Torn - Cynthia Eden Page 0,91
back, but she knelt there, body slumped, chilled, as they checked him—and shook their heads.
Gone.
And his words kept replaying in her mind. A record that wouldn’t end. Don’t . . . t-trust . . . She glanced over her shoulder. Wade stared back at her, his expression carved from stone. Beside him, another EMT was trying to patch up Matthew Walker.
“It was him,” Matthew murmured. “All along . . . it was him.”
A shiver slid over her, and she wished that she’d been able to make a dead man talk, just a little bit longer.
THE AMBULANCE PULLED away from the scene, its lights blazing. Matthew Walker was in that vehicle, strapped down on a stretcher. He’d live. And he’d have plenty to talk about with the cops . . .
The crazy bastard brought a gun onto a college campus. Wade still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around that shit. The computer professor had sent the whole scene crashing straight to hell.
But Walker hadn’t been the only one there with a gun . . .
“You’re saying that Dr. North had a weapon stashed in his desk drawer? A gun?” Detective Black asked.
Wade turned toward him. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. What I said five times already.” Troy North was a dead man. Wade figured the guy’s body would be wheeled out any moment, and plenty of the student body had gathered to see the event. “I had disarmed Walker, I took his gun . . . but North grabbed Victoria. He backed her up to the desk and reached for his weapon—”
“And that’s when she got away from him,” Dace Black cut in.
Wade nodded.
“But he didn’t stop,” Dace continued, reading his notes. “He was firing, and you had to shoot back.”
“My first shot wasn’t meant to kill.” And he hadn’t, dammit. He’d wanted that bastard to go in alive. If North was the twisted freak they’d been seeking, then he wanted him in a cage. They needed to question him, to learn . . . had more women been taken? Were their more victims who needed closure?
We won’t know. Wade sighed. “But then things escalated. Troy was about to shoot Matthew, he was going to kill him.” Wade was certain of this. “I had to stop him.”
Because he’d suspected Matthew would have just been Troy’s first victim in that little shootout. I would have been the second. And then Victoria . . . Wade feared she would have been killed last. The better to enjoy her pain.
His gaze slid around the perimeter. He and Victoria had been separated as soon as the cops arrived. Wade knew that was standard operating procedure, the better for the cops to be able to question them separately—and then compare the statements they provided.
“Why the hell,” Dace wanted to know, “was Matthew so convinced Troy was the killer? How did he know?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” Wade said flatly.
“Yeah, but you and Victoria were here, too, talking with the psych doctor. So you must have been suspicious. What tipped you off?”
Wade had just caught sight of Victoria’s red hair, gleaming beneath the sunlight. “She knew,” he finally said. “Victoria is the one who convinced me to come by here. Said something about the guy was nagging at her. Something he’d said the first time they met.”
“And what would that be?”
She thought he knew that she’d killed her father.
Wade gave him a tired smile. “He was involved with both women who’d gone missing. Too much of a coincidence, right? So we didn’t head to the plane that’s waiting for us. We came here, to see if we could rattle his cage a bit.”
The doors to the Life Sciences building opened then and a black body bag was wheeled out.
“Oh, I’d say his cage was rattled,” Dace murmured.
Wade clenched his jaw. “You think I liked shooting him? That I wanted to take a life?”
Dace lifted his brows. “I think you’d do anything, if it meant that Dr. Palmer was safe.”
He wasn’t going to deny that very basic truth.
“I’d like to know more about that ‘hunch’ of hers,” Dace said. “Wonder . . . would it have anything to do with the fact that Dr. North was at her father’s trial? See, I did a little digging on my own . . . that text she got on her phone about her father . . . it made me curious.”
Wade held his gaze. “Nothing to be curious about there. The killer was jerking her around.”
“Ah . . .”