Page 9 of I’ll Be Watching You

I turned to social media, but didn’t see anything posted on the major Phoenix news feeds. I called my cousin Josie Morales, who was a Phoenix PD officer and my best friend.

“What’s up?” Josie answered. “I’m going to a call, so I only have a minute.”

“I’m up in North Peoria at a coffee shop and saw a half dozen police cars, ambulance, fire, and a tactical van heading north on Lake Pleasant Drive. Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yeah, I got an alert, like, twenty minutes ago. Two people were shot in a vehicle this morning at approximately oh-six-fifty when they were leaving their house. Don’t have any details yet, not our jurisdiction.”

“Do you have an address?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you why in person.”

She sighed, then a moment later rattled off an address. My heart sank.

Liz Swanson’s address.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t get me in trouble.”

“Never.”

Josie grunted and ended the call.

Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe it was someone else, someone visiting, a neighbor . . . but I knew that the reason Liz Swanson hadn’t met me this morning was because someone shot her.

To stop her from talking to me.

I left and drove to the address that Josie gave me. The police had the street blocked off. I pulled over and approached one of the officers while craning to see what was going on.

It appeared that one small SUV had backed into a sedan parked on the street. The number of police cars and emergency vehicles looked surreal against the backdrop of perfect homes on identically landscaped lots.

“Ma’am, you’ll have to step back,” the officer said.

I glanced at his name badge. “Officer Bowers? I’m Margo Angelhart. I may know the victim.”

He stared at me through his sunglasses and said, “Stand back, please.”

“I was supposed to meet with Liz Swanson an hour ago. She never showed. She lives on this street.”

He continued to stare at me, blocking access to the crime scene.

I pulled out a business card and handed it to him. “I’ll wait to talk to someone who can tell me what’s going on.”

He took the card, but made no move to give it to anyone in charge.

I stepped back and watched. I couldn’t tell anything from this distance. Police were going in and out of a house across from where the vehicle crashed. It was the only house with the garage open.

I could picture what happened. Liz and her husband backed out of the garage. They were shot as they were backing out, Josie had said, which meant their killer was waiting for them.

I couldn’t see whether the gunshots went through the side windows or the front window. If the killer shot through the windows, he would have had to fire multiple times to break the glass and ensure his victims were dead.

Things like this didn’t happen in North Peoria. They rarely even happened in Phoenix—unless it was drug related.

But not here. Not in the suburbs. Not to a lawyer and nurse with two kids.

Their kids.