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“She didn’t want my protection. She said she had nothing left to lose and that I should worry about protecting my own.”
Maureen’s lips trembled and a tear slid down her cheek. “Did she go to the warehouse?”
He nodded. “I followed her there. She didn’t like it, but I did. I wanted to help her.” His head wagged side to side. “To protect her. Like I could have. She was beyond feeling anything but pure rage by that point.”
He would never forget Louise wielding those giant bolt cutters. She’d cut the lock away while he kept watch. Once the door to the janitor’s closet was open, the man Lucy had been seeing was just sitting there. He was shackled, wrists and ankles. But he made no attempt to protect himself or to escape. He’d looked young and so very sad.
“What happened then?” Maureen demanded.
“He didn’t try to run. He went willingly with her.”
Maureen’s jaw dropped. “She took him with her.”
“She loaded him into the back of a small cargo van she had rented and told me to go. She said I should forget everything I had seen. I tried to reason with her, but she was so far beyond reason. There was no reaching her.”
“We should call the police,” Maureen said. “If we go to the police together, it might not be too late to fix this.”
Bart thought about the suggestion, but then he said, “No. She did what she had to do, and we need to leave her be.”
“You can’t be serious? Obviously, she was out of her mind.”
“Possibly,” he admitted. “But I’m going to say to you exactly what she said to me.”
Her face was set in stone, her body braced for battle. “I’m listening.”
“If the murdered girl had been your daughter and the heart attack victim your spouse, what would you do?”
The tears came in a flood now, flowing down Maureen’s cheeks in rivers. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to honor her wishes and get on with our lives as if we know nothing.”
Maureen inhaled a shaky breath, then nodded. “Okay. Okay.”
Room by room, they wandered through the house that had once been a home to a loving family. They turned off the lights and then exited through the front door, locking it behind themselves. And then they left.
Maybe they were wrong not to call the police, to just walk away and tell no one, but Bart couldn’t find the rationale to do otherwise.
Sometimes you just had to do what you had to do.
28
Now
Roberts Residence
Shelby Avenue, Nashville, 2:15 p.m.
Finley had patiently heard her father out. She’d listened to his explanation of why and how he’d ended up in this situation, but now she was calling Houser. Reaching for her cell, she said as much.
“You cannot call Detective Houser,” her father argued. “You can’t. You just ... can’t.”
Finley started to argue but hesitated. There was one other thing, she decided, that needed to be clarified first. She tucked her cell back into her pocket and fixed her attention on the man on the other side of the bars. “Are you ill or injured?”
“Of course he isn’t injured,” Cagle grumbled. “Are you blind?”
Finley ignored the irritating remark.
He—Ian Johnson—shook his head. “No.”
