Almost Dead (Lizzy Gardner #5)(31)

Then Lizzy remembered. The buzzing in her ears was back. Last week—maybe the week before that, Lizzy wasn’t sure—Shelby had tried to talk to her after class. She’d asked a few questions about relationships and love, and Lizzy realized now that she hadn’t really listened to her. She’d been caught up in her own thoughts, could hardly remember a word of what Shelby had said.

After everyone left the gym, Lizzy locked up and then made her way across the parking lot, keeping an eye on her surroundings as she went.

Goose bumps crawled up her arms. He was out there . . . watching her.

She stopped. Looked at the row of windows in the building across the street. Shadows danced within. Her gaze roamed the area, darting from tree to tree, building to building, then to every car parked on the side of the road.

“Who are you?” she said out loud. “What do you want from me?”

There was no answer.

She got to her car, climbed in behind the wheel, locked the doors, and started the engine. There’s nobody out there, she told herself.

Nobody out there, in all the world.

“Jared,” she said suddenly, surprised by her own outburst. “Come back to me.”

She tried to imagine him sitting in the seat next to her, but no image of how things used to be came to her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember happier times. When she wasn’t sitting in the hospital with him, it was as if he’d never been. These non-feelings didn’t make any sense. And yet every once in a while, she would feel a glimmer of hope, and for a moment, never longer, she shut her eyes and dared to imagine that everything would be all right. It was pure insanity. She was living in a tornado of confusion, a constant war between logic and irrationality.

A white Volkswagen Passat rolled into the parking lot. Behind the wheel was a young man. Clearly not a threat. Lizzy watched him drive up close to her car, stop, and roll down his window. She cracked her own.

“Ms. Gardner? My name is Derek Murphy,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”

Before she could tell him to get lost, he said, “I work for Channel 10 News, and we want to do a human interest story on you. You know, the story behind the story.”

She hit the Roll-Up button on her window and drove off.




Forty-five minutes later, after being told she could go ahead and enter Detective Chase’s office, Lizzy opened the door, but then started to back out when she noticed he was on the phone.

Detective Chase waved her in, gesturing toward the chair in front of his desk.

Lizzy shut the door and took a seat. While he finished his conversation, she glanced around, taking note of the framed certificate on the wall. Apparently he’d graduated from George Washington University in Washington, DC.

If she were trying to figure out what sort of man he was, judging by the pictures, she would guess he liked to fish and golf with his buddies. A man’s man. Her gaze left the wall and settled on the bronze trophy sitting on the credenza to the right. Apparently Detective Chase received a Top Cop Award and was honored by the president of the United States. Shocker. She didn’t think Chase had it in him.

Chase hung up the phone and said, “Gardner.”

“Detective Chase.”

“How are you holding up?”

The big man was trying to come across as if he cared. “I’m doing OK.”

“You don’t look OK.”

“Thanks.”

“What brings you here today?”

She had two reasons for the visit, but she decided to start with, “Melony Reed.”

Blank face, no expression. “Haven’t heard the name.”

“She came to see you because she was scared.”

“About what?”

“All her friends from high school were dying. Does that ring a bell?”

“That happens, you know—people’s friends die.”

“Yes. I know. Thanks for the reminder.”

He shrugged.

“Melony Reed hired me to investigate why so many of her friends are disappearing.”

“So have you solved the case? It’s been at least a week, hasn’t it?”

“So you do remember.”

Another shrug.

“Did you know Melony died recently, slipped and fell on the knives sticking straight up out of her open dishwasher?”

No shrug this time. Instead Chase appeared a bit uneasy.

“You can’t deny that that’s a lot of accidents in a short period of time.”

“Quite a coincidence. I’ll give you that.”

“Why did you send her to me?” Lizzy asked.

“Because I know how you like to solve murder mysteries.”

Detective Chase, it seemed, was back to his old dickish self. Lizzy didn’t flinch. “You sent her to me because you thought she was a joke. You didn’t believe her.”

“You’re wrong. I believed her when she told me that her friends died. But as I said, people die all of the time. Melony Reed was going through a divorce. There were a lot of contested financial issues, and she ended up losing everything. It was easy enough to see that she was experiencing some kind of midlife crisis—”

“She was only thirty.”

Chase sighed. “Listen. If you add up all of the homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, we’re talking thousands of crimes every year. And that’s just right here in Sacramento.”