The Girl With No Name

Chapter Eleven

Luke lived in an old stone farmhouse that sat seventeen miles outside of central Denton on what was considered a rural route. The original owner of the property had divided up his farm into lots and sold them off one by one. A few buyers had built houses, but Luke’s closest neighbors were still a good half mile away in each direction.

Josie and Luke spent almost all of their time at her house. In fact, he had moved in with Josie for a short period while he recovered from his gunshot wounds the year before. Josie thought it might be permanent, and was just getting used to the idea when the Conway shooting happened and he retreated back to his own home. Whenever they fought he would disappear home and stay there for a few days until he cooled down. As she pulled into his long gravel driveway, she realized she hadn’t been to his house in almost six months.

Her headlights cut across the front of the house, revealing his pickup truck and, just beyond that, lights glowing from the downstairs windows. Josie parked and got out, standing in the dark and listening to the sounds of crickets and cicadas chirping and humming in the fields. She felt a familiar prickle of unease, took a step toward the house and tried to figure out what had caused it. Something wasn’t right. Her hand reached to her waist, patting her service weapon. She was relieved that she had remembered to bring it with her when she left her house to go meet Noah. Of course, after what had happened to her almost two years ago, she’d probably never go anywhere without it again.

She took another step toward the house and then it hit her. His porch light wasn’t on. It was motion-activated and should have flicked on the moment she pulled into the driveway. Pulling her gun out of its holster, she stepped onto the porch. Glass crunched beneath her foot and she looked down to see pieces of it glittering from a pool of blood that extended from where Josie stood to the doorway. She paused so she could listen over the sound of her pounding heart for any movement in or outside of the house. There was nothing. Keeping her gun in one hand, she used the other to dial Noah. He picked up on the third ring. “I’m at Luke’s,” she whispered. “There’s blood on the porch. Send units now.”

“Don’t go in,” Noah said. “Wait for back—”

But Josie had already hung up. She pocketed her phone and held her gun at chest level as she eased inside the house. If Luke was wounded or dying, she wasn’t waiting fifteen or twenty minutes for backup to arrive. It had been ages since she’d cleared a building, but her instincts kicked in, and her body went onto automatic pilot. Worry for Luke’s safety battled with her more practical concern of securing a crime scene. She had to be Chief Josie right now, not the future Mrs. Creighton.

She followed the streaks of blood from the door to the kitchen, where a large splatter fanned across the painted white cabinets. Pools of it collected on the tile floor. She studied the cabinets, walls, and even the ceiling for bullet holes, just to be sure, but the spatter was more consistent with a stab wound. Judging by the drag marks along the floor, the victim—please don’t let it be Luke—had initially been stabbed in the kitchen, lain there for some time, and then been dragged outside onto the porch.

Luke kept his service weapon in a gun safe in his bedroom closet along with his hunting rifle and shotgun. Useless to him if he had been taken by surprise, but he would have had ample warning if any unexpected guests wound their way up his driveway. Unless they were waiting for him when he arrived home, which would explain the broken porch light. He always locked his door, but his house was easy enough to break into through one of the windows at the side.

Holding her gun at the ready and still listening for any noises in the house, she moved stealthily through the rest of the first floor. With every room she entered, she expected to find him bleeding out on the floor, but he wasn’t there. There was no blood on the stairs, but she made her way to the second floor anyway, using her sleeve to flip on the lights in each room as she went. The spare bedroom was empty, as was the bedroom he used as his home gym. She cleared the bathroom and moved on to the master bedroom, which was empty as well. In his closet, his gun safe was locked up tightly.

As she panned the room for a second time, her eyes locked on the nightstand to the right of the bed. Her side of the bed. Not that she ever slept here anymore. The lamp was the same, but there was a dog-eared paperback novel she had never seen before next to a half-full bottle of water.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered to herself, sagging against the doorframe.

The house was clear. Luke was missing. Judging by the blood in his kitchen, wherever he was, he hadn’t gone there willingly. It had to be connected to what had happened at Misty’s house that day; it was too much of a coincidence that Misty and Luke had been meeting in secret together and now, months later, both were in serious trouble. What the hell had Luke gotten into?

Only a few hours ago, she thought she had known everything there was to know about him. She had never pegged him for the kind of guy who kept secrets. What you saw was what you got with Luke. Maybe she had been so busy worrying about him finding out about the skeletons in her closet that it had never occurred to her that he might have some of his own. The biggest secret he had ever kept from her was that he used to be engaged to a woman who worked for the state police crime lab. Now she wondered if that was the only he thing he had hid from her. Who had been sleeping in his bed—next to him? How had she been so blind? She shook her head, trying to shake off that last question. It didn’t matter at the moment. Her relationship issues had to wait. Right now, she had her second missing persons case of the day, and it was the man she loved.

She tried to still her panicked thoughts as she walked back to the kitchen. Carefully avoiding the blood, she holstered her gun and pulled out her cell phone. She dialed Luke. From the living room came the muffled sound of Blake Shelton’s “Mine Would Be You” coming from his phone. She remembered the first time he had played the song for her; it was just about the most romantic song she’d ever heard and the sound of it now caused a small ache to bloom in her chest. She found the phone on his coffee table, tossed haphazardly among the other items: his car keys, the television remote, a stack of mail. She wanted to scroll through it to see if there were messages or calls to or from Misty—or any other numbers she didn’t recognize—but she was standing in a crime scene. She would have to wait for her evidence response team to come and process the house first.

She walked back to the kitchen and stared at the bloodstains, trying to calculate whether a person could lose that much blood and still be alive. Her phone vibrated with a text from Noah. He was five minutes out. That was good. She didn’t want to be alone much longer.

A clatter out back startled her, and she ran to the back door and looked outside to see a figure running into the darkness toward the barn at the edge of Luke’s property.

The back door banged behind her as she raced outside.