The Witness

Chapter Twenty-Four

“COME SIT DOWN, MARIE,” Daniel encouraged. “Amy won’t be late. She just said she was walking over, and it’s a cold morning out there. Give her a few minutes.”

“I know.” Marie walked back over to the couch in the living room. She smiled. “I changed my mind; your apartment does kind of grow on a person over time.”

He offered the pillow she’d taken to sliding behind her back to ease the ache. “You can help with more of the artwork if you like. It still needs a lighter touch, I think.”

“Maybe the seascape,” she offered, having thought that before. Her smile faded into the weight of waiting for Mandy. Days had passed, and she still didn’t know what to say. She’d stayed behind at the restaurant to ask Connor about Christmas plans with Mandy being able to join them, and moments later glass had rained down and she had ceased to be thinking.

“Don’t cry. Not before she comes,” Daniel said softly, offering his handkerchief.

“Some guest I turn out to be, walking around in slippers and carrying a box of Kleenex and sleeping the majority of the days.”

“The rest of those pills from the doctor are going to get used too and without protest. Another five or six days and you may be standing upright without weaving on me, but until then you’re sleeping some more.”

She rested her head back against the couch and thought again that she was glad she liked him, this cousin she had never known she had. “Tracey would have never wanted all this, the manhunt, the hiding, the fact her photo is headlining newspapers.”

“She’s safe in heaven; the rest of us will shift and cope with that,” Daniel replied. “Are you okay with what you want to tell Amy?”

“Yes. She’s not coming to the funeral. I can absorb that. The rest of it-” She didn’t let herself think about the rest of it. “Will Luke be here, to see her too?”

“He knows she’s coming, but I think he’s giving her room instead. Room to decide what she wants to do most.”

“Yes, Luke would want to be fair that way. Mandy doesn’t trust him yet, not really, completely. Kind of like you, how you don’t trust God. All the pieces are there, but it just never nudges across the line to take the risk.”

“She’s afraid of getting hurt.”

“We all are.”

Marie listened for a soft knock on the door and wished Connor had been able to come and see her this morning. Not that she would do anything more than cry on his shoulder like she had done last night, but it would be nice to have him here to lean against. He’d just wrapped her in a hug and said he was sorry over and over again, and she hadn’t been able to think of anything to reply but to hug him and be glad he was there. It wasn’t Connor’s fault, and it wasn’t Amy’s, but both carried the hurt as if it were their tragedy to prevent and they had failed.

The knock came on the door, and Daniel got to his feet.

“Stay with us, Daniel, please.”

He squeezed her shoulder as he passed behind the couch and went to answer the door.

Traffic had picked up while Luke was visiting Caroline in the hospital. He turned east out of the parking lot and headed toward Daniel’s place. A night following the tracks of a reporter had been a bad trade-off for the amount of sleep he hadn’t gotten-watching who the reporter was meeting was a sound idea; assigning himself to do it not so sound. Maybe a quiet word to the traffic detail and they could start sourcing addresses where they spotted Sykes’ car over the next week-that might give him a lead. The guy was getting his information somewhere.

Luke covered a yawn and checked the time again. He didn’t want to arrive at Daniel’s so early that Marie and Amy were in the early stages of grieving with each other, nor arrive so late that he missed seeing Amy.

“Have him call me,” Amy had said. The message Amy had left for him with Caroline circled around and around in his thoughts and didn’t make sense. He wondered if Caroline had remembered it properly, or if he was simply too tired to understand the message.

Then he knew.

He reached for his pocket phone and opened it; he called directory assistance. “Park Heights, the Radisson Hotel, please.”

He listened as the operator dialed and then the front desk answered.

“Ann Walsh, please.”

“One moment, I’ll connect you to her room.”

Luke listened to the phone ring, knowing Amy was at Daniel’s right now, and heard the room answering service pick up. He closed the phone without leaving a message.

He took a right at the next light. Three hours, he’d give Amy three hours with Marie while he cleared away what he could on his desk and left the manhunt in the hands of his deputy chief, and then he was going to go knock on a hotel-room door. Amy wasn’t coming in from the cold, but she’d stopped running. That was enough for now.

Thirty hours without sleep-Luke rested his head against his arm and hoped someone took mercy on him today and kept new crises for tomorrow. He needed shut-eye time and soon. Amy answered the hotel-room door on his third knock.

“No food this time, but an offer to take you out for a bite if you would like,” Luke said softly, studying a face so stressed he knew her time with Marie had not gone well.

“I don’t think I could eat right now,” Amy replied, studying his face as he was studying her and relaxing as she absorbed the fact he had zero desire to push her right now. She stepped back to let him enter the room. “You figured out the message.”

“Yes.”

He looked around the room, but other than signs she’d stretched out on one of the beds to catch a nap there was nothing in the room to show it as being occupied. He took a seat at the round table, and she paused by the ice bucket to retrieve a couple sodas keeping cold in the melting ice before sitting near him rather than across the table. He accepted the one she handed him, relieved it was caffeine free. “Thanks.”

“Would it help if I turned in the ledger and told the New York cops everything I can remember from that night?”

He blinked. “Yes,” he replied simply.

“Then set it up for me, please. One of Jonathan’s guys can pick up the ledger for me if I give him detailed enough instructions on how to find it.”

“Give me four or five days. We’ll make sure you have a lawyer of your own in on the discussions so they can’t bring you into the trial without your testimony being screened off and aliased.” He reached over to touch her face, seeing ten years of age in the last few days. “I’m sorry, Amy. I’m so sorry about Tracey.”

Tears drenched his hand, but she held his gaze. “It may have been the same shooter that killed Greg. I’m sorry; I just don’t know for certain.”

She didn’t know; she really didn’t know who had shot Greg. “We’re close enough on his trail-we will find him. Caroline can make the case in court. She’s good on the stand, solid, credible, and she did see him. Please don’t feel guilty for not remembering the face of who killed Greg.”

“It was dark that night and wet, and I should have seen enough to remember because he chased me for blocks, but I never saw enough to remember a face…” Her emotions were tumbling on him, the calm of this lady long ago broken.

Luke slipped a hand around her neck and moved to bring her into his chest and hold her.

“Marie didn’t blame me. She just wanted me to come home.”

The sobs broke his heart, and Luke closed his eyes. “You can safely come home, Amy. We’ll make it safe,” he whispered.

Too much grief, too many hurts, too much running. She had come to a full stop with him, and he knew the running was over. He shook a bit, knowing the grief she carried and the risks that would now bottle her into one place. “I’ve got a place arranged in the next county over with a sheriff friend who will help us out. You and Marie can spend as much time there together as you like and not worry about here.”

“What if this shooter leaves town and no one pays for killing Tracey? How does that get absorbed and swallowed and lived with? I want to stay and walk the streets and find him and make sure he can’t get away…”

Luke wondered all those things too, how long it would be before he could find justice for them, where this would end. God had let a wonderful lady get shot and killed, and there was a bitter taste to accepting that fact.

He rested his head against hers and let Amy cry, and his heart broke with the pain she was in. There were no words he could say, no certainty he could offer. Just a promise that she was no longer dealing with this alone.