Free Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) by Sandra Parshall Page B

fence and a third on the gate. A padlock secured the gate on the inside.
    “You wouldn’t put out the welcome mat either,” Tom said, “if you’d been through what these people have. It’s incredible, the crap they get thrown at them. Literally, sometimes.” He plucked his cell phone from his shirt pocket. “Having a convicted murderer in the family doesn’t make life easy.”
    Tom punched in the couple’s home phone number and drummed his fingers on the armrest while he waited for an answer. Vance Lankford’s parents lived in a residential area on the outskirts of Mountainview, where the lots were smaller and the houses closer together than anywhere else in the mostly rural county. Tom could remember when robust azaleas had lined the front of the white siding-covered house and the flower beds had overflowed with spring bulbs and colorful summer annuals. Now the azaleas looked sickly, with sparse foliage and only a few pink flowers dotting the branches. Several clumps of gold and white daffodils bloomed beside the front steps—you couldn’t kill a daffodil if you beat it with a shovel, Tom’s mother used to say—but the tulip leaves struggling up through the weedy beds looked like weak afterthoughts of bulbs long since spent.
    Although the Lankfords’ cars both sat in the driveway, the curtains on all the windows remained tightly drawn in midday. After the phone rang for the sixth time, Tom tapped his horn. One downstairs curtain flicked back a couple of inches, then fell closed again. A moment later, Jesse Lankford answered the phone inside the house. “What is it? What do you want?”
    “I just came by to see if everything’s okay here. Can I come in? I won’t bother you for long.”
    Jesse sighed. “I’ll be out in a minute.” He hung up.
    “He’s coming to unlock the gate,” Tom told Fagan. They both stepped out of the cruiser.
    Slamming the passenger door, Fagan said over the car’s roof, “These people are teachers? They teach in a public school when they have to live this way? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
    “I don’t know how they do it,” Tom said, rounding the front of the cruiser. He lowered his voice when he saw Jesse Lankford emerge from the house. “Considering the shitty way teenagers behave sometimes.”
    Jesse, a tall, thin man whose stooped shoulders made him look shorter, hustled along the driveway with his head down as if he were running a gauntlet. Ten feet from the gate he glanced up and stopped in his tracks. His eyes, fixed on Fagan, widened behind his black-rimmed glasses. “Who are you?”
    “This is Detective Fagan from the Fairfax County Police,” Tom said. “Detective, this is Jesse Lankford.”
    Before Fagan could speak, Jesse demanded, “What do the Fairfax police want with us?”
    Fagan stepped forward. “I’ve been investigating the Beecher girl’s disappearance, and I’m down here looking into her death.”
    A blotchy flush traveled up Jesse’s neck to his pallid cheeks. “We don’t need to get dragged into that. It has nothing to do with us.”
    “We just want to talk to you,” Tom said. “Can we come in for a minute?”
    Jesse shot a look to his left. Tom followed his glance and saw the white-haired woman next door peering through a side window at them. Muttering something under his breath, Jesse yanked a key ring from his pants pocket and fumbled with the padlock inside the gate. He yanked it open, and without speaking again, wheeled around and hurried back up the driveway to the house.
    Tom and Fagan made their way to the front door, sidestepping a mess of half-rotted fruits and vegetables strewn over the driveway, the front walk and the steps. Dents pockmarked the vinyl siding on the house, and the rocks responsible for the damage lay on the ground along the foundation. Sitting only thirty feet from the road and lacking a porch, the house made an inviting target. Even so, Tom figured you’d need a hell of a strong pitching arm to lob a