In Seconds

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?”

“No, C. C. Larsen did. When Gertie found him, she ran to C.C.’s to use the phone.”

“But C.C.’s house is a quarter of a mile from those rentals,” Claire said. Having lived here her whole life, she knew every street, every alley, every empty field and rental cabin. She’d searched them all, at some point, for her mother.

He adjusted his bag to redistribute the weight. “She didn’t want to go to another rental for fear of who might be there. You can understand.” Wrinkling his nose, he added, “C.C. and I watched ’em cart out the body.”

“This is terrible,” Vivian muttered, but she wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying. She was wondering if the panic intensifying her sadness over Pat’s death was justified or simply an echo of an earlier time.

“I tried to get a few more details from the sheriff, but…it was useless,” George said. “He told me he’s ‘investigating the incident’ and that he’ll know more later. He also said everything will be okay. But I don’t see how it can ever be okay for Gertie.”

The sheriff had answered without really answering. Vivian recognized his “cop-speak” because she’d heard it before. When her stepfather had been shot and killed, the investigators wouldn’t tell her or her family anything. Not knowing what was really going on had been almost as agonizing as learning that they were placing the blame on Virgil, her older brother, and prosecuting him, at eighteen, for murder.

“We’ve got a right to more information than that,” Claire complained. “It’s our community, too.”

George nodded. “I see those shows on TV. I know what can happen when a serial killer gets started. Psychopaths don’t quit till someone stops ’em. And this sounds like a psychopath to me. Who else would beat a man to death for no reason?”

“Do you think maybe some drug addict wanted Pat’s wallet and he wouldn’t give it up?” Vivian grasped at any feasible explanation, hoping the truth wasn’t what she feared.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” George replied. “C.C. told me that Gertie said his wallet was missing. But there was only about fifty bucks inside. Still, a bungled robbery would be better than a serial killer. Imagine someone like that Zodiac fella or—or BTK setting up shop here in the Chain of Lakes.”

Vivian couldn’t imagine it. That was the problem. Claire’s mother disappearing fifteen years ago was the only blemish on this town, and most folks believed she’d run off. Pineview, nestled so close to Crystal Lake, was picture-perfect. Safe. Close-knit. Stunningly beautiful. Untouched by the rest of the world. Apart from it, too. As George had said, Pineview didn’t even have cell-phone reception.

It did, however, have its first modern-day murder.

“The FBI would descend on us. The media, too.” George was expanding on his psychopath theory.

Claire checked the street, probably hoping to see her sister, Leanne, roll toward them in her motorized wheelchair. Crippled in a sledding accident when she was thirteen, Leanne drove it everywhere, even through the ruts on their road. “Maybe Chester over at the paper will get a letter from the killer, taunting Sheriff King.”

George staggered under the weight of his bag. “Or someone else will die.”

A real-estate agent beaten to death inside his own vacation rental spoke more of rage than a stalking type of murder, but Vivian didn’t say so. She preferred to fade into the background, didn’t want Claire or George to think she knew anything about the subject. No one here had any idea that her stepfather had been murdered, or that her brother had served fourteen years in prison before being exonerated. They had no idea of the problems that had started upon his release, either. Because all of that had happened to Laurel Hodges, not Vivian Stewart.

“If there’s a serial killer running around, the danger is far from over,” Claire said, but Vivian wasn’t so sure this perpetrator had killed just for the thrill of it. If the violent gang her brother had joined while he was in prison had caught up with her yet again, it could be that Pat had merely gotten in the way. Like that U.S. marshal in one of the places she’d been before. The Crew had slit his throat and left him bleeding out on the floor. They would’ve killed her, too, if not for—

She couldn’t even think of what had almost happened, because it involved her children. The men who belonged to The Crew were ruthless. They’d proven that, hadn’t they? They’d also proven that they could get hold of whatever information they wanted. Vivian was convinced that someone in the very agency charged with their protection had been talking. That was the only way The Crew could’ve found them before, when they were all living in D.C. So they’d left the witness protection program, assumed new identities yet again and separated. Other than Virgil, his wife, Peyton, and Rex, who lived in Buffalo, New York, no one knew where she was, not even their handler from WitSec who’d helped them relocate the first time. After all that, what more could she possibly do to keep her small family safe?

Should she have changed her children’s names, too? Because children were so difficult to trace—they didn’t sign up for credit cards or get jobs or do any of the other things that left a trail—she’d opted to keep their first names. They had a different last name, though, which they understood was because of her divorce. Her new first name, she’d told them, was because she liked it better. Even that had taken them a while to get used to.

“We need to look out for each other, report any strangers we see,” Claire said.

“But it’s tourist season,” George responded. “There’re always strangers this time of year, most of ’em young guys who’ve come to hunt or fish or canoe. And you know how rough some of ’em can look, with all their tattoos and body piercings.”

“Then we’ll have to keep an eye on all of them.” Claire glanced at Vivian, anticipating her full agreement, and did a double take. “Oh, my God! We’ve got to get you rinsed!”

She’d changed her hair. Drastically. Myles King noticed that right off. For one thing, she was now blonde. That suited her, but he didn’t know if he liked the cut; he couldn’t see Vivian clearly enough to tell. His neighbor waited just outside the dim yellow glow of his porch light as if she feared he might press her to come inside if she moved any closer. She always approached him as warily as she might a bear or some other dangerous animal.

Why was she so skittish?

He might’ve guessed that he intimidated her. Police officers got that reaction sometimes. It came with the uniform. But at six foot two, he was only four inches taller. And maybe she was slender, but she was fit. She didn’t seem like the type to feel easily threatened.

Besides, he’d been so nice to her! He rolled her garbage can to the curb if she forgot to set it out, mowed her lawn when he mowed his, bought enough fresh strawberries to share (he’d once overheard her telling her son that she loved fresh strawberries). He couched it all as an attempt to be neighborly, and it was—being neighborly to the beautiful brunette, who was no longer a brunette, next door. But nothing he did seemed to break down her defenses. Her kids were always excited to see him, but other than those strawberries or something as small as that, she politely declined every gift or invitation.

His instincts told him he was better off not getting involved with her. But he could sense the chemistry between them, and that was what confused him. He’d never forget the time he was working in the yard without a shirt and caught her watching him from where she was weeding her garden. It was as if a lightning bolt had gone through them both, incinerating them on the spot.

He knew desire when he saw it; she was as attracted to him as he was to her. So why wouldn’t she let him take her to dinner?

“Can I help you?” Determined not to try any harder than he already had, Myles kept one hand on the door. It’d been a hell of a day. The last thing he needed was to top it off with another dose of sexual frustration.

“Um, yes…maybe you can.” She cleared her throat. “I’m afraid my fridge has gone out.”

The images of blood and death he’d seen earlier still filled his head, making it difficult to immediately comprehend her words. He’d returned from the scene of Pat Stueben’s murder more than an hour ago, but he’d carried the grisly sight home with him. The fact that anyone would beat a good man, a friend to everyone, in Myles’s own backyard, so to speak, made him so angry he couldn’t think of anything else. “Did you say your fridge?” he clarified.

“Yes.”

He felt his eyebrows go up. “Okay…”

“It went on the blink a couple of hours ago and… Claire told me you’re a better handyman than Byron Jacobs.” She flashed him a quick smile. “She said he had to call you when he couldn’t fix her stove last month.”

She was here for a favor? She never darkened his door, except to drag her son away. Jake slipped over whenever he could. The kid liked to follow him around, even help with the yard work, so Myles had been training him to use the weeder, the edger and the pruning shears.

But he wasn’t in the business of fixing other people’s broken appliances. He’d done Claire a favor. He wouldn’t mind lending Vivian a hand, too, but it’d taken him three days to screw up the nerve to ask her if she’d go out on the lake with him two weeks ago. And her response? She had to clean her house—an excuse that was almost as bad as telling him she had to wash her hair.

He opened his mouth to turn her away. He was about to say the food would last until Byron could get to it in the morning. But he couldn’t make himself go through with it, which just proved how obsessed with her he’d become. His wife had died of cancer only three years ago—but thirty-six months of celibacy felt a lot longer to his body than his heart. Not only that, this was the first time Vivian had invited him inside her home. From what he could tell, she didn’t ask anyone in. Except maybe Claire and Vera Soblasky, who occasionally watched Jake and Mia for her.

Curious to see how she lived, he heard himself accept. “Sure. I can come over right now, if you want.”

“Marley won’t mind?” she asked.

His daughter had a friend over; they were watching a movie upstairs on the big screen in his room. They wouldn’t miss him if he stepped out for a few minutes. “No. She’ll be fine.”

Vivian’s face lit up. “Great. Thank you so much.”

When that rare smile shot like an arrow to his groin, Myles cursed the testosterone that made him so…male. He had single women coming on to him all the time, but he wasn’t interested in them. Instead, he wanted this complicated neighbor who’d let him know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t welcome him even as a friend.

But tonight she needed help. And he was planning to make sure she got it. Apparently even the gruesome murder of an upstanding Pineview citizen couldn’t lessen her impact on him. “I’ll grab my toolbox and come over.”