The Trouble With Murder (35 page)

“Sorry,” I said. “Hey, how’s
Koepke? He still mad at me?”

“He’s fine. He’s still drowning in
paperwork, but he’ll survive. He’s only a little bit mad at you.”

I scoffed. “He should be thanking
me. I blew his case wide open.”

“You became the number one suspect
in two homicides, blew off a homicide detective, got yourself kidnapped, and
proceeded to take your show on the road, leading a band of murderous drug
dealers through the mountains during a record-setting rainstorm for more than
thirty miles while trying to bleed to death. Eighteen people are dead. When I
think about it like that, I realize
I
should be mad at you. I’ve never
been so scared.”

“Okay,” I conceded. The guilt I
felt was almost entirely the result of Ellmann; I didn’t want him to worry
about me. “Maybe I was a tiny bit reckless. I see that now.”

Annoyance flashed in his eyes.

“It’s the best you’ll get,” I said
softly.

“Is there any point asking you to
promise you won’t do anything like that ever again?”

I wanted to say yes. But I didn’t
have the heart to lie to him. I had no plans to ever repeat any part of what
had just happened to me, but I knew my ability to wind up in big trouble better
than anyone. It was too risky to rule anything out.

“Probably not.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He kissed my hand again, then sat
holding it tight between his, as if he might never let it go.

The following day, I was discharged from the hospital and
Ellmann drove me home. Or, he drove me to his place, as I was temporarily
homeless. I spent the afternoon napping and watching TV. In the middle of the
night, I woke up sprawled across the sofa, covered with a blanket. I swallowed
a couple more pain pills then shuffled off to the bedroom, where I crawled in
bed beside Ellmann.

Ellmann had taken a week off. He
assured me he had plenty of personal time, but I figured part of his reason for
the vacation was needing time to recover from the stress of worrying about me,
which had likely driven him dangerously close to a stroke. I knew Ellmann had
been seriously wounded once before in the line of duty, but it had been little
ol’ me that had almost done him in. Go figure.

Wednesday, I switched to Tylenol.
My left shoulder was horribly bruised, the deep black and purple coloring
spreading from the middle of my arm to the base of my neck, and down my chest
and back. I’d been right when I’d guessed the sutures had pulled loose. In
fact, every last one of them had been. Dr. Allen had had to repair the wound
again when he’d gone in to tend to the bullet hole in my thigh.

My leg wasn’t nearly so bruised,
and, as a result, it was far less tender, though I still walked with a limp. I
was fortunate that bullet, like the other, had missed everything vital.
Actually, Allen had said it was the blood loss that had been the most dangerous
for me. If I had been any longer getting to a hospital, my ending would have been
much different.

Thursday afternoon, Ellmann took me
to run a few errands. We stopped by King Soopers, and I picked up my one and
only paycheck. Hobby Lobby had already mailed me theirs. Then we went to Fort
Collins Property Management. The snooty little receptionist appeared much more
reserved today. When I got a bit closer, I could see her eyes were bloodshot.
She had taken the loss of Margaret Fischer hard.

“Cindy Grogan took over your
account,” she said, reaching for the phone. “She’s in her office; let me see if
she has a few minutes.”

A moment later, the girl hung up
the phone, and a nearby office door opened. A petite woman with short, curly
blonde hair and brown eyes walked up to me. She was wearing heels and a gray
skirt suit. I guessed her to be in her forties. After shaking my hand and
Ellmann’s, she led us back to her office.

“I’m really sorry about Margaret,”
I said sincerely. I hadn’t liked her, but I didn’t wish her dead.

“Thank you. Margaret was a very
passionate woman. She will be missed. Now, I’ve read the notes on your account,
but I think I’d like to hear from you what’s going on.”

I explained the situation to her.
She asked a few questions, took lots of notes, and then when I was finished,
she set her glasses on the desk and leaned back in her chair, looking between
me and Ellmann.

“I’d like to suggest we charge you
a weekly rental fee, pro-rated, of course, to cover the partial second week. As
these circumstances were beyond your control, I see no justifiable cause to
hold any of your deposit.” She reached for a prepared document and laid it on
the desk in front me. “If you’re agreeable to the weekly rental charge, this
would be your balance. The difference,” she said, reaching into her drawer and
withdrawing a check, “would be refunded.”

I stared down at the check. It was
most of the money I had paid to the management company. Making out better than
I had dared to dream, I quickly agreed, signing the paperwork and tucking the
check into my pocket before she could change her mind. We shook hands, and I
left.

Next, we stopped by the bank.
Ellmann parked, and I reached for the door handle.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

He leaned over and opened the glove
box, withdrawing a small note. He handed it to me.

“What’s this?”

I unfolded it and saw it wasn’t a
note. It was a check. The check was made out to me in the amount of fifteen
thousand dollars. I knew my eyes were wide when I turned to Ellmann.

“What’s this?” I asked again.

“It may have just been about
catching Tyler Jay to you, but it wasn’t to the police department or the
sheriff’s office. And, like you said, no one has ever found the guy three
times. You deserve it.”

“That is awesome!”

Smiling all the way into the bank, I
deposited the money into my account. Suddenly I felt much better about my job
situation, and I was reconsidering my previous decision to accept White’s
promotion, even if temporarily.

Ellmann and I spent the afternoon
looking at houses for rent. Around four o’clock, we ended up in a nice
neighborhood near Front Range Community College. Most of the homes sat on
spacious lots full of mature landscaping. They were starter homes for people
buying their first house or raising their families. But one of them, obviously
a bit smaller than the others, sitting on one of the biggest lots at the end of
a quiet cul-de-sac, appealed to me even from the street.

We met the landlord and took a
tour. It was slightly smaller than the place I was moving out of, with two
bedrooms and an office, a smaller living room and kitchen, and almost nothing
of a formal dining room. But it had the attraction of never having been a crime
scene. The two-car attached garage and enormous yard were what finally did it
for me.

The guy had a contract ready for me
to sign right there. I paid the security deposit and first month’s rent then
took the keys.

The place needed some work, but I
could move in immediately. That was ideal, because I’d signed an agreement with
Fort Collins Property Management saying I’d be out of their place by seven
o’clock the following evening. The landlord left shortly after our business was
completed. Ellmann and I sat on the front porch, the evening quiet and warm
around us.

“Have you thought any more about
what you’ll do for work?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I’ll
go back to work at White Real Estate for now. Nothing else has really worked
out for me. Maybe that’s a sign.”

“I think I may have a job for you.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Doing what?”

“Well, you tend to wind up knowing
things other people would prefer you didn’t. You’re pretty good at finding
people who don’t want to be found, or at least having people who don’t want to
be found find you. I think you could put that talent to work.”

“Sounds interesting. I’m listening.”

“Bond enforcement agents get
paid
to track people down. That’s sort of your thing.”

“What’s a bond enforcement agent?”

“A bounty hunter.”

At the height of my recent ordeal,
I’d just wanted my life to go back to the way it was. But, really, my life
could never be the same. And not all the changes were negative.

I no longer lived with my mother
(or roommates who used all my shower products). I was growing fonder of my
truck now that it drove without any issues, and it had been more than a week
since I’d entertained ideas of pushing it into the reservoir or in front of a
train. And the last few days of my vacation were really looking up. I’d slept
in three mornings in a row, no one had tried to kill me, and no one had accused
me of a crime. Yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t move from the sofa. I’d watched
hours of TV, and I’d already finished a whole book.

My relationship with Ellmann was,
without question, the best thing to come out of it all. We were still working
on getting to know one another, but I felt hope and confidence growing every
day. Only time would tell regarding our longevity, but Ellmann is different;
that much I already know.

My mother going to prison for a
very long time was a close second. Our relationship now had the buffer of time
and distance, and that was already helping. As predicted, she’d fallen into
depression. The prison had put her back on her meds, which she was, so far,
taking compliantly. In a few more weeks, she’d be leveled out again. A few
months after that, she’d want to stop taking the pills, starting the whole
cycle over again. This time, however, the prison psychiatrists would be
monitoring her. It would be more difficult for her to be noncompliant—not
impossible, just more difficult (this is
my
mother after all, and I’d
gotten it from somewhere).

Work would also be different. With
Paige and Sandra serving prison sentences of their own, the office would be a
friendlier place. I ran almost zero risk of being fired by White, and I had
never appreciated White or my job more than I did after the recent fiasco of
trying to find a new one. I still felt the best thing for everyone, including
me, was to find something else for the long-term, but I was content in the
short-term.

So, I signed up for the
certification course to begin my bond enforcement career. I didn’t know if it
would work out, but Ellmann had made some valid points: I am pretty good at
finding people, and I do have great instincts (or luck, as he calls it). I
thought the least I could do was give it a try. I also figured it would be more
like self-employment, which might make it more difficult for me to get fired.

On top of it all, I was making
regular trips to see my therapist again. And she was having a field day with
all the new material. Killing people, being kidnapped and shot, having people
try to kill me—it had all provided the means for several more weeks of therapy.

Oh, and I’d lost eight pounds.
Turns out, getting shot and spending two days in the hospital aids weight loss.

All in all, I was adjusting to my
new normal. And I thought I could get used to it.

But then, I should have known, I
have never been
that
lucky.

Catherine
Nelson has worked in healthcare for the last ten years. She is a Colorado
native and currently lives in and writes from Fort Collins, Colorado. Be sure
to follow her at catherinenelsonbooks.blogspot.com and visit her Facebook page
at facebook.com/CatherineNelsonBooks.

Turn
the page for a preview of the next book in the Zoe Grey series.

1

The trailer park off Harmony Road is almost completely
obscured by a shopping center that had been constructed a few years before.
Now, only those who already knew it was there ever spotted it. I found I was
spending quite a bit of time here recently.

It was five
a.m.
on Thursday morning, and this was my second trip to this
particular trailer park this week. I made my way through the roundabouts then
made the first right, cruising around the periphery of the park until I came to
the lot I was looking for. It was a double wide, the standard white that
someone had tried to spruce up with pink shutters (horrendous even in the dark)
and a window planter. It was late June, but the planter was empty.

Albert Dennison was out on bail and
had failed to appear for his court date earlier this week. Not only didn’t the
court appreciate that, but the bond company, which I worked for, didn’t either.
Now here I was, cuffs in my pocket and capture paperwork in my bag, assigned to
haul his dumbass back to jail.

Of course, I don’t do this kind of
thing for free. Each skip I drag back to the pokey is worth ten percent of the
bond. In Dennison’s case, eight hundred bucks. Bonds vary, but some capture
fees are six figures. I haven’t tracked down any of those guys yet, but I’d
only been doing this four weeks.

I drove past Dennison’s mother’s
trailer and made a left down the next street. I turned around in an empty
driveway and parked near the corner, eyes on Dennison’s place. I’d been assigned
Dennison on Tuesday. This was his third bond this year alone. He almost always
skipped, but he wasn’t hard to find. He was something of a “starter” case for
newbies like me. All the other guys had taken their turn, and now it was mine.

When I’d first shown up at Sideline
Investigations and Bail Bonds with my toylike badge and course certificate
asking about work, Dean Amerson, the office manager, had taken one look at me
and paired me up with an old school PI and skip tracker named Roger Blucher.
Blue, as he was called, spent three weeks showing me the ropes. Dennison was
one of my first cases working solo, assigned to me because I was lowest on the
totem pole and needed the experience.

The majority of Dennison’s arrests
were alcohol related. There were notes in his file about his favorite watering
holes. Turned out, he wasn’t hard to find. But he was slightly more difficult
to
catch
. He may have been a middle-aged drunk, but he was fast. Both
times I’d found him, he’d bolted before I’d had a chance to put a hand on him.

I will admit a small degree of
culpability in this, as I am not a runner. I don’t want to run, I don’t like to
run, I’m not any good at running. In the last six weeks, this reality had been
thrown into sharp relief. I’d discovered this new job of mine involved a great
deal of running.

But this job wasn’t one I was
willing to walk away from. Six weeks ago, I’d been more or less fired from a
string of jobs for circumstances largely outside my control. One of the most
appealing aspects of my new job is the fact I’m something of an independent
contractor; it’s much more difficult for me to be fired. Also, I’m good at
this. Call it luck, like my boyfriend Ellmann does, or dumb luck, like Amerson
does, or instinct, like I do, I have an uncanny knack for finding people who
don’t want to be found. Even if that sometimes means
they
find
me
.

So if I can’t run my skips down, it
just means I have to outsmart them. This isn’t usually difficult. Which brings
me back to sitting outside Albert Dennison’s mother’s trailer at five
a.m.
If I couldn’t catch him when he
ran, I had to make sure he didn’t run.

I’d followed Dennison last night.
He was on his third bar by the time I’d finally called it quits. I was betting
he’d closed down whichever one he’d ended up in last, and I would be sleeping
it off right about now. His mother was home, but from my search of the place, I
knew she took sleeping pills. Plus, she was seventy. I didn’t see her posing
much of a threat.

I got out of the truck, stuffing
the capture paperwork into my pocket, and held a flashlight in one hand. I
hustled over to Dennison’s place and bypassed the front door. The trailer had
lots of windows, but only two doors. I’d expected a sliding glass door off the
kitchen but instead found a regular one. I went to the back and found a square
shovel propped against the siding with some other yard tools. Using the shovel,
I arranged it under the door handle and reinforced the other end with a couple
cinder blocks that were serving as steps. Then I returned to the front door.

When I’d searched the house, I’d
also discovered a spare house key in a drawer in the kitchen. I’d pocketed it
because I’d quickly learned those things come in handy. And it did now.

I let myself in and closed the
door, taking time to lock it. If Dennison slipped past me, that would buy a few
seconds. Immediately, I heard snoring. I grinned inwardly that my plan was
working.

I moved down the hall to the
bedroom I knew to be Dennison’s. As my hand twisted the knob, I felt all the little
hairs on my body stand up. Something was wrong. The snoring had stopped.

Shit.

Before I could make my next move,
the door at the end of the hall swung open, and I saw the business end of a
double barrel shotgun. An instant later there was an enormous
boom
and a
burst of orange light. I threw myself to the floor and felt the round spray
over me, heard it pepper the furniture in the living room.

As I scrambled forward, toward the
shooter, I heard the pump rack the next shot. My shoulder injury burned in pain
as I desperately charged the shooter. An instant before I closed the distance
between us, I caught a glimpse of fuzzy slippers and a pink bathrobe.

Great
, I thought,
I’m
going to get shot again by a seventy year old woman. I’ll never live that down
.

I burst to my feet, my left hand
closing around the gun and forcing it upward, while my right hand gripped the
front of the pink bathrobe and pushed the woman back. The gun boomed again,
this time spraying the ceiling. Then Dennison’s door crashed open.

“Let go!” the woman squawked at me,
batting at me with her free hand. “Give it back! Let go!”

I tried to yank the gun from her
hand, but she refused to let go, displaying unnatural strength born of deep
conviction.

“Lord, forgive me,” I groaned as I
let go of her robe and reached for her neck.

I closed my hand around the front
of her neck, squeezing her carotid arteries closed, thus interrupting the blood
flow to her brain. Within seconds, her obdurate grip on the gun slackened. I
ripped it away and turned back in time to see Dennison fumbling at the lock on
the front door.

“Stop, Albert!”

“Fuck you!” he slurred, practically
clawing at the door.

I charged forward, but I heard the
lock retract. That drunk bastard was a second away from slipping past me
again
.

In a moment of blind desperation, I
hurled the shotgun at Dennison. I didn’t necessarily aiming, and it never
crossed my mind I was giving a gun to a bad guy.

The gun flew through the air and
banged into Dennison’s shoulder, knocking him off balance. He cried out in
surprise and pain, going down on one knee as the door swung open. Then I was on
top of him. There was a loud crash as I collided with him, and we landed in a
pile on the smelly carpet.

A brief struggle ensued, in which I
nearly vomited from the old beer stench clinging to him. Then, after a lot of
swearing and name calling, I finally got him face-down under me. I held his
right hand behind his back as I reached into my pocket for handcuffs. Before I
could get them on, there was a screech behind me.

I flung myself forward, lying flat
over Dennison, as I glanced back. The old woman had grabbed up a lamp, still
plugged into the wall, and chucked it at me. Clearly, she’d recovered from my
assault.

The lamp jerked against the cord
and shattered against the floor a foot from me. With another screech, she flung
herself forward. In the faint street light pouring in through the open door, I
saw her face for the first time. It was wrinkled with age, contorted with anger
and a dose of madness. Her eyes were black, and her mouth was open. She had two
snaggleteeth remaining, which made her look that much more demented.

“Shit,” I hissed, straining to keep
a hold of Dennison struggling beneath me. “Lady, stop. Stop!”

To be fair, I think she was too far
gone to hear me. She barreled into me. Had she weighed more than a hundred
pounds, she would have knocked me over. As it was, she mostly bounced off,
landing on the floor on her ass. Her spindly legs stuck out in front of her
under the bathrobe, which was frighteningly askew.

“Stop, now,” I said again, cinching
the cuff on Dennison’s right wrist. “Just stay down.”

Her black eyes were fixed on me,
and she worked to get to her feet. She seemed oblivious to the broken lamp as
it cut into her legs and hands. Dennison continued to struggle, and as I
finally got hold of his left wrist, he shot a glance at his mother. Even in the
poor light, the blood was obvious. Dennison screamed.

“Mama!” he cried, wrenching his
wrist away from me.

I groaned my annoyance and increasing
desperation and flung myself forward again, pinning his face to the floor.

“Stop!” I ordered him.

I caught his wrist again and
managed to get it behind him, ignoring the pain in my own shoulder. The old
woman had gotten to her knees. On all fours, she came at me again. She crashed
into me and clawed at my face and neck.

I didn’t want to her hurt. Bottom
line, she was old. Her body was fragile. If I threw her around like I knew I
could, like I so badly wanted to, I could very easily cause serious damage, or even
kill her. I had enough bodies on my conscience. I didn’t want another. But that
was hard to remember as I felt her talon-like nails tear into my skin.

“Mama! Mama!”

The old woman was screeching in my
ear, her rancid breath hot on my cheek.

I couldn’t take anymore. I threw my
shoulder into her, knocking her back.

She squealed as she fell, and
Dennison howled. I roughly clamped the cuff on his wrist and squeezed, hearing
the satisfying click over the racket. Then I was up.

The old woman was righting herself,
ready to make another run. I wished I hadn’t left my damn cell phone in the
truck. Not only did the woman need medical attention, I thought a few cops
would be useful right about now. I couldn’t remember seeing a phone when I’d
been in the house the first time.

She threw herself at me again,
stumbling slightly over her son as he thrashed on the floor between us. By some
miracle, I managed to get a hold of her around the middle, pinning her arms to
her sides. She twisted and fought against me, but she was no match. I lowered
her to the floor, holding her in front of me as she fought for all she was
worth, screeching all the while. I began to worry she would give herself a
heart attack or a stroke. And I was seriously wondering what to do now.

When blue and red lights began to
dance over the walls of the trailer, I was almost giddy with relief. A moment
later, two uniformed officers came to the front door, guns drawn and
flashlights on.

“Zoe? I should have known.”

The taller of the two, Derek Frye,
is a patrol officer for Fort Collins Police Department. Tall and lean, with
dark hair and brown eyes, Frye is a nice guy and a good cop. The shorter of the
two was obviously young, with blond hair cut in a high and tight. I’d seen him
before, but I didn’t know his name.

“Hey, Frye. I’m really glad to see
you.”

He pointed his flashlight at the
old woman and Dennison floundering on the floor. Then he tipped his head to his
partner.

“Have a look around,” he said.

The second officer moved down the
hall toward the bedrooms, searching for anyone else inside.

“Neighbor called 911,” Frye said to
me. “Reported gunshots.”

Frye and I went back a couple
months to shortly before my bounty hunting days. I’d been mixed up in a big
drug/murder case in which people kept trying to kill me. Incidentally, that’s also
how my shoulder was injured: gunshot wound. Also, he’s a friend of Detective
Ellmann’s. I was coming to think of him as my friend, too.

“Thank God. I wasn’t sure I could
handle her on my own. Speaking of, will you call an ambulance?”

“Sure,” he said, holstering his
gun. “Wanna explain things to me?”

I tipped my head at Dennison. “He’s
FTA. When I came to escort him back to jail, his mother took exception. She
shot at me, and then attacked me. She’s not well.”

Frye looked from the old woman,
still struggling in my arms, to the rest of the living room, and then the
ceiling. I saw him shaking his head.

“Things got a little out of hand,”
I admitted.

“No shit.”

“Hey, it’s clear,” the second cop
said, holstering his weapon. He glanced over at me and the old woman and
chuckled. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “Zoe Grey, right? Ellmann’s girl.”
Then he laughed. “This is great.”

“Ellmann’s girl?” I repeated,
looking between them. “Is that what you guys call me?” I gave Frye a pointed
look.

Frye had the wisdom to look
cautious, and slightly embarrassed. The other guy just chuckled again and
nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s true,
isn’t it?”

I sighed. I didn’t know how I felt
about my identity as “Ellmann’s girl.” True or not.

“Whatever. Mind giving me a hand
here?”

They looked at each other then back
to me. After a very long minute, they stepped over Dennison. Each took the old
woman by an arm and easily hauled her up.