Cold Case Chase, page 1
“We don’t have time for this!”
Tessa’s voice rose. “I told you, there are men in masks—”
“I want to believe you,” Anthony said. “I really do. Just tell me you’ll cooperate.”
His free hand moved so quickly she didn’t even realize what he had done until she felt the cold sting of metal against her wrists. She looked down. Anthony had handcuffed her.
“Tessa Watson,” he said, “I’m arresting you on the charge of obstructing and impeding an official police investigation—”
Emotion overwhelmed reason. She wrenched away from him, turned and ran blindly down the beach, with her hands cuffed.
“Come on, Tessa!” Anthony shouted. “Stop! We found Cassidy’s body! She’s dead.”
She faltered a footstep and nearly fell, as if she’d taken a literal bullet to the back. She turned and saw the sorrow flooding his eyes, as if now that he’d started to tell her the truth, he knew he couldn’t stop.
“Tess,” he said. “I could get in real trouble for telling you this, but they think you killed her.”
Maggie K. Black is an award-winning journalist and romantic suspense author with an insatiable love of traveling the world. She has lived in the American South, Europe and the Middle East. She now makes her home in Canada with her history-teacher husband, their two beautiful girls and a small but mighty dog. Maggie enjoys connecting with her readers at maggiekblack.com.
Books by Maggie K. Black
Love Inspired Suspense
Undercover Protection
Surviving the Wilderness
Her Forgotten Life
Cold Case Chase
Rocky Mountain K-9 Unit
Explosive Revenge
Protected Identities
Christmas Witness Protection
Runaway Witness
Christmas Witness Conspiracy
True North Heroes
Undercover Holiday Fiancée
The Littlest Target
Rescuing His Secret Child
Cold Case Secrets
Visit the Author Profile page at LoveInspired.com for more titles.
Cold Case Chase
Maggie K. Black
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.
—Matthew 10:29
For all those who’ve made mistakes and are trying to do better.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Dear Reader
Excerpt from Texas Ranch Target by Virginia Vaughan
ONE
As Tessa Watson stepped off the bus in the tiny town of Princess, British Columbia, her eyes locked on the tall, broad-shouldered man in the cowboy hat who lounged on a wooden bench on the other side of the street. He was following her. She was certain of it. He wasn’t the first suspicious character Tessa had believed was spying on her since she’d become a licensed private investigator. She’d opened her own one-woman investigations agency at the age of twenty, almost ten years ago. She’d named it The Chase Agency, in memory of her friend Cassidy Chase, who’d disappeared as a teenager and never been found. In the past few years, Tessa had noticed enough shadowy figures walking behind her down darkened alleys, or hanging around by her parked car, to suspect she’d made at least one powerful enemy along the way who was now keeping tabs on her. Not to mention the occasional threatening letters she got in the mail from unknown sources who wanted her dead.
But this guy—whoever he was—was definitely the most relentless stalker she’d ever had.
Tessa glanced past him, through the lenses of the thick-rimmed glasses she wore to disguise her features, and pretended to scan the quaint stores of Princess’s Main Street. Her fingers fiddled with the strings on her sweatshirt, activating the tiny camera hidden in the pocket, and she took several pictures of him, which she would run through facial recognition as soon as she could. Beside the camera, in her breast pocket, sat the most important piece of evidence she’d ever collected, and the clue that had led her to Princess—the engraved silver bracelet Cassidy had been wearing on the day she disappeared. Tessa had spent years searching for it, and she’d suddenly gotten a hit on an online auction aggregate site early this morning. A bangle matching the description had turned up at a pawnshop in Whistler, BC.
The pawnshop owner had warned her she wasn’t the only one interested in it, but had promised to hold it for the two hours it would take her to get there. She’d hit the road immediately, feeling fresh hope building in her chest, and then had somehow picked up an unwanted shadow along the way. Was he after Cassidy’s bracelet too? Or was he after her? She’d first suspected the cowboy was on her tail when she’d noticed the same blue truck kept reappearing behind her on the highway from Vancouver to Whistler. Then she’d noticed the man himself following her around the mountain resort town. In an all too casual way, he seemed to track her every move without ever getting too close or letting her see his face. She’d managed to ditch him in a parking garage, leave her car there, change her appearance in a washroom and then hop on the bus to Princess instead of driving, in the hopes that would shake him.
Apparently, it hadn’t. Instead, he’d beaten her there. He’d even gone to the trouble of swapping the shirt he’d been wearing for a blue plaid one and brown leather jacket, and switched up his baseball hat for a Calgary white hat, as if he was on his way to the Stampede. Despite the palpable shiver of fear that seeing him again spread down her spine, she also felt her lips quirk. This guy was almost as good as her.
Who are you, cowboy? Who are you working for?
Some past criminal she’d taken down who held a grudge? Or had she somehow stumbled into a police investigation so significant they’d actually sent one of the big guns to trail her?
Catching a bus hadn’t been part of the plan when she’d left her house this morning. Then again, neither had been trekking all the way to Princess. When Tessa had initially rushed out the door to hop in her car that morning to head to Whistler, a pair of uniformed officers had approached her, pulled out their badges and asked if she was free to come into the local station for questioning. They wouldn’t tell her why or what it was about, and she knew the law well enough to know that they didn’t have to. But she also knew that she was under no obligation to go anywhere with them unless they detained or arrested her. So she’d gotten into her car, taken off and been relieved that they’d finally stopped following her when she hit the highway. They’d been simple to shake.
Something told her losing this cowboy wouldn’t be so easy.
She stretched the handle of her small rolling suitcase out to its full length, raised her chin and walked down the street toward the Princess Inn. The late morning sun still shone bright overhead. But storm clouds were beginning to build at the edge of the horizon where they brushed against the Rocky Mountains. Gigantic pine trees towered high around the town. There was something about them that made Tessa think of sentry guards, as if the trees themselves were trying to keep someone or something from escaping. The man at the pawnshop had told Tessa the bracelet was discovered by someone camping on a small island nearby. He wouldn’t give her the person’s name, but claimed this guy had camped at that particular site so often he knew with absolute certainty it had only been dropped there in the past twenty-four hours. Tessa wasn’t sure she believed that. But a heavy storm was on its way, and if there were any other clues to Cassidy’s disappearance on the island, she didn’t want to risk them being washed away by the rain before she could search the area. Thankfully she’d managed to not only book a hotel suite online, she’d even managed to find herself a kayak.
She’d check in, make her way to the island and see what she could find.
Just as soon as she lost the guy on her tail.
She reached the Princess Inn. Chimes jangled as she pushed the door open. For just a fraction of a second she could see the face of the man who’d been following her reflected in the glass. She froze as recognition dawned.
Anthony? Anthony Jones?
Anthony was the one following her?
When they’d been teenagers, Anthony had promised to love her forever. Instead, he’d broken her heart. In an instant, the face disappeared again. Suddenly her heart overruled her brain, and she turned around to look for the face of the man she’d once thought herself so deeply in love with. Instead, all she saw was the man’s back as he walked away from her down the street. No. The man who’d been following her couldn’t be Anthony. It had been a lifetime since she’d put the earnest young man in her rearview mirror. He’d been eighteen then, passionate about reading books on law enforcement and playing basketball, and unwavering in his belief that he knew what was best in every situation.
No good would come from thinking about him now.
The smell of well-polished wood and vanilla filled her senses as she walked through the lobby. Caribou and elk heads looked down at her from above the check-in desk. They were flanked by mounted salmon. A pair o f stuffed and mounted mallards sat on top of a fancy cabinet that held rows upon rows of old-fashioned room keys. A sign on the wall read Hunters Welcome.
She tapped her finger on the bell that sat on the counter, and a satisfying ding filled the lobby. A second later, a man in a waistcoat and with a head of white hair appeared from a door behind the counter.
“Checking in, miss?” He stretched out the syllable of the last word for a beat, as if waiting for her to fill in the rest.
“Galloway,” she said. “Joanna Galloway. One night.”
She laid a pretty good fake ID that matched her alias down on the table, but the man barely even glanced at it. The suite had already been paid for with a prepaid credit card that couldn’t be traced back to her but ensured the inn wouldn’t be out a dime. The man handed her a very modern key card, gave her the Wi-Fi password and wished her a pleasant stay. Tessa thanked him, grabbed her suitcase and walked toward the stairs. Her eyes scanned the large picture window and searched the street outside.
The man who she kept telling herself couldn’t be Anthony Jones was nowhere to be seen. She’d have felt safer if she’d spotted him there, glaring at the front door and waiting to nab her when she exited. At least then she’d know where he was.
She found her suite halfway down a hallway on the second floor. It was fairly simple. The living area had a couch, table and two chairs. To her right was a bathroom and to the left, the one bedroom with a second adjoining bathroom. Straight ahead lay huge sliding glass doors leading out to a balcony, and beyond that a thick forest of cedar trees. She put her suitcase on the bed, then went into the washroom where she stared at the unfamiliar face in the mirror. First, she took off the long, straight wig she’d been wearing to reveal her usual mass of unruly, shoulder-length brown curls underneath. Then she ditched the glasses she didn’t actually need to see. Finally, she swapped her blue sweatshirt for a red one. She shook her hair out, went back into the bedroom, unzipped the suitcase and pulled out the one thing inside—a camo-green backpack that contained all her belongings.
Now what?
Tessa worked her cases alone. But she gathered a lot of help and information from a group of likeminded citizen detectives she connected with online, as well as material she gleaned from community message boards and neighborhood watch groups. She also had a private social media page for past, present and prospective clients. When she’d posted something there, while still on the bus, about needing to rent a boat in Princess, one user had responded immediately, saying she worked for a local mom-and-pop boat rental business and would leave a kayak for Tessa in a nearby cove that was only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel.
It had been twelve years since a seventeen-year-old Cassidy had walked out of a Whistler bar with a stranger and never been seen since. She’d been hanging out and drinking, underage, with teenage colleagues there before she’d gone missing. A couple of brief texts had been sent from Cassidy’s cell phone to her parents in the days after her disappearance, reassuring them that she was okay. Then her debit card had been used and her cell phone had pinged around British Columbia and Alberta for weeks after she vanished, and the media had written Cassidy off as a troubled runaway who had a history of underage drinking.
In the years since, Tessa had built a huge database of facts about the case, including interviews and newspaper articles. It seemed the police had dropped the ball and let the case go cold, but that hadn’t stopped Tessa from calling and emailing law enforcement repeatedly whenever she uncovered anything new.
What Tessa wanted to do now before heading to the island was fire up her laptop, log on to the dark web, and take a couple of hours to review both the maps she’d downloaded of the area and her files on Cassidy’s disappearance, in the hopes she’d find some scrap of a clue that would help in her search. She had a tablet with her too, which gave her the opportunity to scan two screens at once and compare them. That had been her plan before she’d been facing the twin threats of an impending storm and an unwanted shadow.
Now she didn’t want to risk hanging around the hotel too long.
She downloaded the photos she’d taken on the street with her hidden camera. The man’s face appeared on the screen.
A strong jaw. A tender mouth. Eyes hidden under the brim of a cowboy hat...
Once again her heart told her it was Anthony, and her mind told her heart that it was wrong. She was only thinking of him because her mind was stuck in the past, and once she figured out what happened to Cassidy she’d be able to move on.
Something rustled in the trees outside and drew her attention to the window. A shiver ran down her spine. There was no one there. A reverse image search for the man’s partial face turned up nothing. She quickly sent the pictures to her small and trusted group of citizen detective friends, hoping one of them would have more success. Then she pulled out the bracelet and examined it closely. The harsh chemicals the pawnshop had cleaned it with would have probably destroyed any fingerprints or DNA. But she searched for both just in case with a small crime scene kit in her bag and found neither. The bracelet itself was in remarkably good shape, sterling silver with intricate flowers and vines on the outside and an engraving on the inside: To Cass—Friends Forever—Tess.
Ironically, it hadn’t felt like it the night Cassidy disappeared. Their friendship had ended in a spectacular fight after Cassidy had decided to get back together with her no-good boyfriend, Kevin Scotch-Simmonds, just days after she’d begged Tessa to sneak out at night to come rescue her from him at a party. Kevin was the son of the owner of Canada’s second-largest grocery store chain, and the party had been at his family’s spacious summer house. When Tessa had arrived, Kevin had been violent and drunk, and Tessa had been injured in the scuffle. Anthony had come to her rescue, but he’d also called her parents and the police from the hospital. Tessa had been grounded for sneaking out and forced to give up her summer job as a camp counselor.
Tessa and Anthony hadn’t seen eye to eye about anything that’d happened that night. Anthony had called Tessa both reckless and foolish. Tessa said Anthony shouldn’t have taken charge of everything and called her folks and the cops without talking to her first. They’d broken up. And it had all been for nothing. Cassidy had gone right back to Kevin, told Tessa they could no longer be friends and blocked her number. Tessa had then written Cassidy an angry letter saying all sorts of nasty things she’d regretted the instant she’d sent it.
Then, less than two months later, Cassidy had taken a weekend off work to party at a cottage with five other camp counselors. They’d all gone underage drinking in Whistler and Cassidy had disappeared.
And yet video footage of the bar had shown Cassidy had been wearing Tessa’s bracelet that night. Did that mean Cassidy had forgiven her?
Tessa took pictures of the bracelet from all angles and uploaded them to her online storage drive. Then she locked the bracelet, laptop, her computer tablet and various bits of her disguise in the hotel room safe. It wasn’t the best option, considering whoever was following her might break in, but taking them with her seemed even more risky. She cast a final glance around the room to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind.
Unexpectedly, a Bible on the nightstand caught her eye. Her ultra-strict parents had raised her to believe in a God who, like them, “loved” her in theory but didn’t seem to like her very much. When Tessa had taken a DNA test, she’d been upset to discover her dad wasn’t her biological father. Rather than talking with her about it—let alone comforting or reassuring her—her parents been angry with her for even asking them if it was true. They hadn’t spoken to her since. But Anthony had believed in a God who really cared about people and wanted them to take care of each other. There’d been something she’d really liked about the way Anthony prayed.
God, if You’re listening, help me solve what happened to Cassidy. I don’t need anything for me. Just help me find her. And if something bad happened, help me get justice for her, okay? I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to her.
She wasn’t sure if that counted as a prayer, but it was the best she had for now. Tessa pushed the window open and looked out into the trees. The balcony was only one story off the ground, but it was still farther than she wanted to drop. She’d never been much of a fan of heights. She pulled a climbing rope from the side of her rucksack, clamped one edge on the balcony and made her way down. Hopefully nobody on the first floor was looking out, wondering why a woman was rappelling down the building. She landed in a crouching position and pushed the release button on her rope. It slithered down toward her.
