Page 10 of I’ll Be Watching You

I approached the officer again.

“Are Trevor and Brian okay?” I asked. “Please tell me nothing happened to the boys.”

He hesitated, and even behind his sunglasses I could see compassion in his expression.

“There are only two victims,” he said quietly.

I nodded my appreciation for the information, then stepped back again and pulled out my phone as if I was talking to someone. But instead, I watched what was happening halfway down the street.

There were not only police cars, but several unmarked vehicles. The ambulance had left. I couldn’t see the bodies from here. Neighbors stood silently on their small porches.

A Ford F-150 approached the barricade, driven by a man who looked frantic. He rolled down the window and said something to the officer, showed his driver’s license. The officer let him through, motioning for him to park on the street well away from the crime scene. He did, jumped out of the truck, and ran to the house.

A relative. Came for the boys. I felt ill.

Liz Swanson and her husband were shot and killed because she’d known something that might help my father get out of prison. I was certain of it.

And now I would never know.

One person knew. My father.

I called Jack. “I have something to do, can Tess or Luisa back you up this afternoon?”

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I didn’t tell him. I didn’t think he would tell our mother, but I couldn’t risk her finding out what I planned to do and maybe finding a way to stop me.

“I’ll tell you tonight. It’s important, otherwise I wouldn’t bail on you.”

“I’ll see if Luisa is free.”

“She doesn’t have classes on Tuesdays,” I reminded him. “She would love to help.” I hoped. “Thanks, Jack.”

I climbed into my Jeep and headed straight to Florence, where my father was incarcerated in Eyman State Penitentiary.

Chapter Three

The prison required an appointment to visit an inmate, so I called on my way down. One of the advantages of my mother having been the Maricopa County Attorney, and my brother a cop for twelve years, was that we had a good relationship with the prison staff, so getting a last-minute visit scheduled wasn’t a problem.

The earliest time I could get was 2:00 p.m., which left me with three hours to kill once I got to Florence. I refilled my iced coffee at Starbucks, grabbed a table, and opened my laptop to dig into the Swanson family.

Tess was faster at pulling backgrounds, but after years of working solo, I knew what I was doing.

My heart ached for the two kids left behind. I prayed they had a strong extended family to help them survive this tragedy.

I kept circling back to my conversation with Liz Swanson. Was my date with Cal the reason I didn’t push harder to meet last night? I couldn’t say for sure, but I needed to figure that out. I had never let a relationship interfere with my job.

If Cal hadn’t been sitting at my kitchen table, would I have driven up to North Peoria and confronted Liz earlier?

Face-to-face, I could be very persuasive. I would have learned what information she’d been holding back. Maybe even get her to spill the name of the patient who had his file erased. More details on the other patient she’d alluded to where a year had been missing from the chart. What did they have in common? And mostly: Why would someone erase medical information?

She knew something unusual had happened, and because she was a nurse she would see things in the data that I might not understand. She wanted to tell me everything she knew or suspected, otherwise she wouldn’t have called. My questions may have joggled her memory.

If I had forced myself on her last night, Liz and her husband might still be alive.

Maybe.

Dammit.