CJ couldn’t talk about this anymore. Braddock was saying something to her, but she couldn’t listen.
Not right now.
Right now, full-on reality was throttling through her.
Her sister was dead.
The bastard responsible was out there ... getting away with it.
Chapter Seven
3:30 p.m.
Braddock guided his SUV onto the shoulder of the road. The strip of Triana Boulevard that ran between Johnson Road and Redstone Arsenal was deserted except for the white forensics van.
He sat there, his hands braced on the steering wheel, his gaze focused on the woods. Images from another wooded area ... the river ... another murder flashed one after the other through his mind. Female ... only seventeen years old.
His fingers tightened on the wheel and his palms started to sweat.
No one messes with me.
He closed his eyes, exiled the painful visions.
Don’t look back ... focus on the case. His jaw tightened. Shelley deserved his undivided attention. He had to do this right for her and for CJ—no matter that she hated him now.
With one last glance at the street, he emerged from his vehicle.Don’t let emotions get in the way.
All he needed was one piece of evidence to connect this homicide to the bastard he wanted to nail more than he wanted to wake up tomorrow.
He wasn’t stopping until he nailed that lowlife son of a bitch.
Where the hell was Cooper? He didn’t see her truck. Lines of frustration furrowed on his brow. His partner was supposed to be here with the techs performing the third sweep.
“Braddock!”
Speak of the devil.
Cooper materialized from the trees where the warning signs and yellow tape marked the area as officially off-limits to pedestrian traffic. She tramped from the underbrush and double-timed it across the ditch to meet him.
A tight-fitting blue tee was tucked into her equally tight jeans. She didn’t look a whole lot like a cop, much less a homicide detective. With long blond hair tucked into one of those ponytails that poked through the back of her baseball cap, she looked like a teenager who’d been up to no good.
Adeline Cooper liked to brag that she could shoot a flea off a dog’s ass from a hundred yards. Braddock couldn’t say she was quite that good, but she was tough as nails and never even flinched while cutting a perp off at the knees ... or busting his balls.
He was going to need her to get through this. Would she have made the same decisions as he? He’d kept way too much to himself for far too long. If he’d been smart, hadn’t been so damned focused on his own selfish need for vengeance, he would have allowed his partner in all the way. Now things had gone to shit, and she wasn’t going to be happy that he’d kept her in the dark to some degree.
“You find something?” If she had, Braddock would gladly wash her big-ass truck for the rest of the summer. His partner drove a vintage Ford Bronco, four-by-four, lifts and seriously large tires included. She washed it once a week, by hand. She swore it was the closest thing to a baby she would ever have. She’d hit thirty this year. He was beginning to believe her.
“Damn straight I found something.” She jerked her head toward the woods. “Follow me, Little Red Riding Hood, and I’ll show you toGrandma’s house and why I’m a detective and those dudes back there are just evidence techs.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Anticipation lit, searing away some of the anxiety ripping through his gut as he slogged through the overgrown path behind his partner.
The uniform posted to protect the immediate scene gave Braddock a nod. The central search area was under guard and cordoned off until this final sweep was completed. Before crossing that cautionary yellow line, Cooper stopped and turned back to him. She liked setting the stage for her reveals. Over the past two-plus years, he’d gotten used to her need to dramatize her revelations.
“Since it hadn’t rained in forever before Saturday evening,” she began, “we didn’t find any tire tracks on the roadside. We couldn’t determine what route had been used by our perp when he brought the victim to this location or when he split.” She rolled her eyes. “In part because those kids and their friends trampled the area like a herd of elephants before the uniforms got here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he reminded her, “I know that part.”
“Anyway,” Cooper said with a pointed look, “so we have no tire impressions. No shoe imprints, not even the vic’s. Except,” she qualified, “for the sneaker treads of adolescent boys. The perp left no trace evidence behind—at least, nothing we’ve found so far.” She gave a little shrug. “To the less experienced, less dogged detective, it might seem that this investigation is a wash.”
