Riverbend Road (21 page)

The sheer satisfaction in her voice—and her rare profanity—made him smile, despite his own emotional upheaval.

“You love sticking it to the bad guys, don't you?”

“When they have it coming, absolutely,” she said. “Anyone who thinks he has impunity to attack or torment someone smaller and more vulnerable deserves every possible punishment and I'm happy to be on hand to help deliver it.”

“It's what makes you a good cop, a dogged investigator, especially in cases where there is child abuse and neglect or sexual abuse of any sort.”

She blinked. “I... Thanks.”

Something he had wondered about for a long time made its way to the surface of his brain. For a brief second, he considered ignoring the impulse to ask her, but somehow the moment seemed right. His instincts were sometimes spot-on, too, and he decided not to question them in this case.

“Tell me something. Did you become a cop because of Wyatt's death or because of what happened to you in college?”

She stared at him for several long seconds then she sank into a chair as color flooded her features in a hot tide. “You...know about that?”

“I've known since before I hired you. I did a complete search, Wyn. You think I wouldn't find out you were one of the key witnesses in the trial of an accused serial rapist who preyed on college students in Boise?”

She drew in a deep breath and then another and he was in awe all over again of her strength and her courage. She refused to be a victim. Instead she was tough and smart and completely dedicated to helping others.

“You've known, all this time, and you never said anything?” Her voice was a mix of shock and disbelief.

“You just said it, when you were talking about Andrea,” he murmured. “Some things are private and personal. If you had wanted to talk about it, I figured you would have.”

Why he had asked her now, after avoiding the question all this time, he wasn't sure but he still wouldn't regret it. This was all part of the package that made her the strong, courageous, amazing woman he loved.

“Does my...family know?”

His throat ached at her question and what it implied. He had read the transcript of her testimony. Like her, he hated when anyone vulnerable was hurt or abused in any way but it was so much worse when that person was someone important to him.

“Not from me,” he answered gruffly. “You mean you never told them? You carried this burden alone? Didn't you think you needed their love and support?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice low. “But I also know it would have killed Dad to know how stupid I was, how I foolishly ignored all the things he told me about protecting myself. I went to a party by myself at the home of people I didn't know, I didn't watch my drink closely, I let a strange guy drive me home. Stupid, from beginning to end.”

“You do know it wasn't your fault, right? You were drugged and sexually assaulted without your consent.”

“I know that
now
. I had an excellent rape counselor and that made all the difference. But right afterward, all I could see were my own stupid mistakes. I was afraid to tell my parents at first. After Brock Michaels was arrested and charged, I was getting up my nerve to tell them I would be testifying at his trial and then Wyatt died and...it didn't seem important. They were already grieving so much for him. I didn't want to add more hurt to their hearts.”

She had chosen instead to walk the difficult road on her own. He couldn't imagine what that would have been like. Testifying without the support network of friends and family, being forced to relive the ordeal again and again.

How had she found the strength to get through it, at the same time she would have been lost and grieving for her beloved twin as well?

Her dad used to tell him that some people had grit and other people had grace. Wyn had both and contrary to what she thought, John Bailey never would have thought her stupid or weak. He would have been nothing but proud of her.

Was it any wonder Cade was so deeply in love with her that it seemed to fill every single empty space inside him?

* * *

H
E
KNEW
.
All this time.

As the police station faded in her rearview mirror after her stunning conversation with Cade, Wynona shook her head, still reeling. Cade knew about her attack, about her testimony in the trial, about the events of one stupid night that had changed her life.

She didn't know what to think.

Why hadn't he said anything over the years?

He had spoken about it so matter-of-factly, as if it was one of those things that just
was
. She could only believe her past had never mattered to him. She had worked for him for more than two years and he had never treated her like a victim, someone fragile or damaged.

She drove toward Riverbend Road with her thoughts as twisty and wild as the Hell's Fury.

Ahead of her, a couple of kids were riding long boards. They turned into Sulfur Hollow, shoulder-length hair flying in the wind behind them. She lifted her foot off the gas and on impulse clicked her turn signal on and followed after the kids.

She waved at the boys but they just glared at her. She wasn't in uniform and she wasn't driving her department vehicle but people here knew who she was.

Sulfur Hollow always seemed...different from the rest of town. If she combed through the police department's statistics, she would suspect they had almost twice as many calls to this particular neighborhood as any other area of town, far out of proportion to the number of residents who lived in the cluster of twenty or so small, run-down homes.

She passed the house where Cade had lived as a boy, a small, boxy ranch-style house that had once been covered in peeling gray paint but now was tidy with new siding and fresh-painted shutters.

Another family had moved in since Walter Emmett died in prison. She had never met anyone in the family—probably a good thing, if they were staying under the police radar—but she knew the father worked as a laborer in Shelter Springs and the mother was a teacher's aide at the elementary school. She saw a couple of bikes on the lawn and had a fervent wish that those children were enjoying a much happier childhood than Cade had in that house.

A wave of tenderness washed through her, huge and deep.

Cade was a good man. He had been a tough, emotionally starved boy who had grown into a tough, hard police officer.

It would have been so easy for him to take a different route—his father's way, always thinking life owed him something and if it didn't deliver, he could go out and take it.

Cade could have followed his father's footsteps into a life of crime. In her experience, these things often ran in families. If members of one generation were convinced they were above the law, they usually taught that philosophy to their offspring.

What made Cade take a different path?

John Bailey.

Her father had reached out a hand and lifted a struggling boy out of the squalor and hopelessness and showed him something better.

She wanted to do the same. That was the reason she was finishing her degree. Police officers certainly could make a real and permanent difference in the lives of those they encountered. She had known many dedicated, passionate people in the law-enforcement community who tried diligently to impact their communities for good, starting with her father right on to Elliot and Marshall and Cade and on to Wyatt and Andrea's husband, Jason, who had both given their lives trying to help someone else.

Too often, though, people's brushes with the law were punitive and came too late, when ingrained habits made it too difficult to divert them from their troubled road.

It might be idealistic, but she wanted to help stop problems before they began.

How would talking with Ronnie Herrera help her with that new plan for her life? It wouldn't. But she knew something else had happened that night, something Cade wouldn't talk about. He knew all her secrets, apparently. Why wouldn't he tell her the truth about the night her own father was shot?

She wanted to snip the dangling thread before starting the new phase of her life.

She would try one time to talk to him. If he wasn't home, she would forget the whole darn thing and she wouldn't come back again.

When she pulled up to the house where he lived with Elena and their three children, though, Ronnie was outside with the hood up on his old wood-side Jeep Wagoneer.

Hoping she wasn't making a huge mistake, she turned off her SUV and climbed out. A dog barked in a dyspeptic sort of way and she heard a radio somewhere nearby playing some '80s hair band. Ronnie sang along in a surprisingly good baritone.

“Hey, Ron,” she called out loudly. She had learned early that it was best not to sneak up on people in this neighborhood. Most of them had some kind of weapon at the ready, even if it was just a makeshift rock sap.

He knew who she was—and though she was dressed in civilian clothes, he managed to look both resigned and suspicious.

“What do you want? Did that bony-assed witch next door call and complain about the noise? That's a classic, man. Nobody can belt it out like Axl Rose.”

He reached down to the boom box on the ground next to him and turned up the volume. “How do you like that, bitch?” he yelled in the general direction of the house next door. A curtain twitched and Wyn wondered if she would have to go apologize to Dolores Hammond, who likely had no idea what was going on.

“I'm not here about the noise, Ronnie,” she said.

“No?” He turned down the tunes. “Then what? I ain't doing nothing wrong. It's my own damn yard. I'm not breaking no laws.”

She decided not to mention the senseless murder of the English language going on here, since that wasn't important. “I'm actually not here in any official capacity. See how I'm not wearing a uniform?”

He narrowed his gaze and seemed to accept that. “Then what do you want? Can't you see I'm busy? I got to change the clutch in this stupid thing again, third time in two years. I can't seem to make my kid understand she needs to take her foot off it sometimes, that she will only burn it up when she rides it constantly.”

She had done the same thing with the old manual-transmission pickup truck she and Wyatt had traded driving when they were teenagers.

She was stalling. Maybe she didn't really want to know what happened that night. Maybe she should just tell Ronnie she had made a mistake, jump back in her vehicle and leave Sulfur Hollow for good.

No. She was here. She should follow this through.

“I need to ask you a question on an old case you might have information about,” she said, before she could lose her nerve.

He scratched his cheek, avoiding her gaze. “Yeah, you're probably gonna have to be a bit more specific than that.”

Under other circumstances, she might have smiled. She had always liked Ronnie, even though he was one of those guys like Walter Emmett who always seemed to slip in and out of trouble. Ronnie, though, didn't have a malicious bone in his body—unlike Walter Emmett, who had seemed filled with them.

She didn't smile, though. There was nothing amusing about this conversation she suddenly wished she had never started.

“I'd like to talk about the night my father was shot.”

“I don't know how helpful I can be. That was a long time ago.”

Two years, six months. But who was counting?

“The thing is, I was going through some old files and found a witness statement signed by you that seems to run contrary to the official report.”

“Like I said. A long time ago.”

She had interviewed enough reluctant eyewitnesses to recognize that Ronnie didn't want to talk to her. “This might jog your memory. See your name down there? That's you, right?”

He squinted at the copy she had made of the report for a minute then busied himself wiping a rag across the screwdriver in his hands.

“A lot of water has flowed under my bridge since then, ma'am. I can't be sure.”

“You seemed pretty sure of what you said that night,” she pressed. “You wrote in this statement that you were a hundred percent certain the first shot came from the two officers, that the suspect was preparing to surrender and had even laid his weapon down when he was shot.”

Ronnie released a long breath. “Here's the thing. I was pretty drunk that night. Me and the wife had a big fight and she threw me out. That's why I was trying to sleep in my pickup down by the dock, even though it was colder than a witch's, well, you know.”

He shrugged. “Some investigator with the state police threw out my statement, said I wasn't a credible witness.”

“Ronnie, I need to know, straight up. Were you telling the truth as you knew it in this statement?”

He scratched his cheek. “Why you have to dredge all this up again now? Your dad's dead. Why go messing around in the past? Things that maybe ought to be left alone?”

She needed to let this go. What did it matter who shot first?

She thought of her father his last difficult two years, unable to speak in complete sentences, unable to dress himself or even use a knife and a fork.

Her heart ached at the hard memories. John Bailey would have pushed to know the truth. He wouldn't stop until he had the answers he needed, even if the truth was hard.

“Ronnie, you said your statement was thrown out by the state police but you didn't say it was inaccurate. I need to know what you saw that night. Did the police fire on a man trying to surrender?”

He dropped the rag to his side. “I don't know. Wish I could say yes or no a hundred percent, you know? Like I said, I was drunk. But seems to me, that's what happened. One minute the guy was going to his knees with his hands up, the next I saw a flash then heard the shot and him yell out a second later. He went down, then scooped up his gun and started firing. It was like a movie, you know? A real shoot-out. I ducked down out of the way and crouched on the floor of my pickup. Not ashamed to say it. I was scared as shit. The whole thing lasted maybe two, maybe three minutes and when the shooting stopped, I saw both your dad and that punk from California on the ground with Cade Emmett yelling into his radio while he did CPR on your dad.”