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How long had she been walled up in the garage of this house? And who was she?
CHAPTER TWO
BETH SAW THE detective go utterly still. When he finally stepped down and faced her, his expression had been wiped clean, but she could feel his tension.
“I need to make a call or two,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d wait outside, Ms. Marshall.”
However pleasantly phrased, it was an order. She nodded and hurried out into the sunlight.
“What?” her brother demanded.
“I don’t know. He looked, said he has to make calls and asked that we wait out here.”
“Damn, it’s hot,” Matt muttered.
Beth saw how pink Emily’s face was. Her own face felt too warm. They should have long since renewed their sunscreen. After putting it on first thing this morning, she’d dropped it in her tote bag, currently sitting on the workbench. “We could go inside, get something to drink,” she suggested.
“Make conversation with Dad?”
“Would that be the worst thing in the world?”
His mouth tightened. “Let’s just sit in the shade.”
“I’ll get the cooler. We can at least have drinks.”
While a police detective decided what to do about the dead woman encased in the wall of the house, she thought, semi-hysterically. Whoever she was, she might have been there the whole time Beth and the others had lived here. As a kid, she’d never have noticed that the wallboard looked a little different. Although…didn’t she used to leave her bike there? Often letting it tip over and bash the wall?
When she went into the garage, she saw the detective’s broad back and his phone at his ear. Somehow he heard her, though, because he swung around, his dark eyes locking onto her.
Until now, she hadn’t fully let herself notice how handsome he was. Coppery-brown skin stretched over some impressive cheekbones and a strong jaw. A lot of the Hispanic farmworkers she saw in town were stocky and on the short side. The detective had to be close to six feet tall and athletic in a broad-shouldered, lean way. As his name suggested, he had black hair and the darkest eyes she’d ever seen.
He also carried an alarmingly large gun at his hip.
Trying to hide her shiver, she scurried to the small cooler, lifted it for his inspection, and waited for his nod before retreating outside with it. Matt and Emily had pulled folding lawn chairs against the back wall of the house, where the sun, high in the sky, granted them a meager two feet of shade. Since there wasn’t a third chair—they’d come across these in the garage yesterday—Beth sank cross-legged onto the stiff, brown grass and opened the cooler.
“Who wants what?”
Emily peered over her shoulder. “Diet cola.”
Matt took an energy drink, Beth water. Her body sighed in relief to be sitting, but she became more aware of the painful spot on her butt where she’d landed on the concrete floor, and one almost as bad on her shoulder. Plus, her nerves felt as if they were being stretched on a medieval rack. What was the detective saying? When would he come out to talk to them? Meantime, she prayed her father hadn’t noticed the new arrival, wouldn’t emerge to see what was going on. It was bad enough to imagine Detective Navarro interviewing Dad, but Beth didn’t need the stress of dealing with him right now.
Matt stared straight ahead. Beyond him, Emily curled forward, clutching her drink and seemingly studying the grass, or maybe her feet. Beth’s gaze darted from her sister and brother to the corner of the house that hid the side door into the garage, to the brick patio, then back to start all over again. What probably wasn’t more than a couple minutes felt like an eternity.
Detective Navarro appeared, even more intimidating than he’d been when she first saw him. Beth wished he had a more expressive face.
Emily straightened and stared at him.
Matt stood. “So?”
“I’m confident enough those are human remains that I have a CSI team on the way. I don’t want to touch anything until they photograph and fingerprint the section of wall that will have to be torn out.”
On a shudder, Beth hugged her knees. She’d known but still hoped he would say, “I don’t know what we’re looking at, but it’s not human.”
