I sat down on the stool next to her. “If it helps, I never saw you here.”
Lacy laughed. “Lonnie won’t mind that I made the stop. He wants me sane and knows this will help.” She nodded her head toward the back of the room. “Look who’s here.”
I noticed a man sitting alone in a booth. “Who?”
“Barnaby Johnson.”
I turned a little, so I had a better view of the man who had finished his meal and was sorting through his wallet for cash to pay his bill. “Colt has been trying to track him down. I’m not sure if he was ever successful. I’ve been calling Colt all morning, but he isn’t picking up, and he isn’t calling me back.”
“That’s odd,” Lacy said.
“Did you leave a message?” Velma asked.
I nodded. “I hope Colt simply misplaced his cell phone or let the battery run down or something like that.” I glanced at Velma. “I actually stopped in to see if you’d seen him.”
“No. I haven’t seen Colt since yesterday.”
“He’s getting up,” I said.
The man had dropped his money on the table and had gotten up to leave.
“I’m going to follow him.” I looked at Velma. “Try to track Colt down. Tell him to call me.”
I stood up as the man exited the diner. Lacy stood up next to me. “I’m coming with you.”
I hesitated and then nodded. By the time we made it to my car, Barnaby had a head start.
“He made a left onto Pine Avenue,” Lacy said from the passenger seat next to me.
I sped up just a bit.
“Don’t get too close. He’ll see us,” Lacy warned.
“I know how to tail someone.”
“Really?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you a cop?”
“No, but I write about cops tailing suspects all the time. The trick is to hang back but not so far back so that you lose them.”
“He just made a right onto the highway,” Lacy said.
I turned on my turn signal and followed. I hoped the guy wasn’t paying all that much attention to his surroundings since there weren’t a lot of cars on the highway to hide behind.
“I think he’s going to pull onto Hanover Lane. There are a few houses out there, and I sort of remember that he lives out that way,” Lacy pointed to the truck in front of us.
“I’m going to make the turn, but if he pulls into a drive, we’ll continue on by and park down the road. We’ll walk back. Try calling Colt again.”
Lacy did as I asked. As we expected, Barnaby pulled onto a dirt drive leading out to an isolated house. I drove past and then pulled onto a side road. I found a clearing and parked.
“So what now?” Lacy asked. “Do we just wait until Colt calls back?”
“I want to get a look inside the house.” I grabbed my door handle.
“You’re going up to the house? Are you crazy?”
“I’m not going to knock on the door or anything like that. I’m just going to sneak up to the house and peek in a window or two. I feel like we need to know what we’re dealing with just in case Colt doesn’t call back.”
“What we should do is call 911. If Colt isn’t available and Peach isn’t in the office, it will ring through to the county office.”
“And what are we going to tell them?” I asked. “So far, we haven’t actually seen Barnaby do anything other than have breakfast in town. Colt wanted to talk to him because of his connection to Evagrius Industries, but we don’t know that he actually did anything wrong, and we certainly don’t know that whatever is going on can be classified as an emergency. I think we need to take a peek and then decide what to do.”
Lacy blew out a breath. “Okay, but I want to go on record and say that I don’t like this.”
“You can wait here,” I suggested.
“No. If you’re going, then I’m going.”
I locked my car, and then Lacy and I headed down the road. When we got to the driveway Barnaby had turned onto, we headed into the woods, which provided a bit of cover. Once we reached the back of the house, we slowly tip-toed our way to one of the back windows and looked inside. No one was in the room. It looked to be a spare bedroom. The room was much like any other room, but the thing that made me gasp was a pile of plastic clams like those found with the three victims lying on the bed. I’d just opened my mouth when a large hand clamped onto my face from behind. I felt a moment of panic before I realized it was Colt’s voice whispering in my ear. I glanced next to me to see that Colt’s other hand was over Lacy’s mouth. She looked as terrified as I felt.
“I’m going to remove my hands,” Colt said into our ears. “You need to be quiet. Understand?”
I nodded. Lacy must have nodded as well since he removed his hands from our faces, grabbed us each by the hand, and dragged us into the woods. Once we were well away from the house, he demanded to know what we were thinking following a suspected killer to an isolated house.
“It was Abby’s idea,” Lacy said, throwing me under the bus.
I scowled at her. “I guess it was my idea. But I knew you’d been trying to track this guy down, and I didn’t know if he was going home. I didn’t want him to disappear again. I tried to call you a bunch of times, but you never answered, and you never returned my calls.”
“I seem to have lost my
