Cold Case Target
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Jessica R. Patch
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14
ONE
Beau Brighton had finally solved his first case. And not one to sneeze at either. Fender Industries’ CFO had been embezzling millions, and Beau had found the money trail earlier today. An arrest had been made, and bringing a jerk like Claude Morrison to justice had felt amazing. Maybe he was cut out for private investigating, even if the Texas media and his father thought it was yet another one of his grand adventures to pacify time.
Let them talk.
He’d helped a company. Been on the good guys’ side for once.
That was new—doing something worthwhile.
Only three and a half months ago—the week of Christmas, to be exact—he’d had a serious wake-up call about his life when he’d been suspected of serial murders. One that led him to surrendering his life to the Lord and then going into a partnership in a PI business with his longtime best friend, Rhode Spencer, who’d launched Second Chance Investigations on the side of his day job—aftermath recovery with his brothers.
Beau had always admired the Spencer men, especially Rhode. He’d been a former homicide detective for Cedar Springs, Texas, before going to work for Spencer Aftermath Recovery and Grief Counseling Services. Rhode had hit a rough patch in his life too, but had never given up. Beau admired that most.
Beau had also admired Rhode’s twin sister, Sissy. More than he should have. But she didn’t do crime scene cleanup. Blood made her squeamish. She’d once fainted when her oldest brother, Stone, punched Beau in the nose and blood sprayed everywhere, including her face.
He’d had it comin’.
But she never held his shortcomings against his sister, Coco. When Coco lost her fiancé in a drowning accident two weeks into the new year, during a winter glamping trip to McKinney Falls State Park, Sissy had been there to help her through the past three months.
His mind wandered as he drove back to their dude ranch in the Texas Hill Country between Cedar Springs and Austin. He’d received word from Rhode that the upcoming birthday party the Brighton family was hosting at their estate was doubling as a wedding proposal from Stone Spencer to his Texas Ranger girlfriend, Emily O’Connell, the birthday girl herself. They’d gotten together this past Christmas.
The upcoming proposal had put Coco on his mind again. She hadn’t been able to get out of bed after her fiancé Kiefer’s drowning, but with Sissy’s counseling, Coco was now showering and dressing. She had even started to paint again. But the proposal might hit her hard, and Beau wanted to give her a heads-up so she had time to prepare.
The gate to their Texas dude ranch and estate was open, and Reggie wasn’t in the guard shack. Odd. Maybe he’d gone into the employees’ wing to the restroom. Beau drove past the gate, noticing the contractor and his crew had finally arrived to work on the guest cabins. These days people wanted rustic to be chandeliers and old farm tables. Not cowboy foil packets over an open fire. If the ranch wanted the business, they needed to supply the demand.
Beau followed the wending drive behind the house to the guesthouse. Though it was usually reserved for important friends of their family, Coco had moved out there after Kiefer had died. Beau had tried to convince her that isolating herself wasn’t healthy, and that they had their own wings in the main house. She would have privacy. But she wanted seclusion. Randall McDonough, who ran the day-to-day operations on the ranch, saw to it she had what she wanted.
Beau’s opinion had been kicked to the curb.
Beau let himself in the front door. “Coke! It’s me.” He hoped she was in the back room. Randall had made it into a small art studio for her. If she was painting, she was having a good day. Beau hoped to see more and more of those.
While he hadn’t lost a fiancée, he had lost the only woman he’d been in love with, and he had no one to blame but himself. He’d done Sissy Spencer nine kinds of wrong when he was eighteen.
Passing through the foyer, he froze.
The house was in shambles. Chairs had been overturned, vases of flowers fallen to the floor—dirt and glass everywhere. A noise dragged his sight to the long hallway, and his heart leaped into his throat. A dark figure was racing away. He started to give chase when another presence came into view.
His blood turned cold.
Coco.
She was slumped in a dining room chair, her head lolled back, exposing her throat and revealing red splotches on her pale skin.
Shoes crunching on broken glass, he raced to her. Making sure she was alive was more important than chasing her attacker at the moment.
He checked her pulse. Nothing. “Coco! Coco, can you hear me?” he asked, her unresponsiveness terrifying him. He fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. “Siri, call 911.” A mountain of emotion lodged in his throat as he began CPR.
Come on. Hurry up.
He checked her pulse again. Still nothing.
Panic broke loose as he continued compressions and prayed he wouldn’t fail at this too.
Beau frantically paced the ER waiting area, holding back tears. Coco was the best person. Why would anyone want to hurt her?
After they’d loaded her in the ambulance, he’d given his feeble statement to Cedar Springs homicide detective Dom DeMarco, who was also the Spencer family’s cousin.
He should have been able to relay more information. Height and weight of the assailant. Anything. But the figure had been a blur, and once Beau had seen Coco, terror and shock had erased any common sense but to save her. All he remembered was that his security guard hadn’t been at his post and the gate had been open. He hadn’t registered anything peculiar. The police were checking on Reggie. Right now, he had no news about his guard or his sister.
She might be alive.
She couldn’t be dead.
Commotion and voices broke out, and then the Spencer clan barreled into the waiting area. Looked like Dom had called them after he left Beau. Rhode led the charge, with Stone and Bridge following.
What shocked him most was that behind Bridge was Sissy. He wasn’t surprised she’d come to see her friend in critical condition but that she’d come knowing Beau was here. Sissy hadn’t been within five feet of him since the summer before she left for college.
The only exception had been the week of Christmas when he’d come by the family ranch, not realizing she’d been there. He’d tried to respect her wishes of space. She’d allowed him to stay and partake of their early Christmas festivities. She knew the Spencers had been more of a family to him than his own. The small mercy had meant a great deal. And there was her wedding...
She cast a quick glance at him, her ebony eyes meeting his under a canopy of long dark lashes. She and Rhode had their mother’s Mexican heritage, and it showed in their bronze skin. To him, every other woman fell short. No one was sweet and spicy like Sissy Spencer. When he held her gaze too long, she sandwiched herself between Rhode and Stone.
“I’m so sorry, man,” Rhode said as the brothers took turns with sympathies and handshakes. Rhode hugged him. “What did the doc say?”
Beau shook his head. “Haven’t heard from him yet. My parents want updates, but my dad’s business overrides flying home. Though I suspect Mom will hop a plane as soon as he lets her.”
“We need to get a list of anyone who has it out for Coco or anyone who might be obsessed with her,” Rhode said and slicked his chin-length black bangs behind his ears. “Didn’t you say she felt watched the last couple of months?”
“I chalked it up to the media—they always try to follow a Brighton and even more so since Kiefer’s death. I shouldn’t have ignored it. I should have beefed up security. Which reminds me. Reggie, our security guard on duty at the time, wasn’t at the shack, and I saw a few construction vehicles and vans. We legit have some work being done. But one of them could have been Coco’s attacker blending in. I need to talk to Reggie and get the entrance footage. We might have our guy on camera.” Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, he called the guard shack. Zeke answered. “Hey, man, have you seen Reggie?”
“No, he wasn’t here when I came on duty. He’s not answering his cell phone either. There’s a swarm of media here and the police, asking me the same questions.”
News traveled fast. Too fast. “Don’t let any of the media in and cooperate fully with the PD. Call Reggie’s wife, see if he’s at home. And pull the footage from when he was on duty.” A pool of dread formed in his gut.
“Yes, sir.”
Beau ended the call and looked at Rhode. “No one can find Reggie. And I fear what we’ll discover on the security footage.”
“Any word on Coco?” Sissy asked, refraining from making any physical contact with him.
She hadn’t laid a single finger on him, not even to hug him at her wedding, but he was okay with that. It would have been too hard to embrace her and then let her go. But he’d been tempted.
Sissy Spencer had been too good for him. He’d tried to keep their friendship platonic. But one night before leaving his house after a swim, she’d kissed him out of the blue. Best kiss he’d ever had. In that moment, he was no failure. The world had belonged to him. And Sissy was the world. They’d kept their relationship a secret. Beau’s reputation with girls was never squeaky-clean. But he’d never felt about any other girl the way he’d felt about Sissy Spencer.
Then that one summer night under the stars, he’d ruined everything when they’d been unrestrained. Instead of protecting her and breaking things up before they crossed lines, he’d rushed in with a headiness he didn’t want to contain.
Afterward, guilt swooped over him like a tsunami. Dad had been right. He’d had no business getting involved with someone as good and sweet and innocent as Sissy Spencer. He’d failed. Ruined her. His guilt and shame had been overwhelming, and in typical Beau Brighton fashion, he’d ghosted her.
Ignored her calls. Ignored her. Pretended like it hadn’t meant anything. Then convinced himself over the years it was better this way—her believing the lie.
“No. No word yet. And quite frankly, I’m scared to ask.”
“I know you already told Dom what you witnessed,” Rhode said, “but can you tell us while it’s still fresh?”
“Truth is, I can’t remember much of anything.” How would he make a good PI if he couldn’t be observant and cool under pressure?
“I understand,” Rhode said. “But it’s Coke we’re talking about. Try to go through it one more time.”
Beau nodded and recalled what he could with nothing new surfacing. “Should I have chased him down?”
“No,” Stone said. “You made the right call.”
He nodded, but didn’t feel like he’d done anything right from the moment he walked inside the house.
The doctor entered the waiting area, his face grim as he looked at Beau.
“Is she...?” Beau was too afraid to finish the question.
“A coma. She’s on a vent, but she’s alive.”
Alive. Coco was alive. That precious word blurred out the rest of the doctor’s information. Something about gone too long without oxygen, swelling of the brain, and touch and go.
“She’s in ICU. You can go up for a very short time.”
Sissy Wells, who was still called Sissy Spencer in these parts, stood in shock at the severity of the doctor’s news. Coma. Not enough oxygen to the brain. Possible brain damage. Sissy had been friends with Coco since they were toddlers. Coco had mentioned to her that she’d felt watched at times, but severe loss, like a fiancé’s death, could often trigger all sorts of psychiatric disorders.
But who would want to kill her? Had it been random or was it personal? These were the things her brothers and Beau had been discussing before the doctor made his appearance.
Beau looked completely disheveled, his brownish-blond hair sticking up everywhere and his piercing blue eyes wide and frightened. Beau loved his sister more than anything. They were as close as Sissy had been with her late older sister, Paisley, who’d died over four years ago. And only a few months before her death, Sissy had lost her father. As a grief counselor, it was her job to help others heal and mend in a healthy way.
But Sissy was a hypocrite.
She was still stuck in the grief and loss. Not only of Paisley and Dad, but the loss of her husband and the baby girl she’d delivered stillborn after the car accident. How could she help her clients and not herself?
“Go on in and see her. Call us if anything changes,” Stone said, and he and Bridge left.
Rhode hugged Beau. “We’ll find who did this.”
Beau nodded. “I won’t stop until we do.”
Sissy swallowed down her ill feelings and stepped up to Beau. He’d smashed her heart and made it hard to trust others, but he was grieving, and she knew that particular heartache best. “I’m sorry. And I’ll be praying that she wakes up with no complications.” She reached out to touch him, hesitated, then squeezed his bicep to comfort him. His eyes widened and he glanced at her hand. “If you need anything, I can provide you with a good counselor.”
Not her.
“Go on in and see her,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can.”
Sissy understood the fear and dread. The anxiety. “Beau, I know how you’re feeling. I’ve been there. But you can’t hide from it.”
He held her gaze and she tried not to squirm. She’d always been a sucker for those brilliant blue eyes. When looking at her, they’d been kind and honest and sincere. So she’d thought. Turned out Beau’s tongue really was silver, and she’d fallen for his words and let him steal her heart.
“I—I could go with you if you’d like,” she heard herself say. The words shocked her. But she meant them. They were no longer friends, but Beau wasn’t faking his fear, his shock or his aloneness. His parents were in France. He had no one.
His eyes filled with moisture and his cheek twitched. “You...you would do that? For me?”
“Coco wouldn’t want you to be in this alone.” She couldn’t lie and say it was for him. It simply wasn’t.
He seemed to process her words. Then he nodded once and cleared his throat. “Only one person can go inside anyway. I’ll be okay. I’m not alone.”
She wasn’t sure who might be with him, but she let it go. “Okay, then.”
He wiped his eyes. “I do appreciate you coming, though. Thank you. If Coco wakes, I’ll tell her you came by to see her, to be here for her.”
Sissy’s heart broke a tiny bit, and before she thought it through, she hugged him.
At first it was a one-sided hug, but in a few moments, Beau’s arms encircled her lightly, then with more strength. She’d forgotten what he smelled like—money and sophistication. And ruggedness. Suddenly, the past flooded back—their friendship, the laughter and late-night talks that turned serious so often. Their fears and hopes and dreams and all the things teenagers talked about during the first months of puppy love.
She broke away and exhaled a shaky breath. “Call us if anything changes.”
She left him standing there alone, though he said he wasn’t, and she rushed to the elevator, hoping to catch her brother Stone. This was all too much.
Sissy hated hospitals; it brought back memories of laboring in childbirth in vain. Of Todd’s death, her father’s, her sister’s. She met Stone and Bridge in the parking lot.
“Everything okay?” Stone asked as he spotted her.
“No.” Nothing was okay. She couldn’t stop thinking of the past and how much she’d loved Beau once. She’d had a crush on him since she was nine. Slivers of guilt for thinking of their romance—and not of her and Todd’s—pricked her heart. She needed a distraction. “Did Beau say if there was blood at the scene?”
Bridge narrowed his eyes. “No blood. Why?”
She nodded as if it was a done deal. “I need to do something. Coco won’t want to come home to a messy house. Beau isn’t going to think to ask, and I can’t let their house manager do it. She practically raised Coco. So I’m going to go clean up the mess. Has the scene been released?”
“Yes.” Stone cocked his head. “But there’s no reason you need to do it tonight.”
“Coco might wake up. And what if Beau decides to go back there? I don’t want him—” She paused, realizing this need to clean the crime scene—to be distracted—was as much for him as it was for Coco and herself. “He doesn’t need to see that.”
“She’s probably not waking or coming home tonight,” Bridge said. “You heard the doctor. He won’t know much of anything until the swelling on the brain subsides—if it will subside—and it could take days to months. Maybe never.”
“Yes, I heard him,” she snapped. “But she is going to wake up and I’m going to clean the scene. I have my gear in the car.” She raised her chin, daring any of her rough and tough brothers to disagree.
Stone raked his hand through his hair. “I can come help.”
“No.” He, Bridge and Rhode had been on a long scene today cleaning up after a teenage boy accidentally shot himself. Sissy rarely cleaned the scenes. Blood turned her insides out, but she was always available for grief counseling. The teen’s family had turned it down for now. “I need to be alone anyway.”
Stone wrapped her in his beefy arms and kissed her head. “I know this is bringing up stuff. Spend some time with the Lord in prayer as you work and don’t stay too late.”
She nodded and marched toward her car. On the drive to Coco’s, nothing but her own tragic life played on repeat. She was stuck in a void of loss, spinning like the farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz. She’d yet to be dropped into her new normal where the gray turned to color again and a yellow brick road led her to relationships. She had no ruby slippers to click because home wasn’t going to be warm or welcome anymore.
Instead, she continued swirling in a vacuum and faking it until she made it. But she wasn’t sure she would make it.
Why did she have to lose so many people she loved? It wasn’t fair.
She drove to the gate of the Brighton family ranch, which still had media vans parked outside. She pulled to the gate and met Zeke, the night guard. He recognized her and smiled.
“I’m going to work on the cleanup,” she said quietly.
“Yes, ma’am.” He let her through the gate, and she drove around to the back where Coco had been living.
She quickly slipped on a hazmat suit, even though there would be no biochemicals. Still, it was easy to clean in. She shivered in the mid-April air. It was cooler tonight than usual. After stepping into special shoes, she pulled on latex gloves, grabbed the cleaning gear from her trunk and headed inside. She’d called her mom and told her that her Cavalier King Charles spaniels, Lady and Louie, needed to stay awhile longer until she could pick them up. Sissy used her Cavaliers as therapy dogs, and Mom, who was undergoing chemo treatments, enjoyed them warming her lap and providing comfort. Her sweet Blenheims could calm the most restless of hearts.
As she entered the living room, she dropped her gear and sighed at the signs of a struggle. Oh, Coco. She’d fought valiantly but it hadn’t been enough. After placing her AirPods in her ears, Sissy turned on an upbeat Christian station on her Apple Music and got herself organized. She laid out her heavy-duty industrial trash bags, cleaning supplies, rags and extra gloves. She didn’t need special waste containers except the plastic one for the glass.
She started on the big items, collecting the broken shards for the plastic bins. Next she righted the couch cushions, put the books on shelves and set the dining chairs back where they belonged.
The biggest disaster came from the coffee table, which had several glass panes shattered. Sissy tried not to think about Coco’s fight for her life. Maybe coming here wasn’t the best idea after all, but while she swept up glass, she concentrated on the songs about faith in God and remembering that He was always good and faithful.
He had been good to her, but she’d been pretty angry at Him for a while after Todd and their baby girl—Annabelle—had died. For a whole year she’d turned her back on Him, never darkening a church door, cracking open her Bible or listening to a single song of praise.
She wouldn’t consider her spoken words, or the words of her heart, kind toward Him. She had learned her lesson with Beau and had made sure she and Todd did things right. They went to church together, prayed together and waited for marriage to be intimate. And still God had taken him and their baby away.
What had she done to deserve such tragedy? Such pain?
Nothing.
Sometimes pain and tragedy happened. Deep down she’d known that, but it was so much easier to blame God for the bad things that happened. He hadn’t popped that tire that led to the crash. But He hadn’t prevented it either—and that had made her the maddest.
But God wasn’t in her pocket to do her bidding. To always see to it that nothing she deemed bad would happen to her. When she came to that conclusion she’d repented.
No longer was she angry at Him. But she also saw no way to move forward without fear that tragedy might strike another loved one or another baby. She was still stuck in the depths of grief that pulled her down like quicksand. No one saw her fighting to claw her way out or to succumb, depending on the day.
That was her invisible burden to bear alone.
She stared at Coco’s massive entertainment center. Glass from the coffee table had gone everywhere and that meant under furniture. She slid the broom under the small opening at the bottom of the center and drew out shards of glass, dust bunnies and even a little loose change. Sissy also noticed a black thumb drive.
Tears filled her eyes.
Coco had been working on a memorial album to honor Kiefer. Sissy had encouraged her to comb through photos and begin compiling her favorites in a desktop folder. It was a good way to remember good times, laughs and tender moments.
Sissy hadn’t managed to do one for Todd. Some counselor. She’d tried but failed. It was too painful. Too hard. Too much.
Coco had balked at the idea at first for the same reasons Sissy hadn’t created one. But then, unlike Sissy, Coco decided to try. It had helped.
She pocketed the thumb drive and swept up the debris with the industrial vacuum, then began cleaning the fingerprinting powder off every piece of furniture, the doors, windows and even the floors. She couldn’t say the Cedar Springs CSI didn’t give it their due diligence.
When she was finished, she checked the time. It was almost midnight and she was exhausted. Her back hurt, and it was too late to pick up the dogs. They were likely snuggled up with Mama in bed. But she missed them.
Time to lug the cleaning materials and trash outside. At least Coco would come home to a clean house. As if nothing bad had happened.
Except it had.
Sissy started for the front door when the hairs on her neck rose. A cold chill swept up her spine as an awareness of someone’s presence prickled her skin. As she turned, a dark figure in a ski mask swung the metal vase she’d replaced on the table and smacked Sissy in the head. Pain blinded her and she shrieked. The attacker dived on top of her, and she bucked and thrashed underneath the weight.
The black-clad figure pulled a gun and put it to Sissy’s head. She instantly froze and her breath came in pants.
“Sissy?” a voice called.
Beau! Beau was here.
The attacker froze, then smacked Sissy in the head again, dazing her. He jumped up and bolted toward the back of the house.
Beau entered the living room and spotted the figure, then glanced at her.
“Go! I’m okay,” Sissy called, and he blew past her, giving chase.
Sissy’s ears rang and her whole body ached. A trickle of blood seeped down her temple. She touched the cut on her head and winced. Trembling, she stood on jelly legs.
Someone had attempted to kill her. She’d had a gun to her head. Bracing herself against the wall, she breathed deep, trying not to pass out from the shock and the two smacks to the head.
It must have been the same person who had tried to kill Coco. Why return? To finish the job? Would he not know that Coco was in the hospital? It had been on the news.
Why attack Sissy?
And would he try again?
