Chapter 3
Alex heard the cell phone ring in her ear. She’d called again in case she’d misdialed. Then she heard it ringing in the large dining area, coming from the far side of the room. She walked over and saw four women sitting at one of the tables. She double-checked the faces and brought up the woman’s picture on her cell phone. She was at the right place. She stopped at the table, introduced herself, and asked to speak with Melanie Schaefer for a few minutes.
Melanie swallowed and said, “Can this wait until after breakfast?”
Alex considered the issue. “How about in half an hour?” she compromised. “Make it forty-five minutes, if you want to meet me at the station.”
With the woman’s assurance she’d be there in forty-five minutes, Alex turned to the front counter, ordered a coffee to go, and stepped outside. She studied this corner of town. She’d felt like a stranger for a long time, but Coronado was settling into her soul. The city was like any other large city, with the exception of this one being full of servicemen and women. Still, the people here had motivations and reactions, the same as anyone else.
Wherever there were people, there was trouble, and that was her specialty.
She got back in her vehicle with her coffee and slowly drove past the other three houses that had been broken into. She stopped at each, took pictures of the front with her cell phone so she could compare them. Then she took her time driving back to her office.
Instead of heading to her own cubbyhole, she walked around the building to dispatch and headed for the boss’s office.
Somebody else was in his office, but she didn’t wait. She knocked and opened the door, stepping in. Barry looked up and glared at her. She glared right back. He made a motion to his visitor and said, “Come up later, and we’ll go over this then.”
The woman got up, smiled at Alex, and left quickly. Alex stormed in, sat down on the vacated chair, and said, “Why the hell wasn’t I called?”
Barry pounded the desk in front of him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s because your people don’t do their jobs,” she said smoothly. “If I get missed on a call-out again, it’ll go down on paper.”
“Don’t threaten me,” Barry roared. “I already talked to them. You should have been called.”
She pulled out her cell phone, opened it up to the calls from that day, and tossed it in front of him. “I didn’t get called. The fourth break-in in a week, and I didn’t get called.”
He frowned, tapped his desk, and said, “That’s not good.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think?” She grabbed her cell phone and walked out without another word.
She didn’t know what was going on, but the locals sure didn’t like the fact she’d taken over this job. And of course they expected those already here to get promoted first. But that hadn’t happened, and they all needed to deal with it. She admitted that her predecessor had been on the job for ten years and had been the kind to walk around and hand out chocolates and flowers to everybody.
That wasn’t her style, but she didn’t expect to be stabbed in the back over it. To not be kept informed when crimes occurred was inexcusable. She kept hoping they could work it out without bringing all the brass down on top of everybody. Because, in that case, when heads rolled, they would roll long and far. She didn’t want to cost anybody their job, but no doubt the person deliberately keeping her out of the loop deserved it.
As she pondered that, she wondered if it was possible the person doing so was protecting whoever was responsible for the break-ins. It was a huge leap in her own mind as she couldn’t imagine anybody being that obvious. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
She stopped in the outer office and looked around. That thought wouldn’t leave her alone. She strode back into Barry’s office, stepped inside, and said, “I want the names of everybody working from midnight to eight this morning.”
He shook his head. “You don’t need that.”
“If one of your staff is covering up for whoever is doing these break-ins, I do need that. And I’ll make it official if I have to.”
His glare turned stern. “You can’t be thinking somebody else is involved?”
“What else am I supposed to believe when I’m deliberately kept out of something like that? I want those names, and I want them on my desk by this afternoon.”
She turned and this time strode straight out of the outer office. She hadn’t closed the door between her and Barry, so she knew some people would have overheard the conversation.
Offices like this thrived on gossip, and that was okay. She’d bust those asses down a grade or two. It just wasn’t acceptable, and she was still fuming when she got back to her office. She took the lid off her take-out coffee, poured it into her mug, and sat down.
There had to be some way to track this asshole.
Traffic cams were set up on the main streets, but so far there had been no indication this person was driving a vehicle. Chances were good he was on foot, and that made him a local. He’d picked that neighborhood for a reason. Quite possibly it was his own stomping ground.
In that case, she wanted to know exactly who lived in every one of those houses, and that involved a lot of canvassing. She needed to narrow it down so she wasn’t wasting man-hours, her own included.
As she sat here making notes, her phone rang. She lifted the desk phone to find out Melanie sat in the lobby waiting for her. Alex got up, walked through to the main entrance, motioned for Melanie to join her, and led the way back. After they were both seated, Alex said, “I’m sorry to make you go through this again, but I need to know exactly what happened.”
Melanie was anything but cooperative. “Why don’t you just ask your other officers?”
“Because I want to hear from you personally,” Alex answered smoothly, her gaze narrowing as it settled on the young woman. “So, from the beginning please.” She kept her voice strict and stern, giving Melanie no leeway to not comply.
As if realizing that, Melanie slowly spoke. “There’s not much to say. I was sleeping soundly. I woke up when I heard a noise downstairs. I went down and found the intruder. I screamed at him, told him to get out of my house. He turned around and whacked me one. I fought. My head hit something, and I fell. When I woke up, he was gone. I called the police for assistance, and it was a damn long time before they got there.”
“How long was it exactly?” She had her pen over a sheet of paper, taking notes. When the woman said fifteen minutes, Alex looked up at her.
“I’d have been dead if the guy hadn’t been gone already,” Melanie snapped.
“You don’t know where the officers were at that time, who they were already helping. Just because officers are on duty doesn’t mean they aren’t already busy,” Alex said shortly.
Melanie stood. “Can I go now?”
“No, I have a few more questions.” And she proceeded to work through the list of questions she had in front of her.
Melanie remained standing through them all.
“Did you hear a vehicle at any time, arriving or leaving?”
Melanie shook her head. “No, I didn’t hear a vehicle at all.”
“When you heard the first noise, was it coming from the back of the house or from the front of the house?”
“I have no idea. It came from underneath me.”
“Is your bedroom in the front of the house or the back of the house?”
“My bedroom is in the front of the house. So, are you asking if he came in through the front door or the back door?”
“Partially …” Alex waited for Melanie to answer.
Melanie thought about it. “I assumed he came in the kitchen door because, if it had been the front, somebody could have seen him.” She shrugged. “I had both doors locked, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“It matters if somebody else might have seen him.”
“Well, if they did, I doubt they’d say anything.”
“Had you heard the media coverage warning everybody in your area to be careful, to watch out for an intruder?”
“Sure, I heard about it, but I didn’t think it applied to me. Why would he come after me?”
“That’s the next question I was going to ask,” she said. Melanie was looking a whole lot less belligerent now. “I wonder why he targeted you.”
Melanie shrugged. “I figured because I was a female at home alone. But that would mean he knew that. Which means he either has been watching my house or following me.” At that, the look on her face was stricken as if she hadn’t really understood just how personal this attack could have been.
“Do you have valuable items in your house?”
Melanie shook her head. “No. The most expensive thing I have is the TV, but it’s wall-mounted, and it is still there.”
“It’s probably too heavy for him to have moved on his own.”
Melanie gave a short, hard laugh. “Well, that’s one good thing about being extravagant. I always wanted a large TV. But it never occurred to me it would be too big to steal.”
“I presume you only saw one man?”
Melanie nodded. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t more.”
“Is there anything you can tell me about him?”
“He was wearing a black mask, dressed all in black, and I never heard him say anything.”
“So, you didn’t hear his voice, couldn’t recognize his face?”
“No. But he had a slight build. He wasn’t one of those big, solid, chunky guys, and he certainly wasn’t fat. He was very lean, tall and wiry-framed.”
“Good to know.” Alex continued to jot down notes as she kept questioning Melanie. Finally, when she figured she had everything Melanie could offer, she asked, “What are your plans now?”
“I’ll stay with a friend overnight. My sister is flying in,” she said. “But she won’t be here until tomorrow.” After an uneasy silence, Melanie asked, “Do you think he’ll come back?”
Alex looked up at her. “He hasn’t returned to the others yet. However, that doesn’t mean he won’t.” She watched as Melanie deflated like a balloon in front of her.
“I really hope he doesn’t come,” Melanie said fervently. “It was bad enough the first time around. I can’t imagine a second time.”
“I hope he doesn’t too. The problem is, now he knows the inside of your house. He knows what you have for security, or rather that you don’t have any security. He knows you live alone. All things that he assumed before, but now he knows for sure.”
“What did he want?” Melanie cried out. “I don’t have anything worth stealing.”
Alex tossed down her pen, leaned back in her chair, and studied the small woman. “And that’s my concern too. In each of the houses he entered, he didn’t take anything.”
Her face blanched. “Do you think he meant to rape me?”
“It’s a possibility. The question then is, why he didn’t while you were unconscious.”
Melanie’s hand went to her throat. “I screamed. I was screaming as loud as I could just before he knocked me out.”
“And that’s probably what saved you,” Alex said gently. “If you screamed loud enough, then he’d be afraid somebody else would raise the alarm, and the police would come. If you hadn’t done that, he might have considered there would be enough time to do what he wanted.”
In her head, that reassured her about his motivation for not having touched the woman while she was out cold. There was nothing like a good set of lungs to warn the neighbors.
“When your sister gets in tomorrow, feel free to go back to your home. You might want to invest in a security system.”
“I never bothered before because everybody told me it was too easy to bypass them.”
“That’s quite true. It is easy to do. But, if you get one, you have somebody at the end of a phone. As soon as the alarms are cut or set off, they will contact you to make sure everything is okay. And you can also have a panic button linked directly to them. There are all kinds of options. What you don’t want to do is treat this as a one-off that never happens again.”
Melanie shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. I never want to experience this again. I just have to find the best way to do that.”
Alex stood. “Thank you for coming in.”
Melanie smiled. “I really didn’t want to talk about it over breakfast, and I didn’t want to have to go through it with all the women there beside me. They are friends, but I knew it would just make it worse. It’s bad enough to know others see you differently. But when they hear all the details, well …”
“That’s an interesting way to look at it. Most people would tell their friends so they would have their support and understanding.”
Melanie shrugged. “I guess most aren’t that good of friends.” She turned and walked off.
Alex watched Melanie head outside into the sunshine and get into her vehicle. She made a very good point. We have friends, and then we have friends. She herself would only tell her best friends. The others, she wouldn’t want them to know. There’d be too many questions, and Melanie was right; they’d look at her differently. But, in this case, nothing had happened. She’d had an intruder; she fought him off, and the intruder ran away, scared. The end.
At least Alex hoped so.
She headed back to her desk. No matter how many assholes there were in the world and how many they caught, the number of files on her desk grew.
*
Macklin had searched the internet, looking for any insight into Marsha’s last years. There were a couple of mentions of a Marsha with different last names and variations on the spelling of her first name but no exact hits. When they’d spent time together, she’d enjoyed coffee shops and walking on the beach, but he didn’t really know much more about her.
And that made it difficult to figure out what she’d been doing. She used to work as an office clerk, he thought, but whether she had until her death, he wasn’t sure. Yet that little bit of information made no difference to the damn case.
Just because bits and pieces came up from the depths of his memories didn’t mean anything at this point.
His phone rang. He picked it up and grinned. “Hey, Caitlyn. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine, but it’s you I’m worried about. How did the meeting go with Alex? I’m sorry that I couldn’t wait until you were done, but I had to go into work.”
“Not a problem. She just asked a few questions about Marsha, where I’d been the night she was killed. What kind of relationship we had. You know—things like that.”
“She’s a good person, and she doesn’t know you like I do.”
Macklin chuckled. “She wasn’t mean to me. She was professional. I answered her questions like I would for any other officer.”
“Good. She’ll get to the bottom of this. I know she will.”
That was his cheerleader best friend. She always tried to believe the best in everyone.
“I know she will,” he said calmly. “Don’t worry about me. I didn’t do anything. And the evidence will show that.”
“I know it will,” she muttered. “But it’s frustrating.”
“These things take time so not to worry.” They spoke for several more minutes; then she had to run to meet Ryder.
Mac smiled as he put away his phone. Caitlyn and Ryder were good together. He wondered if Alex had someone in her life.