15 Seconds

“Carrie Holmes…” I said.

A fear kicked up that she was probably waiting for me. They probably had a trace set up as soon as they heard my call. It might even be a trap. A plant. Knowing I’d call in. I couldn’t blame her now.

And I didn’t care. I didn’t care if the cops barged in here right now and took me away. I just wanted one fucking person in this world to believe me. As long as I had one person to help me clear my name…

“Community Outreach. Carrie Hol-”

“I didn’t do it, Carrie!” I didn’t give her a second to interrupt. “I don’t care what it looks like. I don’t care how it makes me seem. I didn’t buy that gun. I’ve never been to a gun show. Someone is setting me up, Carrie. That’s what I couldn’t tell you the other day. Why I couldn’t turn myself in.

“But this time I’m pretty sure I can prove it!”

Chapter Thirty

Raef had been put to bed a half hour ago, and Carrie sat with her father over a beer on the screened-in sunporch.

She thought of her dad as a canny old codger. Actually, not old at all. At seventy-two, Nate still maintained a fit and trim physique-an ex-navy fighter pilot and a small-town police chief in New Hampshire for twenty-two years. And out of everyone else she knew, he was usually the wisest, and the one whose perspective always mattered the most. In her gym shorts and flip-flops, Carrie curled a leg up on the wicker rocking chair and faced him, gently shifting the subject from his dim view of Florida’s football chances this year. The June bugs were buzzing all around the modest, three-bedroom ranch that looked out over an islet, a couple of blocks off the beach.

“Dad, there’s something I have to go over with you… Don’t answer till I finish. Okay? Then say what you want.”

He put down his beer and nodded, knowing this was her way of broaching a serious subject. “Okay…”

She told him everything. Her doubts about Henry Steadman’s guilt from the start. How nothing quite added up. No motive. No weapon. How he had called 911. That she knew there was some crucial piece of information that he was withholding. The way he begged her to help him. Only her.

She waited to gauge his reaction.

“Finished?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She told him how Steadman had called her a second time yesterday. How she’d had some misgivings, and then doubts about her misgivings, which made her father, the ex-police chief, wince, and his eyes registered the seriousness of her involvement.

Then she let out a deep breath herself and admitted how she had tracked down the suspicious blue car Steadman was so obsessed with. The one she could now prove was at both crime scenes.

That was when her dad’s nonjudging eyes widened.

Then she told him about the gun receipt in North Carolina, and that it didn’t sway her either.

“He claims he wasn’t anywhere near North Carolina that day. And that he can prove it. Look, Dad, I know how this all sounds. I know I’ve broken a few rules. But someone’s setting him up. Someone’s gone to an awful lot of trouble to pin these crimes on him, and put him in the middle of something. Nobody wants to hear it, and I’m not sure what to do. Everyone’s already got him convicted, and the news about the gun purchase only solidified their view.”

Nate nodded, leaning forward, forearms on his thighs. “Is there more? Can I take a sip of beer now?”

“Yeah, take a sip of beer.” Carrie sighed. “There is more, but I don’t want to completely ruin my case right from the start.”

Nate curled a smile, but only slightly. “So what is it you want to know? What I would do if I found out someone on my staff who wasn’t even part of my investigative team was having discussions on her own with the suspect and withholding evidence on the case?”

Carrie’s stomach shifted. Probably fire her, she figured he would say.

He continued to look at her. “Or what I think of your assessment of Steadman’s case?”

“I think the first part doesn’t need to be gone into too much.” Carrie shrugged with a contrite smile.

“Or maybe why you’d be putting your job at risk, what with Raef in there in need of care?”

“Just for the record, I could be out of a job next month because of a budget cutback. Even next week,” Carrie said. She sat back and pressed the cold beer bottle against her cheeks.

“Look, I can see you believe him, PK…” “PK” had been his nickname for her ever since she ski-raced as a kid back in New Hampshire, a twisting of the name of her idol, Picabo Street. “But the way you went about it…”

“I know.” She averted her eyes. Then she raised them back to him. “But the truth has to count for something, doesn’t it, Dad?”

“It does… The truth does account for something, honey. It’s just that-”

“Look”-she swung around and leaned close to him-“everything that happened from the time this guy set foot in town seems meant to pin Steadman for those murders. Why would he beg me to look for those plates? What possible gain would there be for him in that? And then the plates checked out. Why would he risk calling me, believing we’d have a trace on him? He doesn’t know me from Adam, Dad…”

“Eve,” her father said, smiling. “He wouldn’t know you from Eve…”

Carrie let out a breath, which relaxed her. “Okay, Eve…”

“You run this by anyone at the office?”

“I tried to.” Carrie sighed. “Akers. I tried to show him what I had, but the mood’s pretty tense there, politically, and everyone’s worked up over Martinez, and it was all falling on deaf ears. It’s pretty clear they don’t want to deal with any possibility except Steadman. Especially now that this thing about the gun show has come up. It’s damning. So what do I do? Drop my file off on Akers’s desk as I’m signing my own termination papers and go, ‘Oh, by the way, Steadman isn’t your man’…?”

“Or…?” Nate asked, looking at her judiciously.

“Or… I don’t know…” Carrie said. “Prove it.”

Her dad cradled his beer again, rotating the bottle. “You know you’ve been through a lot, Carrie. You’ve had things taken from you that none of us should ever have to deal with. You’ve always been a tough little gal, and we’ve all been proud of you… Whatever you’ve done. But are you sure you’re not finding some way to feel”-he hesitated a second as he chose the word-“important again in some way. Not important…” He frowned at himself. “Maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe I mean attached to something. Or simply alive.”

“I feel plenty alive, Dad,” Carrie said. She looked toward Raef’s bedroom. “I feel about as alive as I need to feel right now.”

“Then you’re boxing yourself into a dangerous place, honey… Between what your conscience says, and what the rest of us would say.”

There was a long-drawn-out silence. He was saying what Carrie pretty much expected him to say. What anyone rational would say. Of course, “rational” wasn’t exactly the operative word in her life lately. And maybe her dad was right-maybe there was just a little need to feel vital again after what had happened to her, and it was this that had opened her a little to Steadman’s pleas.

Then you’ll understand what I’m saying, Carrie. I swear, on my daughter…

But that didn’t change what she now was certain had to be the truth.

“So you’re sure?” Nate brought her back, looking her in the eyes. “You’re one hundred percent sure, Carrie, it was the same car at both scenes?”

“You want to see the photos?” Carrie looked back at him just as firmly.

“No,” he answered, leaning back. “I don’t need to see the photos. Not if you say so, girl. It’s just that… this isn’t gonna go so well for you, as you say, politically, no matter which way it works out.”

“Which way…” Carrie cocked her head quizzically.

“Whether you drop it off on Akers’s desk. Or whether you do what you have to do. To find the truth.”