In Seconds (Bulletproof 2)

1

Pineview, Montana

It was the murder that triggered everything. The moment Laurel Hodges—Vivian Stewart as of two years ago—heard about it, everything she’d been through, everything she’d done to escape her past, came rushing back at her. And it happened at a place where she’d felt completely safe only seconds before. She was having highlights put in her hair at Claire’s Salon, which wasn’t much of a salon, just an add-on to her friend’s small home.

Although Claire had grown up here, Vivian had lived in Pineview only since she’d assumed her most recent identity. She’d chosen this town because it had an extremely low crime rate, it was so far from where she’d been before and it was on the backside of nowhere. She’d never dreamed the people who’d been chasing her for four years would think to look here. And it’d been a long enough stretch of peace and quiet to believe the terrible years were over. She’d left her old self behind, adjusted, established her fledgling purse-design business and begun to live again. She and her two children—Mia, seven, and Jake, nine—were finally starting to belong.

And now, in the blink of an eye, everything they’d created here felt threatened.

“What’d you say?” Lifting the hood of the commercial hair dryer, she leaned out so she could hear. The postman, George Grannuto, had just walked through the doors Claire had flung wide so they could enjoy the breezy June morning while she vented the fumes of the hair-coloring chemicals.

“Pat Stueben’s dead,” he repeated, handing Claire her mail. “He’s been murdered.” His face, drained of its usual ruddy color, made him appear years older than he was. Vivian knew his exact age—fifty-five—because she’d attended his birthday party last month. His wife was part of her Thursday-night book group.

Claire, only five foot three or so, leaned on the broom she’d been using to sweep up hair. Vivian had wanted a sassy cut to signify the freedom and happiness she’d been experiencing so often of late. She’d also gone back to being a blonde, which was her natural color. But going so short was a big change. Now she couldn’t help staring at the dark brown locks lying on the floor, feeling as if she’d just shed her skin.

“How? When?” Claire brought a hand to her chest. George’s words had obviously shocked her as much as they had Vivian. With the disappearance of her mother fifteen years ago and the death of her husband after only a few years of marriage, Claire had had more than her share of bad news. And now this… “Leanne and I saw him and Gertie at Fresh Ketch last night,” she said. “They were in the booth next to ours.”

Tall and bony, George resembled a cartoon stork delivering a baby when he carried his bulging mailbag down Claire’s little dead-end street, and the shorts that went with his warm-weather uniform didn’t improve his appearance. They revealed stiltlike legs with knobby knees and varicose veins. But he always wore a smile.

Except today.

“Someone called him,” he explained, “wanting to rent one of those cabins he owns over on the north shore. So after breakfast he drove around the lake to show the property—and never came back.”

If he’d said that Pat had died of a heart attack, Vivian wouldn’t have found it difficult to believe. Pat was no longer as svelte as the picture posted on his real-estate signs. But…murdered? That couldn’t be. They still didn’t know what’d happened to Claire’s mother, but no one had ever been killed in this tranquil place, not in recent memory. Folks here didn’t even lock their doors at night. If the community had more deaths than some, that was because it had more seniors.

The old cloying fear welled up, making it hard for Vivian to breathe, let alone talk. After two attempts to clear her throat, she managed to find her voice. “Who discovered him?”

“Gertie.” The clicking sound George made with his tongue was shorthand for “this makes it even worse.” “When he didn’t come home, she drove over to see what was keeping him. You know how close they are. Were,” he corrected. “The scene when she walked in was—” He shook his head.

“She got there too late?” Claire asked this question; Vivian was still chasing words around the vortex of panic in her head.

George lowered his voice. “She found him lying in a pool of blood, beaten senseless. He died before he could tell her anything.”

The hair on the back of Vivian’s neck stood on end. Beaten senseless? Who could hate Pat enough to kill him—and in such a violent manner? No one from Pineview. He was popular, jovial, well-liked.

Did this tragedy mean what she thought it might?

“Do they know who did it?” Claire beat Vivian to the question that was uppermost in her mind. It was obviously important to Claire, too, and it wasn’t hard to guess why, not with a mother who’d been missing for nearly two decades.

“I don’t think so,” George replied. “Maybe that would be different if we had cell phone service here, but we don’t. And if the sheriff knows anything, he’s not talking.”

Sheriff King happened to be Vivian’s next-door neighbor, so she knew him, at least a little. He wasn’t the type to divulge details until he was good and ready, especially if doing so might jeopardize a case. Myles was a by-the-book kind of cop. He was also a handsome widower with a thirteen-year-old daughter. He’d asked Vivian out on occasion, but she’d never accepted. Claire said she was crazy for rejecting him, but she was still trying to get over Rex McCready, her brother’s best friend who’d entered WitSec—witness protection—when she did. Besides, she was afraid to get too close to anyone who was unaware of her real situation for fear her past would come crashing into her present, just like it seemed to be doing today.

“How do you know all this?” There. She’d found her voice again. She’d also come to her feet.

“My route covers the whole lake.” He gestured toward Crystal Lake, even though they couldn’t see it from this part of town. Claire’s house was artsy, in a hippie sort of way, but it was located on the poor side of Pineview.

Claire started to speak, but Vivian plowed over her. “You were at the scene?”

“I was. So was the coroner, the sheriff, some detectives and forensic techs from the county. Boy, were they were a grim bunch. The sheriff was downright stone-faced.”

For good reason…

Heedless of the hair clippings that remained on the floor, Claire set her broom aside. “Is he the one who told you about Pat?”