it had grazed the side of his face. He ducked back, breathing hard. He waited a few moments, timing it, then peered out again.
Nothing moved. Thin clouds sailed across the moon, washing the cemetery in a ghostly white light. Long shadows hid behind headstones and trees, hanging on to the darkness.
Suddenly a furtive movement caught Jack’s eye. Someone ran out from behind one of the grave markers and now zigzagged through the pines and granite headstones toward the chain-link fence, toward the road and a large, dark car parked at its edge, a long-barreled pistol in the shooter’s left hand.
Jack leveled his gun, leaning across the top of the gravestone, waiting for a shot. Just as the figure reached the fence, he pulled the trigger. Boom. The sound echoed across the graveyard, bouncing like a pinball through the granite stones.
The would-be assassin seemed to hesitate for an instant as if the bullet had found its mark. Jack had shot only to wound the man. A leg shot. But as the figure scampered up and over the fence, dropping to the other side, Jack knew he’d erred on the side of safety and had let the killer get away.
He took one more shot, knowing it was futile. Too far to shoot for any accuracy. No chance of getting closer before the person reached the car.
The bullet shattered the back side window of the large, dark car as the driver leaped in. Jack heard the sound of an engine roar to life and watched as the car sped away in a cloud of dust and gravel.
Jack swore as he holstered the pistol and ran back to the open grave—and Karen.
“Did you get him?” she asked in a whisper.
He shook his head. “I didn’t even get a good look at him.” Medium height, medium build, wearing a baseball cap. Driving a large, dark, American-made car. He could have been the man Karen had seen with Liz at the Carlton. He could have been anyone.
“You’ll get him next time.” She smiled up at him with a mixture of relief and love that was almost his undoing.
He offered her a hand up out of the hole and noticed she was holding something.
Her expression changed as she saw his gaze shift to the doll in her hands. “You aren’t going to believe this, Jack.”
She held the doll out to him.
He hesitated, not wanting to touch it. Not because it was evidence, although it probably would have been, had they not illegally tampered with the grave. Touching the doll would be a connection to the person who’d put it into the grave. That was a connection he would have liked to have avoided, but he could see that wasn’t possible.
He took the doll, then reached for Karen. He just wanted to get the hell out of here. And fast.
“LOOK AT THIS,” Karen said after they’d left the cemetery far behind. The lights from Missoula bled through the low-hanging clouds making the buds on the trees glisten bright new green. It was the trees that made Missoula the Garden City. Soon the branches would be filled with lush green leaves that would form canopies over the streets.
Carefully, she held out the doll for him to see.
Someone had tied a piece of surgical hose around the doll’s neck like—like an umbilical cord, Jack realized with a start. “Oh, my God,” he whispered.
She put the doll down on her lap and stared at it. “It looks as if a child made the clothes for it.” He could hear the emotion in her voice and knew she was close to tears. “I think this doll was Liz’s.”
His gaze leaped to her. “What makes you think that?”
She turned back the small collar on the doll’s worn dress. The tiny homemade tag inside read: Jones Original.
“I had a doll just like this,” she