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The sixth bullet hit the cedar-shake siding a few feet from me. I tried to get a bead on him, but the car was gone.
Breathing hard from the adrenaline, I began to straighten out of my crouch when I saw a blond figure in running clothes sprawled at the bottom of the porch stairs, blood pouring from a head wound. There was no use even going down to check for a pulse. There was no doubt in my mind that—
“Sydney!” Patty screamed behind me. “No! No!”
She began to collapse. I twisted and grabbed her in my arms.
“Why?” Patty sobbed into my chest. “Why Sydney?”
I didn’t have the heart right then to tell her that it looked to me like a case of mistaken identity.
Chapter
18
Within fifteen minutes, Dogwood Road was blocked off with traffic cones and the duplex was surrounded by yellow tape. Crime scene techs were photographing the body of Sydney Fox. A crowd had gathered. An unmarked cruiser pulled up at the perimeter, and Detectives Frost and Carmichael stepped out.
“Great,” Naomi muttered.
“You know them too?”
“Frost and Carmichael,” she said. “They led the city’s investigation into Rashawn Turnbull’s murder.”
“Good cops?” I said, putting aside my first impressions of them.
“Reasonably smart, adequately trained small-town detectives,” she said. “They say they’re by the book, but I suspect they cut corners, play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. And they tend to jump to conclusions.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, and I waited for them to study the corpse.
Frost scratched at his acne-scarred nose, nodded at Naomi. “Counselor.”
“Detective Frost,” Naomi said. “This is Alex Cross, my uncle.”
“We’ve met,” he said without enthusiasm. He turned to me. “This is my case.”
“I’m on vacation,” I said.
“I’m saying that you will have nothing to do with this murder except as a witness,” the detective insisted. “Are we good on that right from the get-go?”
“Your town, your ball game, Detective Frost.”
Carmichael said, “What happened?”
Naomi, Patty, and I gave our accounts of the evening, including the light going out on the porch and the racial slurs we’d all heard just before the gunfire.
Frost’s expression soured, and he asked, “Sydney having an interracial relationship too?”
Patty frowned, said, “Not that I know of.”
“Then they were trying to kill you and they shot Sydney by mistake,” Carmichael said, relieving me of the burden of telling her. “Both of you blondes and all.”
Stefan’s fiancée took the news hard and looked sick to her stomach. “Oh God. I wish I’d never come to this town.”
“In the morning we’ll need you at the station to give sworn statements,” Frost told us. “In the meantime, you need to leave the premises. We’ve got more members of the crime scene team on the way.”
Patty said, “Can’t I stay here? In my house?”
The older detective said, “You won’t get much sleep.”
