Free Where Angels Rest by Kate Brady Page B

his skin. He wasn’t a player, but he was no monk. It wasn’t inconceivable that she could get him thinking with something other than his head.
    Have to keep an eye out for that.
    The Angelmaker tiptoed through the lobby, dropped the keys to the Ford into the drawer of a cherry secretary, and cocked an ear toward the stairs. Still nothing. Just a few more steps, and tonight’s fiasco would be over. No one would ever know how Rebecca had slipped from grasp.
    A spread of gooseflesh prickled to life and the Angelmaker looked up at the masks on the foyer wall. Holloweyes, sealed lips, and no ears at all. Harmless now. They might as well be monkeys on display:
See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.
    Words for the wise, Dr. Sims.
    At four-thirty in the morning, Erin pulled into the city parking lot behind the sheriff’s Tahoe. Mann met her at her car door with an expression like thunder.
    “I told you to follow me to your motel exit,” he said, but Erin didn’t care. He’d spent a couple hours at the cabin reading files—barely talking—then told her to follow him back to Hopewell. When she hadn’t stopped at the motel, she could almost
feel
his anger stretching from his car to hers, but she’d be damned if she was going to leave until she knew he was taking what he’d read seriously.
    Less than five days left.
    “Not until we talk,” she said.
    He bent a forearm onto the roof of the Aveo and it sagged beneath his weight. In the wash of security lights, the details of his face were visible—strong Germanic features with deep grooves on either side of his mouth, a white crescent scar bisecting one eyebrow, and a dent marring the left side of his chin. Combined with the weekend’s beard and debauchery, he had a haggard, beat-up look that seemed out of place for Mayberry.
    “I read the reports,” he said. “I know enough to do what I need to.”
    “You know about the other woman?”
    He might have stopped breathing. “Other woman?”
    “That’s what I thought,” Erin said. “Her name was Sara Daniels. She was a twenty-one-year-old bartender who went missing from Hampton, Virginia, in April 2008. Twenty miles from where John Huggins lived.”
    “No,” he admitted, “there was nothing about a second woman.” Then he cocked his head, his gaze taking aim at her. “Why is that? Could it be her case has nothing to do with Jack Calloway?”
    “John Huggins. His name is John Huggins,” she ground out, and stepped around him. She slammed her car door, not caring that he barely snatched his fingers out of the way. “Sara Daniels was just like Lauren McAllister. Lonely, lost. Vulnerable to a handsome older man with a little sex appeal and plenty of money for cocaine. Do you have any women like that here in Hopewell?” He winced and Erin knew she was getting to him. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be trying to keep me quiet. Maybe you should get a bullhorn and alert the newspaper reporters and TV anchors and help warn people, instead of protecting a man—”
    “Who is
presumed innocent
.” His voice vibrated with anger. “Lady, I don’t know why you’re so sure Jack Calloway is a beast, but there’s one thing I do know: No one is gonna come in my town and destroy a man with no cause—”
    “No cause?”
    “No cause.”
His voice ricocheted off concrete like a bullet. Erin was actually tempted to cower.
    But she didn’t. “My, my,” she said, with deliberate calm. “We do have anger issues, don’t we?”
    He ground out an inventive curse. “Understand something,
Doctor
Sims: Jack and Margaret Calloway are a valued part of this town. They run a respectable business and art studio and have a nephew who needs them. If you try pulling that media shit around here that you pulled in those other places, I’ll throw your ass in jail without a second thought.
Then
where will your brother be?”
    The threat hit its mark. Justin. Dear God, this sheriff was turning into one more like all the others. He’d