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leash.
“Are you sure?” Melissa asked.
“Positive.” Hannah took the leash with a genuine smile. “I’ll see if I can teach him a few tricks before you get back.” She started off down the path toward the lakeside marina, Jasper trotting along beside her without so much as a backward glance.
“Traitor,” Melissa muttered with a grin, but her humor fled as soon as she got behind the wheel of her Volkswagen. The worry in Dinah’s voice might mean nothing.
But if Terry Harris was back in her life, it could very well mean murder.
Chapter Three
“She’s squeaky clean.” Aaron’s brother-in-law and fellow deputy Riley Patterson handed Aaron a file folder. “Her insurance agent says she barely has enough coverage on the house to pay for the repairs. She’s never shown any signs of being an attention seeker. Damned if I can see where she had a motive to burn down her own house.”
Aaron had figured as much. It was more likely that someone else had lit the match to torch the place. But who? And why? The same factors that made Melissa Draper an unlikely suspect for arson made her an unlikely victim as well.
Still, she clearly knew more about the fire than she was admitting. It was time he asked her, point blank, to tell him what she was hiding.
He grabbed the phone and dialed the number to the cottage. After five rings, the answering machine picked up. Stifling a mild curse, he left a message, wishing he’d thought to get her cell phone number before he’d left that morning. “Is her cell number in this file somewhere?” he asked Riley.
“Check her initial statement.”
Aaron found the number and tried it. No answer on the cell phone, either. He left a message there as well, grumbling as he hung up.
“Maybe she walked down to the bait shop,” Riley suggested.
Aaron tried the number to his parents’ shop. His sister Hannah answered on the second ring. “Cooper Cove Marina.”
“Hey, Skipper, is Melissa Draper there?” He knew he wouldn’t have to explain his query. His mother would have told Hannah all about her houseguest the second his sister walked into the bait shop.
“She left the cottage about twenty minutes ago,” Hannah told him. “I think she got a call from a client or something.”
A client? She was trying to work today?
“She seemed troubled when she left.” Hannah’s voice went serious. “She tried to hide it, but the call changed her whole mood.”
Worry nudged Aaron in the gut. What if the call was connected to the secret she was keeping about the arson? “If she calls or shows back up, call me immediately,” Aaron told her. “Tell Mom and Dad to do the same.”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?” Hannah asked.
“Probably not.” Even he could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.
After he rang off, he called the county dispatcher and requested that they flag any calls from Melissa Draper’s cell and home phone numbers and let Aaron know about them.
“Hey, Aaron, check this out,” Riley called from his desk.
Aaron crossed to his brother-in-law’s side and looked over his shoulder at the computer screen. On the screen was a police report from the department’s archives, a domestic disturbance call from a couple of years earlier.
The complainant was Melissa Draper, who lived at an address on Tuckahaw Road.
“This is the third similar report I’ve found,” Riley said. “Three domestic disturbances, three calls from Melissa Draper.”
Three different couples involved, Aaron saw as Riley clicked through the screens. Melissa was never listed as a victim, just the person reporting the disturbance.
“That’s strange,” Aaron murmured.
“You said she’s a lawyer, right?”
“Right. Corporate law—contracts, powers of attorney—”
“Maybe she does pro bono cases on the side.” Riley crossed to the file cabinets, rifling through the top drawer of the cabinet nearest the wall and emerging with a manila folder. He scanned the contents quickly, recognition spreading across his face. “I knew her name was familiar. She was the lawyer of record for the victim in a domestic abuse case I investigated back in the fall, one of my first cases after making investigator.” Riley handed the file to Aaron. “I met her before the trial. Seemed nice. A little quiet. But man, when she got that abusive son of a bitch on the stand, she turned into a tiger. Ripped him apart. It seemed—personal, you know? Some lawyers do pro bono work for causes they care about.”
“So the client she’s gone to see may be an abused wife.” Aaron frowned. Where there were abused wives, there were big, mean, violent husbands.
He dialed Melissa’s cell phone again. Still no answer.
He was starting to get a very bad feeling.
MELISSA’S cell phone vibrated against her side as she climbed the porch steps at Dinah Harris’s house, the second call in the last ten minutes. Same digits on the display, but since she didn’t recognize the number she let voice mail take it.
She knocked on the front door. Usually, a knock brought Dinah’s two little boys running to be the first to answer. But all Melissa heard was silence.
A few seconds later, the faint tap of footsteps approached the door. It opened and Dinah Harris stood in the doorway, looking at Melissa with scared green eyes.
“What is it?” Melissa stepped forward, taking Dinah’s hand. “Has Terry been back here?”
“C-come in and have some tea.” Dinah grasped Melissa’s hand, tugging her into the small, drab living room, her eyes glassy and wide with dread.
The hairs on Melissa’s arms bristled, her inner alarm clanging a dire warning. But before she could take even a step back, someone moved out from the shadows behind the door and caught her arm in a cruel, painful grasp.
“Glad you could join us, bitch,” Terry Harris murmured in her ear.
Her heart bucking wildly as a surge of sheer terror flooded her veins, she tried to jerk away from him. But he only tightened his grip, his fingers digging brutally into her arm.
“No, you don’t,” he growled, dragging her through the doorway leading into the kitchen.
Melissa had always known a day like this would come. In some ways she’d been preparing for it for years. Self-defense training, therapy to build the emotional toughness to handle confrontations—even criminal profiling courses so she’d have the mental edge in a dangerous situation.
But no amount of forethought could keep her adrenal glands in check or erase the sometimes crippling memories now flooding her brain with a poisonous dose of unadulterated fear.
Terry pushed her into the wall next to the refrigerator. Her shoulder slammed into the sheetrock, pain flashing through her chest at the jarring impact. He didn’t give her time to do more than wince, advancing until he was inches from her face. His breath was fetid, laced with alcohol and a hint of marijuana smoke, but the enormous size of his pupils, black pools rimmed with only a sliver of blue, hinted he might be amped up on crystal meth. “No wonder a nosy bitch like you ain’t got a man of her own. Who’d have you? But that don’t give you no cause to mess with me and Dinah.”
“You’re right, Terry. I’ll just go now, okay? Message received.” She kept her tone reasonable, struggling for calm and focus. She tried to slide sideways away from him, but he shot his arm out, trapping her in place.
“Terry, please don’t—” Dinah grabbed his arm. Terry wheeled around, backhanding his