Bloodied, disheveled, in terrible pain…
But she got away.
“Here you go, ma’am.” The flight attendant handed over a clear plastic cup filled with ice and soda, still not making eye contact.
She accepted it with her right hand, keeping her wounded left carefully concealed at her side.
“Enjoy the flight.”
She smiled. “Oh, I definitely will.”
In a little over five hours, she would land in Portland, where she’d be able to get medical attention for the wounds she’d temporarily cleaned and bandaged herself.
There, nobody would connect her to the seemingly random Manhattan attack.
There, she could get on with her plans.
But I haven’t forgotten you, she told Lindsay Farrell silently. Not for a second. And I’ll see you in Portland at the reunion.
Part Three. RACHEL by Beverly Barton
Chapter 23
Huntsville, Alabama, May 2006
Her partner lay bleeding to death at her feet. As she radioed for help, she tried to protect him as best she could by dragging him into a protected corner of the alley. Rapid fire from a semiautomatic bombarded her. Dear God, where was the backup she had ordered at least ten minutes ago? With her heartbeat racing and adrenaline rushing through her body at breakneck speed, Sergeant Rachel Alsace realized she was caught in a life-or-death battle with an escaped killer.
Suddenly, without warning, as she got off several quick, well-aimed shots, return fire caught her in the shoulder, the bullet searing through her flesh like a white-hot branding iron. Somehow, she managed to pull the trigger of her Glock two more times. Then reality blurred as agony enveloped her and darkness descended, a smoky gray fog of fear and pain dragging her down, deeper and deeper into unconsciousness.
Sweat coated her body, drenched her oversized cotton T-shirt emblazoned with the words Roll Tide and the famous Alabama elephant, and dampened the cotton sheets on her queen-size bed.
Rachel woke with a start. She tossed the light covers aside, jerked straight up into a sitting position, and took several deep, calming breaths. Since coming home from the hospital three days ago, she had been plagued by nightmares of the day her partner had been killed and she had been severely wounded. Twenty-seven-year-old Officer Bobby Joe Poole had left behind a wife and two young children. For about the hundredth time since that horrific day, Rachel had wondered why a man with so much to live for had died and why she, a divorced, childless woman just two years shy of forty, had been spared. Luck of the draw? Fate? Divine providence?
As she turned around and slid off the bed, Rachel felt an overwhelming sense of guilt and an equal measure of relief. Guilt that she was alive and her partner dead. Relief to still be alive, to have a second chance to find some sort of personal fulfillment beyond her job as a police officer on the Huntsville, Alabama, police force.
She looked at the lighted digital bedside clock. Five-ten. Only twenty minutes earlier than her normal wake-up. At least five-thirty had been her regular get-up time before she’d been forced to take an extended leave of absence. Medical leave. She probably wouldn’t be reinstated to active duty for another couple of months. Recovering from a near-fatal bullet wound, as well as the battery of psychological tests, would take some time. Not to mention the internal investigation already underway, looking into the death of the man she had killed-Randy Grimmer-who had murdered a convenience store clerk and two customers in a bold daytime robbery before shooting her partner and her.
Rachel padded barefoot into the bathroom, turned on the sink faucet, and splashed cold water onto her face. After drying off, she flipped on the light switch that flooded the small room with illumination from three sixty-watt bulbs over the vanity. Momentarily shutting her eyes against the offending brightness, she lifted her good arm-the right one-and rubbed the back of her neck. Slowly, cautiously, she opened her eyes and stared at her reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. Lord, she looked a sight, her short blond hair sticking out in every direction. Using her fingers, she combed through the rats’ nest of curls as she made her way out of the bathroom.
While walking through her bedroom and into the hallway, she thanked God for air-conditioning. Springtime in the South was usually warm, but hot weather had arrived early, just in time for Mother’s Day, and seemed intent on sticking around for a while.
Rachel dismissed thoughts of her own mother, missing her more with each passing year. If not for a few close friends and a scattering of cousins, she would be all alone in the world. Her father had died years ago, back in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, and her mother had passed away six years ago. Rachel had buried her mother alongside her relatives in her hometown cemetery in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That had been a horrific year. She had suffered a miscarriage, lost her mother to cancer, and finally admitted that her six-year marriage to Hamilton County, Tennessee, sheriff’s deputy Allen Turner was over. Three losses in the span of ten months had forced Rachel to reevaluate her life. By year’s end, she had moved to Huntsville and joined the police department, after having served eleven years with the Chattanooga P.D.
Since the day her father died, Rachel had devoted herself to one goal-becoming the kind of law enforcement officer he would have been proud of.
After entering the kitchen, she clicked on the lights, then punched the ON button of her coffeemaker. As the coffee began to brew, she disarmed her security system, opened the back door, and stepped onto the sidewalk that led around the house to the driveway. The nearby streetlight radiated through the early-morning darkness, allowing her to locate her newspaper where it lay in the middle of her concrete drive. She liked her friendly neighborhood in the Harvest area, loved her neat three-bedroom brick house and appreciated the variety of nice guys she’d met since moving here. She was actually beginning to enjoy dating again. She wasn’t seriously involved with anyone, but she kept hoping the real Mr. Right would come along one of these days. But if he didn’t, she’d be okay on her own. She had a pretty good life, hadn’t she?
When Rachel went back inside her house, she removed the half-filled coffeepot, poured a mug of the steaming black brew, and carried it, along with the newspaper, over to the kitchen table. After sitting down, she spread the paper apart to the front page and took a sip of coffee. Scanning the headlines, she noted that there had been another Beauty Queen Killer murder-this time in Alabama, in a little town south of Huntsville. Cullman. A former Cotton Queen had been brutally killed, her head chopped off.
Rachel shuddered.
The poor woman.
Zipping through the brief article, Rachel shook her head. She had been in law enforcement over sixteen years, and she still couldn’t understand what drove a person to murder. Self-defense, she understood. Cold-blooded, brutal murder, she didn’t understand.
She had been keeping tabs on the slew of Beauty Queen Killer murders for the past few years. The perpetrator was a vicious serial killer who had struck throughout the South over and over again. An old friend of hers from their days with the Chattanooga P.D. was working for a private PI firm that had been hired by a victim’s family to independently search for the killer. She and Lin McAllister kept in touch on a semi-regular basis. Mostly e-mails, but a few phone calls once or twice a year.
As Rachel flipped through the newspaper, she finished off her first cup of coffee. The caffeine stimulated her into full consciousness. A second cup should make her even more alert. But alert for what? Another day of crossword puzzles, watching The View and Oprah and As the World Turns? Trying to concentrate on the most recent Sandra Brown novel?
Two cups of coffee later, with her fourth cup in hand, Rachel sat down in front of her laptop computer, which she kept at the built-in workstation in the corner of her kitchen. When she downloaded her e-mails, she deleted several, then paused when she saw a couple from old friends, high-school classmates from St. Elizabeth’s. Her index finger hovered over the Delete key, itching to erase the messages without reading them. It wasn’t that she had anything against her two old friends-friends she hadn’t seen in twenty years-but she knew both e-mails would be about the upcoming reunion. Rachel had no intention of returning to Portland. Not now or ever. Although she had some wonderful memories of her high-school days, those good memories were overshadowed by two tragic losses. A boy she had adored-Jake Marcott-had been murdered at the St. Valentine’s Day dance their senior year. A part of her still mourned him, although she had long ago stopped loving him. And less than two years after Jake’s unsolved murder, her father-the lead detective on Jake’s murder case-had died of a sudden heart attack. Everyone who knew Mac Alsace suspected that being unable to solve Jake’s murder had literally worried him to death.