She wondered why a man who had killed once would be reticent to do it again. Johanna had been an easy target, out in the forest alone. No one would hear her cry for help. No other people would be close enough to save her. So what had stopped him?
She turned around to talk to Marnie and was surprised that the other woman was almost upon her. “What happened to the guy?” she asked.
“He had to get back to work. He was just on a lunch break and having a walk.” Marnie smiled as she spoke, which made Johanna sure that the other woman had a date.
They walked back to the parking lot and got in. Johanna was still lost in her thoughts about the killer—and why she was still alive.
Chapter 4
Johanna had only been home a few minutes when the doorbell rang. She ran to the door, thinking that Marnie had left something behind, but instead, she saw two men standing there. As if they could sense her on the other side of the metal door, one of them held up a shield that she recognized as a police badge.
She opened the door with the chain on it, pretending that she hadn’t been watching them. “Yes, how can I help you?”
The man held his badge up again, this time with a slight smirk on his lips, as if he knew she was playing him. “We have a few questions about last night. Can we come in?” He put his badge away before she could read it, but the second man’s badge read Detective Dempsey. He was the more interesting of the two, with dark wavy hair and soulful eyes. Johanna had to stop her mind and refocus on why they were here—another round of interrogation.
Johanna shut the door, removed the chain, and reopened the door. The pair walked into her apartment without asking permission. They stood in the living room area, waiting for an invitation to sit down, which Johanna made grudgingly. She decided not to offer them any drinks since they’d been so forward. She didn’t like it.
She sat down opposite them and waited for them to speak. She had nothing to say at this moment.
“We need to ask you some more questions about what you saw last night,” stated the man who had shown her the badge.
The other man cleared his throat and began, “Last night, you say that you saw a murder in the car. We’ve been over the area with a fine-tooth comb. One of the things that we’ve noticed is that there’s only one set of tracks for that car. We have to assume that it’s when it pulled into the parking spot.”
Johanna looked at them. “Okay.”
He continued. “That means that it never left. You can’t tell me that this guy threw the corpse over his shoulder and walked her somewhere? That’s not possible.”
Johanna sighed. “Look, as I said before, I wasn’t there anymore. He saw me, and I ran. I hid in the forest there. I didn’t come out until this morning, thinking that my chances of getting away would be far better in the daytime. I don’t know what he did with the body. I don’t know how he did it. Those are things for you to answer.”
The man nodded. “We put some wireless cameras in the area today, and we saw you and another woman at the scene of the crime. Can you explain yourself?”
“A police officer drove me home after you found that woman in the house. Is it true that she was locked in the house?” Johanna asked, thinking of the key in her friend’s pocket.
“No comment,” the man said.
“Well, I had to take someone with me to pick up the car. I wasn’t about to walk there,” she said, thinking of the detective’s comment.
“Do you think that someone else could have picked up the killer last night?” the other man asked. This was the first time he’d spoken since they’d sat down. Johanna wondered what his purpose was here.
“I was too far away to see the parking lot from where I hid. The lights wouldn’t have been visible.”
Detective Dempsey took over again. “We found the place where you hid last night. We were able to determine it from broken branches and some drone work.”
Johanna was freaked out a bit. She had assumed that her word would be taken at face value, and the police would focus on what had happened there. Instead, they appeared to be following her moves and trying to find ways that she might be responsible for the murders—or at the very least an unhinged witness.
“Then my story checks out,” she said. “I was where I said I was.”
Detective Dempsey continued to look at her. “You were there, but we don’t know when you went there—and when you left. You could have been at the parking area at the time of the murder, or you could have already been in the woods. It’s not much of an alibi.”
Johanna put a hand to her head. “What would be the purpose of that? Right now, it’s a perfect crime. A man strangled a woman and disposed of her body. No one knows who he is. No one knows who she is. No one else has reported a person missing. No one knows how they got there or how they left. I’m the only person who has stated that a crime
