Lemon Tart (32 page)

“People would see them, and she’d have to use a credit card,” Breanna
added.

“That’s true,” Sadie said. And she couldn’t imagine Trina
checking into a hotel when her nerves were already so frazzled. “But if not a
hotel, then—”

“What about the cabin?” Breanna interrupted. “If I were going
to hide someone, that’s where I’d go.”

“The cabin,” Sadie repeated.

It was Jack’s cabin. Carrie had always hated it, saying it was
too cold, too run-down, and too dirty. Sadie didn’t disagree with her
much on those points. It was an old hunting cabin Jack bought twenty years ago,
and in Sadie’s opinion calling it a cabin was giving it far too much credit
since it was basically a one-room shack in the mountains. It had
plumbing that continually backed up, a sink, and a stove, but no water
heater.

Jack and Shawn used to go there for a week each year when the
deer hunting season opened, but over the years it had become more of a retreat
for Jack than anything else. When Carrie was making him crazy, or if he just
needed a break, he’d disappear for a day or two, returning with a skin thick
enough to withstand Carrie’s faultfinding once again. Sadie hadn’t been there
herself for years—not since the time she went up with the kids
and killed ten spiders in half an hour before heading home. To imagine Trevor
being there gave her the chills, but she couldn’t deny it would be a good
hiding place.

“I wonder if I can remember how to get there,” Sadie said,
making the instant decision to check it out. “I think it’s off the Grass Canyon
exit.”

A reflecting sliver of red and then blue played across Sadie’s
dashboard and she was confused until she looked in her rearview mirror.

Detective Madsen sat in his blue unmarked car directly behind
her. Just below where his rearview mirror was attached to the windshield were
alternating red and blue lights. His face was pinched and he pointed to the
right and mouthed, “Pull over.”

“Breanna,” she said quickly as she realized she couldn’t outrun
Madsen and she didn’t have much time. “This is very important. You must call
Detective Cunningham at the Garrison Police Department. Tell him everything
I’ve told you and everything you just told me about Trina.” She felt silly for
making this request since Cunningham’s partner was pulling her over, but she
didn’t trust Madsen and she wanted Cunningham to know she’d tried to give the
information to him. She
pulled to the curb and watched Detective Madsen jump from his car as soon as
they were stopped.

“Call him right now, Bre, right now!” She clicked off the phone
and quickly put it in her pocket as Madsen banged on her window. She looked up
into Madsen’s irate, and yet somewhat pleased, expression.

“Get out of the car!” he yelled.

With a resigned sigh, Sadie opened the car door. He grabbed her
arm and pulled her the rest of the way out.

“Hey,” she said as she stumbled to the side of the car. He
grabbed her left arm and twisted it behind her. “I have a bad shoulder,” she
said, cringing against the pain. It was a lie, but she didn’t feel guilty for
it because he shouldn’t be treating her this way.

He loosened his grip and she managed to pull out of his grasp
while turning to face him. She took in the handcuffs he was holding in one
hand.

“You’re arresting me?” she asked, her cheeks flushing with
embarrassment.

“For interfering with a police investigation,” he said,
reaching for her arm again. She hit at his hand and then, realizing his intent,
decided not to make a scene in hopes of keeping some control in the situation.
She put her hands forward, wrists together.

“Behind your back,” Madsen said, grabbing her arm and
attempting to turn her around. No way was she going to have her face mashed
into the top of her car with all these people driving by.

“And ignite my bursitis?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”

She held her wrists up even higher. “Surely you can make an
exception for a fifty-six-year-old woman, or do you think I
can take you down?”

His eyes narrowed, but he finally snapped the first cuff on her
right wrist.

“For heaven’s sake,” she muttered as he finished binding her
wrists. “I want to talk to Detective Cunningham,” she said, trying not to look
too closely at the cars whizzing past. Surely she knew some of these people.
How embarrassing.

Madsen laughed. “He’s done about all he can do for you,” he
said as he pulled her up and pushed her toward his car. “In the meantime, you
have the right to shut up.”

Chapter 34

Madsen
shoved her, none too gently, into the same back seat he’d held her prisoner in
yesterday afternoon at the library. Then he moved her car to the parking lot of
the post office. When he returned, he was stone-faced and offered
little by way of explanation for having arrested her; something she was sure
was illegal. To say nothing of his telling her to shut up. She added it to the
list of things she planned to report to Cunningham. Maybe she’d file a
great big lawsuit against the entire police department for mistreatment or
something like that. Yet, even as she thought about it she knew she wouldn’t.
She was not a supporter of frivolous lawsuits, but then again she’d never been
treated so . . . well, frivolously.

“I thought the investigation was over now that you have a
confession,” she said.

“There are still loose ends to tie up—like you.”

She let out a breath and would have rolled her eyes but for the
anger she felt at his wasting any time at all with her. “Every minute you spend
with me is a minute taken away from the real investigation.”

“The investigation is over,” Madsen said. “Just like you said.
We’ve got our man.”

“But you don’t have Trevor. And if it’s over then why were you
at Carrie’s? Why were you asking her questions? And why am I being arrested for
interfering with an investigation that isn’t really happening?”

His eyes met hers in the mirror. “Stop talking,” he said
blandly before his eyes returned to the road. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“What about Trevor? Aren’t we still trying to find him?”

“We?” he repeated, meeting her eyes again. “We are doing nothing. You are going where you can’t
cause any more problems.”

His eyes went back to the road and Sadie adjusted her
position—handcuffs were blasted uncomfortable but she offered
up a quick prayer of thanks that her hands were bound in front. How would she
sit at all if they were wadded up behind her?

Madsen made a right-hand turn and Sadie searched for
Jack’s truck on the roads around them. The steely afternoon sky spoke of more
snow to come. Carrie was long gone by now, however. It made Sadie’s stomach
ache to think what could be happening right now. While she was stuck here,
falsely accused, was Carrie headed for the cabin? What were her intentions with
Trevor? “I’d like to talk to Detective Cunningham. Will he be at the
station when we arrive?”

Madsen muttered something under his breath.

“It’s terrible manners to mumble,” she reminded him sternly,
fed up with his arrogant rudeness. She reflected on most of her day, realizing
she’d been short and snippy with several people—quite out of
character for her. Then again, she didn’t usually live under so much pressure.
Surely she could be excused for being a little tense.

Madsen sighed. “I said, ‘I’ll just bet you would.’ You seem to
think you’ve got Cunningham in your pocket.”

Sadie snorted. “Hardly,” she said, thinking of the very
un-pocket-occupying treatment he’d been giving her, though she was
curious as to his unofficially telling her to continue with what she was doing.
Almost as if he was prevented from doing what she could still pursue. She found
herself rubbing her mother’s ring again, searching for calmness, and tried to
come up with something she could say. She stared at the back of Madsen’s head,
reviewing all their experience with one another, looking for something to make
sense of his ongoing poor treatment of her. Something came to mind that didn’t
add up just right.

“So what happened to your hearing yesterday?” Sadie asked. He
seemed to be taking the long way to the police station.

Detective Madsen stared straight ahead and said nothing—a
reaction she hadn’t anticipated. It sharpened her awareness of him, the
tightness of his shoulders, the deep breathing. He was taking her into the
station, getting her out of his hair. Why was he so tense?

“What are you talking about?” he asked after several seconds.
“I went to the hearing.”

“No,” Sadie said, “you didn’t.” Feeling cocky for catching him
in a lie, her eyes narrowed and she forgot about the police station for the
moment. “You said you were going to one, but then you showed up at . . .”
Her sentence trailed off as she realized he might not know she’d been at Susan
Gimes’s office. Detective Cunningham knew, but it seemed as if they were
working separately now. That was something else that grabbed her attention. Why
was Madsen alone? Why wouldn’t he know she’d been there if Cunningham knew?
What kind of partners withheld information from one another? Distrustful ones, she answered her
own question.

The plot thickened.

He stopped at a red light and turned to look at her over his
shoulder. “How do you know where I was?” he asked incredulously.

Sadie gave him a cocky smile; he looked nervous as he turned to
face the front again. A shiver of recognition ran through her at the expression
on his face. It was so similar to the look Ron had yesterday morning. Madsen
was hiding something and whatever it was had caused a breach between him and
Cunningham, had necessitated Madsen’s lie about the hearing. She took a breath.
Everyone’s secrets were wearing her out, but she was determined to figure out
what his secret was. To do
so, though, she needed to keep him talking.

“So what brought you here from Denver?” she asked with feigned
casualness; she already knew the answer thanks to Susan Gimes and her family
history lesson.

His jaw stiffened and the tension rolled off of him in waves.
Like a shark in bloody water, her senses heightened even more. He said
nothing.

Her phone!

She’d forgotten she had it and maneuvered her hands to the side
so she could dig it out of her pocket. But she needed him to keep talking so he
wouldn’t notice what she was doing.

“You came from Denver, right?” she pressed as they passed
Harmony Street, the route that would take them to the police station. Her heart
began thudding in her chest as they headed further toward the outskirts of town
and she paused in the retrieval of her phone. He wasn’t taking her to the
station after all. Even more alarming, the tension seemed to be leaving him and
his arrogance returning. Her movements quickened and she finally had her phone
in her hands. She was attempting to flip it open when it slid out of her hands,
bounced on her knee, and landed on the floor. She stared at it in horror.

She was trying to scoot it back to her with her foot when
instead she sent it under the seat at the very moment Madsen’s voice broke the
silence. “Boston, actually.”

If not for the cars and the road still moving outside her
window, Sadie would have thought the world had frozen in place.

Boston?

Anne was
from Boston, it was where she met Jack, where she had worked for Riggs and
Barker, where Trevor was born. In an instant all her moments with Madsen and
his incredible arrogance and determination to find her guilty flashed through
her mind. Like a kaleidoscope, all the colors shifted and a whole new pattern
appeared before her. It wasn’t often that Sadie Hoffmiller found herself at a
loss for words, but she couldn’t think of anything to say.

Madsen seemed to count her silence as a victory and continued
without prompting. “I’d had some trouble in Denver, so I went to Boston to stay
with a friend of mine. Horrible city, if you ask me,” he said, shaking his head
slightly. “Not only is it full of boring history lessons I already had to sleep
through in high school, but it’s big and smelly and under continual
construction. But it’s got a nice night life if you’re into that kind of
thing.” He met her eyes in the rearview mirror and smirked. “I don’t imagine
you are though.”

Sadie felt her mouth moving but she couldn’t make any words
come out. Her head was buzzing again as all the pieces of the puzzle she’d been
working on seemed suspended in the air: filing cabinet, dirty diapers, Trina’s
appointment, Jack’s wedding ring, Anne’s book, pink shoes. None of them had
anything to do with Madsen. She felt cheated for having given so many things so
much attention for no reason.

Madsen continued, the more he talked the more relaxed he
became. Sadie had read about that. Serial killers seemed to make a habit of it
in suspense novels—wanting to boast of their exploits. Is Madsen a serial killer? she
wondered.

“There was this one club, The Barracks, on the north end. Nice
place; catered to military and police. I met a girl there, hot little number.
We danced, and had a few drinks every weekend for a couple months. She had a
kid at home, but hired a babysitter for Friday nights. After awhile she starts
telling me about the kid’s dad, some old guy, married, living in my home state
of Colorado. He totally ditched her, but was coming around sometimes, still
wanting the best of both worlds, ya know.”