THIRTEEN
SCRUNCHING DOWN AGAIN, DARLA GRABBED HER CELL AND quickly dialed Jake’s phone, only to hear the “Yellow Rose of Texas”
—
the tune Jake had downloaded as the default ring for Darla’s number—playing behind her.
Jake’s phone must have fallen out of her pocket and onto the seat when she squeezed out of the back door.
Darla shut her phone in frustration.
She didn’t know Reese’s number, and since she already knew that Jake’s phone couldn’t be unlocked without the correct password, she couldn’t search her friend’s contacts for that information.
That meant she’d have to wait until the protester was safely past and then run inside the coffee shop to find them.
The problem with that plan was that, in the meantime, the Lone Protester might grab another cab or disappear into another shop.
It seemed that her only choice would be to follow the girl once again .
.
.
but this time, in such a way that the teen didn’t know she was being tailed.
Darla frowned.
Though her Wayfarers would serve as something of a disguise, it would be hard to hide her red hair unless Great-Aunt Dee had tucked a convenient scarf a la Audrey Hepburn into the glove box.
She made a quick, hopeful rummage through the compartment but came up empty.
No matter.
The Lone Protester couldn’t be expecting to be followed a second time today, anyhow, right?
By this time, the girl had passed the car and was continuing at a casual pace down the sidewalk.
Darla swiftly made her decision.
She’d follow the girl and go on the assumption that her quarry wasn’t packing a weapon or fists of fury, or anything else that might require Darla needing immediate backup should she be spotted and recognized.
Not the ideal plan, she conceded, but no way she was leaving Maybelle alone and unlocked.
This meant that if Jake showed up at the Mercedes before Darla returned, the most she could do was stare through the car window at her cell phone, which was still lying on the back seat.
She could only hope that Jake had her cell number memorized so she could use Reese’s phone to call her and find out what was going on.
She had just grabbed her purse and was about to reach over and pull the keys from the ignition when a sharp rapping against the driver’s side window glass made her jump.
Choking back a surprised gasp, she glanced up to see a beefy uniformed police officer staring at her through the tinted glass, his expression one of extreme disapproval.
Bad cop.
That was Darla’s reflexive categorization of the broad-faced, mustachioed officer as she recalled Reese’s earlier take on this new kinder, gentler breed of law enforcement.
As for Reese, he fell into the infamous never-one-around-when-you-need-one cop category.
Here, he’d instructed her to park illegally, and now he wasn’t available to do the promised badge flashing to get her out of it.
Frantic, she glanced from the coffee shop door to the Lone Protester’s retreating figure.
Not only were they going to lose their sole suspect in Valerie Baylor’s possibly suspicious death, but she was about to get slapped with a substantial fine as well.
She needed to talk her way out of this ticket, and quickly.
She took a deep breath and powered down the driver’s side window via the center console, and then leaned toward the uniformed man.
“Hello, Officer,” she said with a broad smile, deliberately thickening her East Texas twang into even more honeyed southern tones.
She’d found that most middle-aged New York men responded positively to that accent.
“Gorgeous day, isn’t it?
Is there something I can help you with?”
“Yeah,” he replied, still disapproving and apparently immune to sweetness and light.
He flipped open his citation book and started to scribble.
“You can make sure whosever’s car this is gets this little love note.
In case you didn’t notice, lady, you’re in a loading zone.”
“Are we?
Oh dear, and here my friend, Detective Reese, said it was fine for us to park here while he checked out a suspect.”
“Suspect?”
The cop paused to squint at her, and Darla anxiously pointed to the Lone Protester, who now was peering into the window of a shop a few doors down.
“That girl with the long dark hair and black scarf, right near the red awning,” she said, giving up the southern-girl routine and cutting to the chase.
“I was just about to go after her.
She knows something about a murder.
If we lose her now, we might never find her again.”
“Yeah?
So where’s this detective friend of yours, and where’s his parking placard?
And why isn’t
he
following this so-called murder suspect?”
“He would be, but he’s still checking out the coffee shop,” she exclaimed, not bothering to correct his assumption about who owned the Mercedes.
Shaking her head in frustration, she grabbed the keys from the ignition.
“Look, if you need to write a ticket, write it, but I really need to go now.”
“Lady, where you really need to go is out of this loading zone.
You’ve got the keys, so do your friend a favor and move his car for him.
I still see it parked here a minute from now, I’m booting it and calling a tow truck.”
Baring oversized teeth in what probably was supposed to be a smile, he ripped the citation from the book and tucked it under the windshield wiper.
“Now, you have a nice day,” he told her and climbed back inside his patrol car.
Biting back a groan of frustration, Darla powered up the window again and yanked open the passenger door, almost falling out it in her haste.
She climbed up on the door frame for a better look at her quarry.
The Lone Protester had moved on down the block now and was approaching the busy intersection.
The familiar orange hand flashed on the pedestrian crosswalk sign, meaning Darla still had several seconds to catch up before the light changed again.
Otherwise, the girl likely would escape her a second time.
She hopped down again and slammed the door, only to hear Reese’s voice behind her.
“I told you to wait in the car.
Your protester sees you hanging around here, and she’ll take off again.”
Darla whipped about to find him and Jake surveying her with the same disapproving look Officer Bad Cop had just used on her.
The needle on her own disapproval meter promptly swung way over into the totally p.o.’d zone.
“Where in the hell were you two, roasting your own coffee beans?”
she demanded.
“The Lone Protester wasn’t in the coffee shop, she was next door in the consignment store.
And now she’s standing on the corner about to vanish again as soon as the light changes.”
Though, in fact, the light had already switched over from orange hand to walking man.
As Darla pointed in the girl’s direction, the latter stepped off the curb and headed down the crosswalk with another dozen or so pedestrians.
Reese said nothing but dashed off in that direction.
Jake was on his heels, though not before she ordered, “Wait here, Darla.
We’ll be back in a minute.”
“I can’t wait,” Darla called after her, waving the ticket like a flag.
“I just got fined for parking in a loading zone.
The cop is going to call a tow truck on me.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Jake’s voice drifted back to her.
Despite her limp, the older woman was swiftly closing the gap between her and Reese.
He, in turn, had already reached the corner.
Unfortunately, from what Darla could see through the passing traffic, the Lone Protester had already made her way safely across the street and was headed down the next block, oblivious to any chase going on behind her.
By now, Jake had joined Reese there on the corner.
Darla watched the distant pantomime as the pair seemed to confer for a moment, Reese gesturing in the girl’s direction.
Then, shaking off the restraining hand that Jake had put on his arm, he plunged into the stream of cross traffic.
“No!”
Darla gasped and shut her eyes, certain a repeat of last night’s deadly accident was imminent.
Sure enough, horns blatted, and more than one set of brakes squealed.
When a few more seconds passed and she didn’t hear the impact of steel against human flesh, however, she assumed he must have made it across the street safely.
She sighed and opened her eyes again, only to find herself nose to nose with the same policeman who’d just given her a parking ticket.
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, lady.
I told you if you didn’t move your friend’s car, I was gonna slap a boot on it and call a tow truck.
Well, you didn’t, so I am.”
“Wait!”
she told him, urgently pointing down the street.
“Here he comes .
.
.
and he has the suspect.”
For the Lone Protester, looking tiny and defeated, was indeed walking between Reese and Jake.
Leaving her to stand alongside the Mercedes, Officer Hallonquist—she’d finally gotten a good look at the name pinned to his uniform—hurried to join them.
The four halted a short distance from her.
She saw Jake speak to Reese for a few moments before breaking away to head back in Darla’s direction.
The two men remained where they were, the girl between them as they conferred.
A moment later, they hustled the girl into Hallonquist’s patrol car, which was double-parked a few cars from Darla, and then climbed in after her.
The car took off down the street, presumably headed to the nearest precinct.
Jake, meanwhile, had made it back to the Mercedes.
She grinned and thrust a fist at Darla for the obligatory bump.
“Good work, Nancy,” she exclaimed as their knuckles collided.
“You were right about your Lone Protester, whose name is Janie, by the way.
She admitted right off that she was the one holding up the anti-Valerie signs.
Of course, she denied shoving her into the street to be squashed like a bug, but she agreed to go in for questioning.
We’ll let Reese worry about getting a confession out of her.”
Rather than joining Jake’s moment of triumph, however, Darla felt herself gripped by a nagging sense of guilt.
Anyone who’d had a hand in killing someone else deserved prison time, at the very least; still, the girl looked awfully young to go to jail for the next twenty-odd years.
And something about her defeated air seemed unlike the attitude one would expect of a brazen murderer.
Could the girl’s claim of innocence be legitimate?
Jake seemed not to notice Darla’s dismay.
Instead, after ruefully snagging her abandoned phone from the rear of the Mercedes, she hopped into the front seat, furtively massaging her bad leg while pretending to do an after-workout stretch.
“Jeez, I didn’t realize how much I missed the old running-down-a-perp routine,” she exclaimed as Darla slid behind the wheel.
Snatching the citation Darla still clutched, she added, “I’ll see that Reese takes care of this.
Your friend Officer Hallonquist won’t mind, not after he’s had the chance to help collar a murderer.”
“Alleged murderer,” Darla sourly corrected as she turned the key.
“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say until someone is actually convicted?”
Jake waved away such trivialities, though she gave Darla a keen look.
“So what’s got your panties in a twist, kid?
I thought you’d be thrilled that Hamlet and you have a knack for detecting.”
“I am.”
Darla pulled out into traffic again and turned Maybelle back toward Brooklyn.
“What was going on inside the coffee shop?”
she asked instead, deciding she needed to wait until she was alone to contemplate the other topic.
“Unless it’s a heck of a lot bigger than it looks, you should have been in and out of there in a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah, the kid behind the counter played us, I think.
He claimed your girl had been in the shop but had to leave to find an ATM, and that she’d be back any minute.
It sounded kinda fishy to me, but it was all we had, so we decided to wait it out for a while.
Good thing you were keeping an eye on things from here.”
“So much for street smarts,” Darla muttered, recalling how Jake had praised Reese’s innate instincts the day before.
Apparently, his intuition had taken a vacation this afternoon.
“What happens to Janie now?
I guess she’s under arrest?”
“Not at this point.
Like I said, right now she’s going in for questioning.
We’ll see what happens after that.
And who knows, maybe they won’t find anything to charge her with after all.”