Shielded In The Shadows

What it all meant, she didn’t know. Didn’t even want to guess. Or hope. She just wanted to go with the flow. Maybe it was Ms. Shadow rearing her head, but it didn’t feel that way to Emma. Over the past couple of days—since Jayden had left Sunday morning—she’d been free from her war with her lesser self.

Could be she was changing. Healing from the past. Learning who she was. Finding peace with her place in the world.

Could be, though, she was off on the wild side, falling in love with the wrong guy, and would end up face-planted in a well of self-disgust again.

This time really seemed different, though. She wasn’t frantic. Or refusing to listen to the “mother” voice inside her.

She’d give it a few days. See what happened. And how she felt.

In the meantime, she’d called Chantel, asked about the teenage boy who’d lived in Suzie’s old neighborhood four years before.

The detective called back Thursday afternoon. Emma was showered, in shorts and a cropped black shirt at her desk, feeling fine, other than a bit of pulling at the incision site on her forehead. Her hair covered the cut, which she was told to leave unbandaged now. Other than the stitches, and residual moments of panic when she relived that night on the road two days before, she was pretty much fully recovered. She’d even driven to the grocery store for some veggies for lunch.

“My guys talked to seven different households in that neighborhood, all of whom had been there for more than four years, and not one of them was aware of a teenage boy living in the neighborhood back then,” Chantel said.

Getting up from her desk, Emma walked to the window, looked out at her pool. She hadn’t been out to it since the night a trespasser had entered her yard and vandalized her sliding-glass door. Her pool guy had been there...

He had a key to the back gate. Could he have been the one who’d—

No. There was absolutely nothing he’d need her to “leave alone.” And he was as short as she was.

There’d been no teenage boy in Suzie’s neighborhood?

“I don’t get it.” She broke the silence that had fallen on the line. “Suzie didn’t feed me that information. She’d have never mentioned the kid before I specifically asked the question.”

“Did her answer seem hesitant?” Chantel asked. “Like she was making it up as she went along? Maybe to throw you off someone else?”

Because what if there was someone else? Someone who knew of Bill’s crimes and was trying to frame him?

“No,” she said, disappointed that they didn’t have their answer. Emma interviewed and questioned people every single day. Witnesses, defendants, even expert witnesses and police officers. She was pretty good at figuring out when someone was lying to her...

“She gave instances, like she was reliving them,” she told Chantel. “She’d smile, one time she almost started to cry, as she talked about the kid. And what Bill would have done to him, an innocent boy.”

“What does Jayden have to say about it?”

“Nothing. I asked him not to question Bill about it, to protect Suzie. I sure don’t want him going after her because she talked to me...”

“My guys tell me that Jayden was in the neighborhood Tuesday morning. He talked to at least a couple of the families we talked to.”

Everything within Emma froze. Jayden Powell had had no reason to be in that neighborhood. His job was to keep an eye on Bill Heber. Period. So what had he been doing, talking to Heber’s old neighbors? After she’d told him about the kid? He was a wild man. A man who didn’t follow protocol unless it suited him. He did what he believed he needed to do to get the job done, no matter the ramifications to himself.

He was a man who lived for his work. Lived his work. To give offenders second chances.

Just how much would he do to protect Bill’s? He’d admitted the case was personal to him.

Had she let Shadow blind her to the truth? Was Jayden going to protect Bill at all cost?

Back at her desk, she forced herself to focus. “What did he ask them?”

“Just what we did...about any teenager who might have been in the neighborhood. It sounds like he only hit up a couple of houses and left, like he was on the street no more than five minutes or so.”

Chantel didn’t sound at all worried. To the contrary, her tone held...admiration. Could Jayden have been in the neighborhood to find dirt on Bill? To corroborate Suzie’s story in the only way he could, since Emma had made him promise not to talk to Bill himself?

Emma just wished, since the information about the kid had come from her, that Jayden had told her about his plans. That he’d included her.

He was under no professional obligation to do so.

But that didn’t stop her from being disappointed that he hadn’t.