In Safe Hands (Search and Rescue #4)(5)
She’d resisted getting binoculars in the past, since that always seemed like it would’ve pushed her neighborhood-watch activities out of “quirky” and right into “creepy.” Now, she regretted having qualms. In fact, a pair of night-vision binoculars would’ve been even better. So what if that shoved her squarely into creeperhood? At least she’d be able to see what was happening.
A break in the clouds revealed someone walking along the side of the empty house. Sucking in a startled breath, Daisy rose to her knees and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. She stared hard at the furtive figure.
The person’s shape was wrong. It wasn’t just the distortion of the shadows. Either an ogre was walking next to the empty house, or… Wishing once again for binoculars, she shifted, trying to find a better angle.
Then the wind cleared the clouds away from the moon, and she could see more clearly. The misshapen form was actually someone with a large bundle over his or her shoulder. Peering at the person, she decided from his size and the way he moved that he was definitely male.
After a half step of hesitation, he walked into the puddle of light circling one of the streetlamps. The lights on the SUV flashed, and the back hatch door lifted. Balancing the burden over his shoulder with one hand, he reached with the other to move something around, maybe making room.
“What?” Daisy muttered, confused. The man next to the sheriff’s department vehicle wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was dressed head to toe in black, rather than the tan deputy uniform. Even their department-issued winter coats were tan. The wrapped bundle over his shoulder caught the glow of the streetlight, gleaming a familiar, semiglossy blue. Whatever the guy was carrying was wrapped in a tarp.
Closing her fingers around her phone, she pulled it out and tapped on the video app. The scene was strange enough that she felt like she needed to record it, even if it was just so she could watch it in the morning. In the light of day, the ominous feeling would be gone, and she could laugh at the way her overactive imagination had turned something innocuous into a nebulous threat.
No matter how she shifted, raising up or dropping low, Daisy couldn’t find the right angle to get a glimpse of the man in black’s face. Even if she had gotten a clear view, though, she probably wouldn’t have been able to identify him. She only knew Chris’s coworkers through his work anecdotes. She zoomed in her phone camera, but the image just got darker and grainier, rather than clearer.
Leaning forward, the man half-dropped, half-shoved the large bundle into the back of the SUV. The rear of the vehicle sagged a little, which meant the object must be heavy. There was an unsettling familiarity in the way the tarp-wrapped item fell, bulky and weighted, that sent a shiver across the back of her neck.
The black-clad man shoved at the bottom of the bundle. He’d managed to tuck the majority of it into the SUV when something dark escaped from the bottom of the rolled tarp, tumbled over the rear bumper, and fell to the ground.
Daisy sucked in a breath hard enough to scrape her throat. From her vantage point, that dropped item looked very much like a boot.
Chapter 2
Stunned by the possibility that there was a body in the back of the SUV, Daisy froze. She didn’t move as the man grabbed what was definitely a boot and chucked it into the back with what couldn’t be a dead human being…could it? He closed the back hatch door quietly. Any click or thump it might have made was buried under the whistling groan of the wind.
It wasn’t until the man opened the driver’s door and looked directly at her window that Daisy returned to life, leaping away from the glass so violently that she stumbled over her backtracking feet and fell, dropping her phone. It took her a few moments before she could scrape up the nerve to stand and approach the window again. By the time she got close enough to see the street, the SUV was gone.
“Stupid,” Daisy scolded herself, frantically looking in one direction and then the other, vainly trying to make out the red glow of taillights. There was nothing but darkness. “You could’ve gotten a good look at his face if you weren’t such a chicken. He couldn’t have seen you up here in the dark.” Giving up on getting another glimpse of the SUV, she slumped against the window. “At least you could’ve looked at the plate number.”
She rushed over to where her phone had fallen. Grabbing it, she pulled up her pathetically short list of contacts. Her finger hovered over Chris’s name first, and then her father’s. Her dad was in Connor Springs, installing solar panels on a new, high-end condo project. He was scheduled to be back that evening.
Her finger, poised above the screen, retreated before it tapped on either contact, and her arm dropped to her side. It was sinking in that she didn’t have anything concrete. There was no plate number, no way she could identify which deputy had tossed a human-shaped bundle into the back of a squad SUV, and no certainty that there was, in fact, a dead body currently being transported who knew where. All she had was some indistinct video footage of a dark form putting something into an SUV.
If she called either her dad or Chris tonight, they’d think she was imagining things. Worse, they might believe she’d expanded the boundaries of crazy-town, adding delusions to her current phobia. Her father would look at her with angry, helpless eyes and scratch his beard. In the short time he’d be staying at the house before leaving for another installation job, conversation would be infrequent and awkward. Daisy cringed at the thought.