Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(9)

“You can be on your way now,” Tibbs said to Joe.

As he walked around the house to the front and tossed the booties and gloves into the bed of his truck, Joe heard Tibbs groan and say, “I hope this here thing doesn’t ruin my Thanksgiving.”



* * *



—

Daisy was up and alert in the cab with her front paws on the window ledge and her nose pressed against the driver’s-side glass when Joe got to the pickup. She was agitated and he turned and followed her line of sight over his shoulder.

The dog he’d seen earlier lurked just inside the stand of trees on Kizer’s property. He assumed it was Bert’s dog because it had stayed around even with all of the sudden commotion. The animal gazed at him with those disturbing, mesmerizing eyes.

Joe called to it.

“Come on, boy,” he said, not knowing if the dog was male or female. Then: “Come on, girl. I’ll take you home and feed you. Daisy here won’t do anything but lick you to death.”

The hound started to come, then stopped.

“Come on, we don’t want to leave you here.”

The animal seemed to be considering it for a moment, but then Norwood walked out through the front door in his baggy white coveralls and let the door slam behind him. The dog jumped at the sight and sound, and wheeling around, it loped away into the underbrush.

“Poor thing,” Joe said to Daisy as he climbed in and shut the door. “I think that dog had a really rough day.”

Joe needed to get home as quickly as he could. He knew Marybeth would be anxious to tell him about her own very strange day.





CHAPTER FOUR


    Marybeth Pickett


Earlier that morning, Marybeth had swung her minivan into the library parking lot before dawn and aimed it for her reserved director space. As she’d made the turn, her headlights had revealed movement near the outside of the entrance foyer. Someone was there on a cold Wyoming November morning three hours before the building was to open.

She stopped before pulling into her space. There were no other cars in the small parking lot, and she hit the button to lock all of the doors in the van—they responded with a solid thunk—while she reversed slowly and turned the wheel to the right. Her lights swept across the skeletal line of bushes on the side of the ancient red-brick library exterior and she tapped the brakes when they flooded the entrance area.

A man was bent down in front of the glass door with his back to her. When the beams hit him, he glanced quickly over his shoulder, winced at the brightness, and stuck out his palm to shadow his eyes and face.

He was old, tall, and disheveled with a white shock of hair sticking out on each side of his head beneath a baseball cap. He had light-colored eyes and a long nose and he moved stiffly in a stooped-over way that betrayed his age. He was wearing a thick green fleece coat with a patch of some kind—maybe a faded rainbow trout—on his shoulder. She couldn’t see his face clearly because the cap had a long brim and he kept it tilted down so his features were in shadow.

He scuttled away around the other corner of the building.

And he was gone.



* * *



—

Marybeth sat in her idling car for a moment while her heart raced and a shiver rippled through her body. Something about the man—his stare or the way he’d retreated so quickly—unnerved her. She opened her purse on the passenger seat and found both her phone and the canister of pepper spray Joe insisted she carry with her. As usual, she’d left her five-shot hammerless LadySmith .38 at home. For once she wished she hadn’t.

Marybeth slid her side window down a few inches, listening for the sound of a car starting up in the dark. But she heard nothing. Was he on foot?

There were not many homeless people in Saddlestring. Transients came through in the summer months looking for a more hospitable location, but rarely in the winter. She was very aware of them, because as the director of the county library, she knew that her building was like a magnet for those who had no place else to go. Transients used the restrooms, the couches, and the computers. No one had ever vandalized the interior or harassed her patrons, but she did have to call the sheriff on one middle-aged woman who insisted on wheeling her shopping cart full of possessions inside with her three days in a row. When Marybeth had followed up with Sheriff Tibbs, he told her they’d driven the woman to a halfway house in Casper, a hundred and thirty miles away.

She looked around to see if she could see the man again. Hopefully, she thought, she’d catch a glimpse of him under a streetlight, doing his best to get away. What worried her was the possibility that he had simply ducked around the corner of the library and was lurking in the bushes or in the stairwell that led to the basement storage area.

Marybeth tapped out 911 on her phone but hesitated to hit the call button. The county library was a public building, after all. The man hadn’t been trespassing or attempting to break in, as far as she could discern. Patrons were encouraged to return books at all hours via a slot in the building. Maybe he had overdue books and he didn’t want to return them in person and pay a fine? There were plenty of other scenarios she could think of.

She wasn’t a jumpy woman and she didn’t want to be characterized as one. Her husband was in law enforcement, and the dispatcher at the county building was notorious for gossiping about the calls she received. That the director of the county library had called the cops to check out a man returning a library book after hours would certainly make the rounds and portray her as foolish.