Free Even In Darkness--An American Murder Mystery Thriller by Lynn Hightower Page B

work out?’
    I shrug. ‘Things came up. Her job. Sometimes mine.’
    â€˜It doesn’t sound like either of you were trying too hard.’
    I bite the tip of my tongue. If it isn’t an actual question, and it has nothing to do with the kidnapping, Smitty told me not to reply.
    â€˜Mrs Miller, a young woman and her daughter,
your granddaughter
, are missing. They were taken from their home, from their beds, by a man who did not hesitate to shoot and kill their neighbor just because he got a glimpse of him from the back kitchen door.’
    Agent Jones pulls a notepad close and starts writing something. I wonder what it is. I wonder if I am supposed to wonder.
    Woods opens the file and takes out a stack of pictures. He lays two of them down, rotating them in my direction.
    One is a photograph I have at home on my dresser – Andee’s school photo from last year. She is wearing a black jumper and a purple and white striped shirt, and I smile because it’s an outfit we bought together on a shopping trip. We had lunch afterwards, at McDonald’s. We got cheeseburgers for Ruby, her dog. There was one of those traveling amusement parks in the mall parking lot that day, and we rode the Carousel and the Spider, which made us both sick.
    The next shot is a wedding picture. Joey and Caroline – young, happy, blissfully unaware. I have packed those pictures away, the portrait that hung in the upstairs hallway, the eight-by-ten that used to be displayed in the living room, the three-by-five on my desk. Whatever you say about my son, he is breathtakingly handsome in a tux.
    I think how innocent they all look in their pictures. How anything could happen to them, and often does.
    â€˜Why are you crying, Mrs Miller?’
    I use a knuckle to wipe a tear from my cheek. When I go home today, I’m going to take those pictures out of the box in the attic and put them back up again.
    Woods puts two more pictures on the table, snapping the edges and pushing them close. The first shows a man on his back and a dark stain that runs like syrup from beneath his body to the edge of a refrigerator. The toe of the man’s right foot points south, resting a few inches from a storm door. The bottom glass is fractured where the bullet went through.
    The second picture is a close-up, skillful or lucky. You can see the destruction of the man’s left eye, now a dark, blood-crusted hole.
    â€˜Do you recognize this man, Mrs Miller?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜This is Burton Stafford. Shot two times through the head. Once from a distance, once close range. He was in the kitchen, making a sandwich.’ Woods reminds me of Jimmy Mahan, snorting fire and brimstone from the pulpit. He stabs the close-up with his finger. ‘Mrs Stafford was in bed at the end of the hallway when this happened, Mrs Miller. Just a few feet away. She
heard
the shots. She
heard
her husband cry out. She
heard
him fall. She
knew
there was an intruder in Caroline’s house, because her husband told her about it while he called the police.
    â€˜Think about that. Mary Stafford spends
her
days in a wheelchair. She can’t get out of bed by herself. So she has to lie there. Afraid. Not knowing if her husband is dead or alive. She can’t go to help him. She doesn’t know if the killer is in the house, if he’s coming for her too. And she can’t run away. All she can do is hide under the blankets, and wait.’
    Woods is good. He looks at me with such intensity that I feel guilty, as if all of this is my fault. I want to be forgiven. I want to make it stop. If he offered me absolution and understanding I would say whatever he wanted to hear.
    Woods leans across the table, maintaining eye contact. ‘Anything you know. You have to help us. This man is dangerous. The longer Caroline and Andee are gone, the less our chances are of finding them alive.’ He taps Andee’s picture with a fingertip and it’s