Necessary Action. Julie Miller

father and grandfather.

      He heard panicked footsteps, frightened shouts and terse commands as bullets chipped away marble and splintered wood. Flower petals and eruptions of dust floated in the air. Half the guests at the wedding were cops, active duty or retired, and every man and woman was taking cover, protecting loved ones, ensuring everyone was safe from the rapid barrage of gunfire.

      Duff waited for a few beats of silence before swinging out into the aisle again and crouching at the end of the pew. The gunman was on the move. So was he.

      “I’ve got no shot,” Duff yelled, pushing to his feet as the shooter dropped his spent rifle and pulled his pistol. He pointed the other officers on the guest list who happened to be armed to each exit and zigzagged down the aisle as the next hail of bullets began. “Get down and stay put!” he ordered to everyone else, and ran out the back of the sanctuary.

      “Niall!” Duff heard his father shout to his brother as Duff charged up the main stairs to the second floor. By damn, if that whack job had hurt his brother, he was going down.

      Signaling to another officer to cover the opposite entrance, Duff pushed open the balcony door. But he knew as soon as they entered that the balcony was clear. The chaos down below echoed through the rafters, but Duff tuned it out to focus on the staccato of running footsteps. The shooter was gone. He’d taken his weapons with him and fled through the massive church.

      Duff returned to the darkened utility hallway, where a wave of cold air blew across his cheek. Outside air. Close by. The clang of metal against metal gave him direction. The perp had gone up to the roof.

      His instinct was to turn to his radio and call in his location and ask for backup. But he was wearing a black tuxedo, not his uniform. He’d have to handle this himself. Leaving the other officer to see to the frightened organist, he sprinted down the hallway and climbed a narrow set of access stairs to the roof. If the perp thought he was getting out this way, he’d corner the chump before he reached one of the fire escapes.

      Duff paused with his shoulder against the door leading onto the roof, reminding himself he’d be blind to the perp’s position for a few seconds. Nobody shot up his sister’s wedding, put his family in danger, threatened his friends. No matter what screw was loose in that shooter’s head, Duff intended to stop him. Heaving a deep breath, he shoved the door open.

      Squinting against the wintry blast of February air, he dove behind the nearest shelter and pressed his back against the cold metal until he could get his bearings. The glimpse of gravel and tar paper through the kicked-up piles of snow were indicators that he wasn’t the first person to come out this way. The AC unit wasn’t running, so he should be able to hear the shooter’s footsteps. Only he didn’t. He heard the biting wind whipping past, the crunch of snow beneath tires as cars sped through the parking lot and the muted shouts of his fellow officers, circling around the outside of the church three stories below. The only labored breathing he could hear was his own, coming out in white, cloudy puffs, giving away his position like a rookie in training.

      He was going to have to do this by sight. Clamping his mouth shut, he gripped his gun between his chilling hands and darted from one cover to the next. Instead of footprints, there was a wide trail of cleared snow, as if the man had been dragging his long coat behind him. But the trail was clear, and Duff followed it to the short side wall of the roof. He peered over the edge, expecting to find a fire escape. Instead, he found a ladder anchored to the bricks that descended to the roof of the second floor below him. But he spotted the same odd path transforming into a clear set of boot prints, leading across the roof to the wall that dropped down to the parking lot.

      “Got you now.” Duff tucked his gun into his pocket and slid down the ladder.

      He rearmed himself as he raced across the roof. He could make out sirens in the distance, speeding closer. Backup from Kansas City’s finest. Ambulances, too. That meant somebody was hurt. That meant a lot of somebodies in that sanctuary could be hurt. This guy was going to pay.

      Duff swung his gun over the edge of the roof and froze. “Where the hell...?”

      The only thing below him was a pile of snow littered with green needles at the base of a pine tree, and another officer looking up at him, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head.

      The perp had vanished. Poof. Disappeared. Houdini must have shimmied down that evergreen tree and had a driver waiting. Either that or he was a winged monkey. How could he have gotten away?

      “Son of a...” Duff rubbed his finger around the trigger guard of his Beretta before stashing it back in its holster. He was retracing his steps up the ladder, fuming under his breath, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled out his cell, saw Keir’s name and answered. “He got away. The guy’s a freakin’ magician.”

      “Grandpa’s been shot.”

      “What?” The winter chill seeped through every pore of his skin and he broke into a run. Seamus Watson, eighty-year-old patriarch, retired cop who walked with a cane, followed Chiefs football and teared up at family weddings the same way Duff did was a casualty of this mess? No. Not allowed. “How bad?”

      “Bad. Niall’s trying to stop the bleeding. Get down here. Now.”

      Duff had no one left to chase. The shooter’s trail had gone as cold as the snowflakes clinging to the black wool of his tuxedo.

      “On my way.”

       Chapter One

      July

      “Who cleans up a scuttled boat?”

      Frowning at the smell of bleach filling her nose, Melanie Fiske waded barefoot into the ankle-deep water that filled the wreck of her late father’s fishing boat each time it rained and opened the second aft live well, or rear storage compartment where fish and bait had once been stored. She expected to find water, rust, algae or even some sort of wildlife that had taken up residence over the past fourteen years, like the nest of slithering black water moccasins she’d found hidden inside three years ago.

      Poisonous snakes had been reason enough to stop her weekly sojourn to the last place her father had been alive. But too many things had happened over the past few months in this idyllic acreage where she’d grown up—the rolling Ozark hills southeast of Kansas City—for her not to explore every available opportunity to find out what had happened to her father that night he’d allegedly drowned in the depths of Lake Hanover and was never seen again.

      Now she was back, risking snakes, sunburn and the wrath of the uncle who’d raised her, to investigate the wreck, tipped over on the shoreline of Lake Hanover next to the old boat ramp that hadn’t been used since the boat had been towed ashore to rot.

      All these years, she’d accepted the story of a tragic accident. She’d been so young then, motherless since birth, and then fatherless, as well, that she’d never thought to question the account of that late-night fishing expedition. After an explosion in the engine, he’d fallen overboard, and the eddies near the dammed-up Wheat River power plant had dragged him down to the bottom. It had been a horrible, unfathomable tragedy.

      But she’d caught her aunt and uncle in too many lies lately. She’d seen things she couldn’t explain—arguments that hushed when she entered a room, trucks that arrived in the middle of the night to take handcrafts or baked goods to Kansas City, fishing excursions where no one caught a thing from the well-stocked lake. And maybe most importantly, her uncle’s control was tightening like a noose around her life. There were rules for living on the farm now that hadn’t been there when she’d been a teenager, and consequences for breaking them that bordered on abuse.

      Yes, there were bound to be flaring tempers as they transitioned from a simple working farm to a stopping place for tourists from the city seeking outdoor fun at the lake’s recreational area or a simple taste of country life without driving farther south to Branson and Table Rock Lake. There were reasons to celebrate, too. The farm had grown from a few family members running a