Hidden Witness. Beverly Long

Cal.

      “He’s out of the country.”

      Cal had spent most of the past eight years out of the country. That was what navy SEALs did. For the past six months, following his discharge, he’d been working as a contractor. That was what his business card said. Chase supposed it could be true if the new breed of contractor was trained to blow up the bad guys, disarm bombs and generally screw with the enemy. “Well, I don’t care if he’s on the moon. I’m busy, too, you know. I’ve only been back for a week.”

      “How is the leg?”

      Functional. Still not up to full strength. “Fine,” Chase said.

      “I thought you were going to be out for six weeks,” Bray prodded. “You went back at four.”

      “We’re short staffed.”

      “Aren’t we all? I was especially impressed when your name popped up on one of my search engines. Then, when I dug a little deeper, I realized you were busy being a hero on your second day back.”

      Chase didn’t answer. He’d hated the photo, the article, the attention. Hadn’t considered that it went beyond the print edition.

      “‘Detective Chase Hollister, one of St. Louis’s finest, keeping the streets safe for the rest of us,’” Bray recited.

      His brother did his own part to keep the streets safe. Working undercover for the DEA wasn’t easy. He would have hated the attention, too. But now he was picking a fight in hopes that Chase, wanting to end the conversation, would agree to take care of things. It wasn’t going to work.

      “Listen, Bray. It’s simple. I’m not going back. The house can rot for all I care,” he said. Chase hung up and tossed his cell phone onto the granite countertop. The noise echoed through the quiet apartment. Then he stood in his stainless-steel kitchen and sipped his coffee, burning his tongue in the process.

      Ravesville, Missouri. Two hours southwest of St. Louis. A little town in the middle of the country, undisturbed by major highways and big box stores. A place where everybody knew their neighbor, talked about them freely and dropped everything when they needed a hand. It was the kind of place where a kid got on his bike at eight o’clock on a summer morning and didn’t come home until dinner. The kind of place where there were community-wide chili dinners and pancake breakfasts and people stuck around to clear the tables and wash the dirty dishes. It had been home. And he’d been a happy enough kid.

      And then everything had changed the summer his dad died. Chase had been fourteen, just about to enter high school. And as bad as his dying had been, it had gotten worse two years later when his mother had remarried and Brick had become his stepfather.

      There probably wasn’t a meaner man in the entire state. Why he’d married a woman with three teenage boys when he didn’t appear to like kids was a mystery. He was estranged from his own son, who was quite a bit older than the Hollister boys. Chase could only remember meeting him once.

      When the phone rang again less than five minutes later, he picked it up, ready to give his brother an earful. At the last second, he realized it was his partner’s number. The man should have been sleeping, too. He’d been awake the same twenty-eight hours.

      “Yeah,” Chase said.

      “The boss called. He just heard from the chief,” Dawson said. “Somebody used the Florida witness in the Malone case for target practice.”

      He and Dawson hadn’t worked the Malone case but the man was suspected of murdering three Missouri women about a year ago, one of whom was the chief’s godchild. Harry Malone was currently locked up in the county jail awaiting trial and everybody in the St. Louis Police Department, from the janitor up, had an interest in the case. “That doesn’t make sense. That woman should have been sealed up tighter than your wallet.”

      “Funny.”

      “Was she injured?”

      “No. Lorraine Taylor got lucky.”

      Then, it was the second time she’d gotten lucky. He wasn’t sure of the details but through the grapevine he’d heard that she’d somehow managed to get away from Harry Malone. She’d told the cops about the pictures of the dead women that Harry Malone had proudly shown her and the admission Malone had made about killing the women. She’d been able to lead them back to the apartment where she’d been held. Unfortunately, by that time, Harry and his pictures were gone. But her DNA had been in several places in the apartment and she’d had injuries consistent with her story.

      But Harry had been careful and there was no physical evidence linking him to the Missouri murders because there were no bodies.

      Even so, based on the information that Lorraine Taylor had provided, Harry Malone had been picked up and charged with kidnapping and assorted other crimes and three counts of murder. Lorraine Taylor had likely assumed that she’d done her civic duty by leading the police to the man and that she could get on with her life.

      However, she’d no doubt quickly reevaluated those plans six weeks later after almost being killed by a hit-and-run as she walked to work. Witnesses had substantiated that the attack was deliberate. That was where it got complicated. Following her escape from Malone, Lorraine Taylor’s identity had been closely guarded and her name had never made the newspapers.

      Unfortunately, in the information age, that didn’t mean much. Cops in both Florida and St. Louis knew her name. Then there were the people in the prosecuting attorney’s office and the judge’s office. Harry Malone certainly knew who she was, and jail might impede communication with the outside world but it certainly didn’t stop it.

      The cops considered whether the attack on Taylor could have been unrelated to her potential testimony against Malone. But even if that was true, it didn’t really matter. Any attack, for whatever reason, had the potential of robbing the State of Missouri of their prime witness.

      They’d decided to put her in a safe house. That was the last that Chase had heard.

      Now somebody had shot at her. That was going to make a lot of people nervous, people who were counting on the fact that Lorraine Taylor was going to be an excellent witness.

      She was going to have to be. Harry Malone, a rich, second-generation hedge-fund trader from New York, wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t talking and he’d retained a very good defense attorney. He’d been deemed a flight risk and denied bail so his attorney was working expeditiously to get the trial under way.

      Plus, the scuttlebutt was that Malone was confident that he was going to walk free.

      Was it possible that he wasn’t as confident as he wanted others to believe and he’d decided to ensure his freedom by getting rid of Lorraine Taylor?

      “The chief wants her moved to St. Louis,” Dawson said.

      The chief was a known control freak and, given his personal interest in this case, there was probably no talking him out of it. But Chase understood. They needed Lorraine Taylor.

      “He told the boss that he wants us to start working on it,” Dawson said.

      “Why us?” They weren’t the most senior detectives on the force. He’d barely spoken ten words to the chief and he figured it was the same for Dawson. He didn’t care; brown-nosing his way to the top wasn’t his style. Besides, who knew how long he was going to stick around? Maybe there was a better job around the corner.

      “According to the boss, the chief said that we did a hell of a job in the Brodger case.”

      Hamas Brodger had been a drug dealer who had executed three teenage boys who’d tried to screw him out of a couple hundred dollars.

      A fourth boy had managed to get away. Chase and Dawson had babysat him, twelve-on, twelve-off, for six weeks. It hadn’t been a good assignment. The kid didn’t bathe regularly and had forgotten all the manners he’d learned in kindergarten. And he hadn’t been able to keep his fingers away from social media and had led the bad guys to their door.