Gold Promise by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon [Hammon, Ninie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2020-03-23T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sheriff McGreggor watched the EMTs lead a now-docile Bailey up the stairs to her bedroom. They'd given her a sedative. She would sleep.

She was safe.

The Beast, Jeni's word for the man who'd strangled Poli, believed Bailey was onto them somehow. What else was he supposed to believe when she'd warned the girl to run away from him or die? He thought Bailey knew who they were and what they were doing.

And so they'd gone after Bailey. Had been here tonight. If Fletch hadn't gotten here in time … Fletch and the other deputies had looked around outside with a flashlight, found a footprint in the mud outside the back gate. Could have been anybody's. But it wasn't just anybody's.

No sense hauling the state police crime lab guys out in the middle of the night. They could dust for prints in the morning, but they wouldn't find any. Even if they did, the prints wouldn't be in any database. These guys came and went like smoke in the wind.

He had stationed a squad car in front of the house and Deputy Tackett in the bushes beyond the back gate. There would be an armed officer with her at all times, from now on, until—

Right. Until what? Brice had to figure out how he was going to play this. He had no explanation for how he knew what he knew, at least not one that he could tell anybody. Before he blew out all the stops, contacted all the other law enforcement agencies who should be involved in a multi-national case — the state police, FBI, shoot, maybe even Homeland Security — he'd have to have more convincing evidence than the painting of a dead girl on an easel in Bailey's studio and a mythical fifteen-year-old who had vanished in the casino.

All he had by way of physical evidence was the body of a Jane Doe resting now on a slab in the morgue. At least now he knew where to look for her identity, the girl Jeni had called Polina. Poli. Probably with an "i" instead of a "y." Maybe Jeni was, too. That was a start. The ethnicity of those names … could have come from half a dozen Eastern European countries. Still, it was more than he'd known about her before.

T.J. and Dobbs had parked themselves in Bailey's kitchen. They all were reluctant to leave, not until they could see Bailey, talk to her. And Brice had no intention of leaving even then. He would be here, on guard, until … until whenever. Bailey was not going to be left alone again.

After the other officers left, Brice went to the kitchen and sat down heavily across the table from T.J.

"Coffee's fresh," T.J. said. "We been downin' it so fast it ain't had time to turn into road tar." Brice got up to get himself a cup and when he sat down with it — steaming and black — T.J. tried yet again to apologize for not stopping the girl named Jeni when she ran out of the bathroom.

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