Standing Fast

TWO

Maisy watched, her head swimming in confusion and disbelief, as Chase stayed kneeling between the uniformed cops. Prayer filled her aching chest.

Lord, what’s happening? Did Chase really have something to do with Dad’s murder?

“Justin!”

The tall cop turned toward her, his lips set in a grim line. “Morning, Maisy. I’ve got to ask you to step back.”

Justin Blackwood was a tough and reliable captain, but even then, she’d never seen his face so serious.

“I just saw a prowler in the bushes with a knife!” she said, forcing herself to leave the question of Chase’s arrest for now. If there was even a possibility it was Boyd Sullivan, that was all that mattered for now. She pointed. “Over there. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. But they were thin. I don’t think it was Boyd Sullivan, but he’s been living in the woods for months, so who knows how much weight he’s lost. They had a hoodie and a bandanna over their face. They pulled a knife, but when I yelled they ran away. I think they had part of a picture frame Allie and I made.”

She held out her hand to show him the pieces she’d picked up. Justin’s face paled. In an instant he’d summoned two K-9 officers to his side and quickly took a detailed description of the suspect’s appearance from Maisy and the direction he’d gone. The cops and their canine partners took off after the suspect. Justin turned to Maisy.

“Are you okay?” Concern reverberated through his voice.

She nodded as something about the sincerity of her friend’s caring question made her voice catch. The single father of a teenaged girl, Justin had been someone Maisy had considered a friend for years. If she was honest, she suspected her father had been disappointed that no romantic spark had ever bloomed between her and the military police captain. She’d definitely noticed how the cut of Justin’s jaw and the intensity of his gaze had a certain attractiveness, which had turned more than one female head on base. But the fact that his obvious good looks had never had any impact on her personally had been one of the reasons she figured she was immune to the charms of any man in uniform—a thought that had promptly evaporated the moment Chase McLear had brought little Allie into Sunny Seeds and sent a thousand butterfly wings flapping in Maisy’s chest.

“I’m okay,” she said. “They didn’t threaten me or come anywhere near touching me. They just pulled a knife and then ran. Whoever they were, I wasn’t their target.”

Justin nodded slowly. She had a pretty good guess what he was thinking. In the several sightings of the Red Rose Killer since he’d escaped prison, one constant that remained was that he only killed people he thought deserved it—like her father—or that he needed something from to achieve that aim.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Why are you arresting Chase McLear? Yvette said Boyd had been seen going in and out of his house. That can’t be true.”

He paused and his eyes rose to the sky as if he was trying to decide what to tell her.

“I know that different members of the investigative team have been chasing down a lot of different leads,” she added quickly. “I don’t expect to be kept in the loop about all of them and I know there’s a lot you can’t tell me. But Chase is the father of one of my students.”

Justin’s brows furrowed and for a moment, it looked like he was weighing his words before deciding what to say. “I can confirm that the investigative team received an anonymous tip that Chase McLear was harboring the Red Rose Killer—”

“But that’s impossible!” Maisy felt her hand rise to her lips. “Chase...I mean, Senior Airman McLear is a good man and a devoted father.”

A single eyebrow rose. “I assume this is your subjective personal opinion of the man from your interactions with him and not based on any specific evidence as to his relationship with Boyd Sullivan?”

Heat rose to her face. If she was honest, she wasn’t even sure why she was defending Chase so quickly and eagerly. There was just something about him that got to her. She’d always believed in Jesus’s teaching from “The Sermon on the Mount” that the true character of a person’s heart was known by the things he did. Despite his reserved exterior, she was convinced Chase truly loved his daughter. It was obvious every time she’d watched Allie barrel into his waiting arms at the end of the day. And sometimes when he met her gaze over his daughter’s blond curls, it was almost like she caught a glimpse of something lost and broken behind his deep green eyes.

“Senior Airman McLear says it was all a misunderstanding and that there was a prowler on his property—”

“And I saw a prowler with a knife,” Maisy interjected again. The slight narrowing of her friend’s eyes suddenly reminded her that as a friend and civilian she was being treated with far more latitude than anyone serving under the strict captain would have ever received for such an outburst. “I’m sorry. That was rude. I’m just really shaken by this.”

“I understand,” he said, but the firm timber of his voice let her know just how little impact her passionate defense of Chase would have on his investigation. “Senior Airman McLear has maintained his innocence. We will of course be taking his claims of a prowler seriously and hopefully my officers will be able to track down and catch the person you saw. I’m trusting you to respect the fact that there is additional information about this investigation that I’m not at liberty to tell you. But I do feel a responsibility to let you know this is not the first time this suspect has come to our attention. Now, I have to ask you, do you know if he had any kind of relationship or interaction with your father?”

“No.” She shook her head, feeling her sweat-soaked hair dance and fly around her head. “My dad was his basic training officer, but that was years ago.”

“Do you know if your father was particularly hard on him?” the captain pressed.

“My father was hard on a lot of people.” Especially her. Again, her eyes flicked to where Chase was kneeling, flanked by officers. Anger burned in his eyes, mixed with a quiet desperation bordering on panic, like a wounded animal desperately scanning the snare that had just trapped him. “Look, Chase can’t be working with Boyd Sullivan. I’m almost certain of it.”

The lines of Justin’s brow furrowed deeper. “Again, do you have any evidence to back that up?”

“No.” Her chest fell. She had a hunch and nothing more.

Was her blind faith of Chase’s true nature any different than Yvette’s had been about Boyd?

A frightened and furious wail seemed to break through the early morning air and rise above the chaos. A cop in flak gear was carrying a squirming and pajama-clad Allie out of the house. She recognized him. Lieutenant Preston Flannigan was the slightly pushy single father of one of the boys in her preschool.

“No!” Allie squirmed, fighting against the firm arms holding her. “Stop! No! I want Daddy!”

Sudden tears rushed to Maisy’s eyes. “What’s going to happen to Allie?”

“That’s up to Chase. We’ll be taking him in for questioning. Hopefully, he has someone who can take her. If not, we’ll arrange for a base social worker.”

A stranger? She knew the social workers on base were wonderful people who did a difficult job, but still, she couldn’t imagine how hard it would be on little Allie to understand where she was going and what was happening to her. She glanced at Chase. His face had paled with an agony that seemed to rip her own heart in half. No, she couldn’t just stand there and watch this happen. She took a step toward the little girl. “Allie, it’s going to be okay.”

Allie’s tearstained face turned toward her. “Maisy! I want Miss Maisy!”

Her little arms shot out, and Maisy felt her arms instinctively wrap around the child.

“Justin, I’ll take her to the preschool with me, if Chase is okay with that. She’s one of my students and watching her the extra hour before school starts is no trouble at all. I know her and she knows me.”

Concern rumbled in the captain’s voice. “Are you sure?”

Maisy’s eyes glanced from father to daughter. “Absolutely.”

“All right.” He led her through the crowd until they reached Chase. “Maisy has offered to take care of your daughter while you come in for questioning. Is that acceptable to you?”

Chase turned toward them and gratitude filled his gaze. “Yes, thank you. Please, don’t let her out of your sight. There was a prowler outside of my home this morning. They cut the screen on her bedroom window.”

Was that the same person she’d seen skulking in the bushes? She wanted to ask him more and tell him what she’d seen, but with Security Forces all around and little frightened Allie in her arms it would have to wait. “I’ll keep her safe, Chase. I promise.”

“Thanks,” he said again. “She’ll need to get dressed and changed. Plus, I haven’t fed her breakfast yet. She’s recently been refusing to eat cereal if milk touches it, but she’s okay with fruit...” His voice trailed off, as if his mind was struggling to figure out what else he should tell her.

“Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “I’ve got a change of clothes for her in her cubby at the preschool. I bought some fresh fruit yesterday and I have frozen waffles and yogurt on hand for breakfast.”

The number of students who’d been having problems both eating and sleeping had increased since the Red Rose Killer had broken onto the base. She heard Allie’s babbling voice at her ear, and the toddler took Maisy’s face in both of her hands, turning the preschool teacher’s gaze away from Chase. Allie looked at her seriously. “Police broke my house, Maisy.”

“The police are just searching your house to make sure that you and your daddy are okay,” Maisy said, softly. “Like Queenie searches your house for things. Now, your daddy is going to help the police and you are going to come to school with me. We’ll have special strawberries and waffles for breakfast. Would you like that?”

Allie stuck her lip out. “Queenie comes too?”

Maisy looked down. A young beagle sat by her ankle. It looked up protectively at Allie in a way that told her that she wouldn’t be able to shake the dog, even if she wanted to. “Yes, of course. Queenie can come too.”

“Queenie likes waffles.” Allie tucked her head against Maisy’s chest and she felt the young girl shudder in the safety of her arms.

Chase met her eyes over Allie’s head again. “Thank you.”

“No problem. We’ll see you later.”

The pink-and-orange glow of a Texas dawn had deepened over the horizon. The first parents would be at the preschool ready to drop their kids off in a little over an hour. She started to turn away when she heard Justin calling her name. She looked back. The captain was striding toward them. Something glittered in his gloved hand. It was a sturdy gold cross, dangling on the end of a chain.

He stretched the pendant toward her. “Before you go, one of our officers just found this buried under the floorboards in Chase’s house. I was wondering if you could identify it?”

Her blood ran cold as suddenly as if she’d just plunged into ice. She nodded. Her mouth opened, but for a moment, no words came out. Justin Blackwood turned the cross over and the early morning light fell on the engraved words she’d so carefully chosen as a teenager years ago. I love you, Dad—Maisy.

Her heart sank to a place that was worse than disappointment or even sadness. “Yes, that’s the cross I gave my father for Christmas when I was thirteen, a few months after my mother died. Despite our differences, he wore it under his uniform and never took it off. When the Red Rose Killer murdered him, somebody stole it from his body.”

She could almost feel Chase’s gaze on her face, but she forced herself to turn away without meeting his eye. She didn’t even begin to know what to think. But the fact that it had now shown up in Chase McLear’s home made it a lot harder to hold on to the faint hope that the father of the little girl she now held in her arms wasn’t somehow linked to his murder.

* * *

“Stephen Butler, commissary cook!” Preston slapped the glossy photo of the corpse of one of the Red Rose Killer’s most recent victims down on the interrogation table in front of Chase. “Found dead behind a restaurant off base. Boyd Sullivan used his uniform and ID to sneak onto base after escaping prison. Did you lure him to the woods for Boyd? Are you responsible for this man’s murder?”

“No, sir.” Chase’s jaw ached and his lower back twinged with the reminder that he hadn’t stood or stretched in hours. But he wasn’t about to let his bearing relax. They’d brought him in for questioning in the same track pants and T-shirt he’d been wearing when they’d arrested him. Being challenged by uniformed men while in his civvies made the humiliation he felt even worse. But he wasn’t about to give in to the temptation to slouch.

An airman was an airman, even out of uniform.

His eyes roamed over the glossy picture of the dead young man. The Red Rose Killer’s first set of victims before his arrest had been linked by a common thread—they were all people who’d treated him worse than he felt he’d deserved. A homecoming queen who’d broken his heart, a high school bully and a gas station attendant who’d fired him had been the first three people he had killed. A woman he’d once dated and her new boyfriend rounded out the five murders that he’d gone to prison for. But since breaking out of prison, his targets had been more mixed. Some seemed to be revenge killings, complete with a red rose and a note left on the body. Others, like poor Stephen Butler, seemed to have been killed for practical reasons, like gaining access to the base or the kennels. Preston had already covered the first set of victims and had now moved onto crimes committed since Boyd had broken out of prison.

Captain Justin Blackwood stood stone-faced and impassive by the door, apparently content to watch as Preston conducted the questioning with the volume and aggression of an angry terrier that had cornered a rat. Chase wasn’t sure what that meant. Was the captain not as convinced of his guilt as the lieutenant was? He could only hope that the forensic team was taking the cut in Allie’s window screen, the torn picture and the footsteps in the dirt as seriously as Security Forces were taking their investigation into him.

When Lieutenant Ethan Webb had met him in a coffee shop three and a half weeks ago and told him his name had shown up on Boyd Sullivan’s prison visitor list, Chase had been both shocked and indignant; his frustration at just how ludicrous the whole situation was had shown in both his tone of voice and his body language. He still kicked himself for that. Growing up, his grandfather, Senior Master Sergeant Donald McLear, had drilled into him that a man and a hero always kept his chin high and his emotions in check. But the idea that he’d do anything to help Boyd Sullivan had been both insulting and laughable. How could anyone think he’d want to spend one minute in the presence of that monster? He’d expected his name would be cleared immediately and that whoever had used his name to cover their tracks had picked him at random. Even the fact that his laptop had been stolen from his truck, along with his gym bag and toolbox, had seemed like a cruel coincidence.

But any hope that he wasn’t being personally targeted, which had remained flickering in his heart, was completely snuffed out the second Captain Blackwood had held the late Chief Master Sergeant Clint Lockwood’s gold cross in Maisy’s startled face. The thought that it had been found under his living room floorboards chilled him to the bone. He’d been set up, no doubt about it, by someone who’d both been inside his home and had eyes on his truck. He didn’t know who and he didn’t know why. But one thing was certain—for the sake of his little girl, he had to clear his name.

“Landon Martelli and Tamara Peterson,” Preston barked, as he slammed the pictures of two more of Sullivan’s victims down on the table. “Both were K-9 trainers and murdered by someone who opened the kennel doors, letting about two hundred dogs go free. You don’t have an alibi for the morning this happened, do you?”

Chase fought the urge to cross his arms. “As I’ve stated before, I was on a video chat with a military contractor named Ajay Joseph, who I used to work with in Afghanistan, from four fifteen in the morning until my cell phone rang shortly after oh five hundred with an alert that Boyd Sullivan had escaped prison and let dogs loose on base. I paused the video call and went into the bedroom to answer my cell phone and spoke to Master Sergeant Westley James. When I returned to the living room, approximately eight minutes later, my daughter, Allie, was up and playing with Queenie and the video call had ended.”

“But you have no way to corroborate that story,” Preston interjected.

“That I was at home and on a video call when Sullivan broke onto base? No, I don’t. Because my laptop was stolen, along with my gym bag and toolbox, from my truck when I was off base and I haven’t been able to reach my contact.”

Preston smirked. Yeah, Chase knew how weak his alibi sounded. It didn’t help that he hadn’t been able to reach Ajay since then. But he was an Afghan, an independent contractor and a coordinator between locals and the United States Air Force. Ajay wasn’t stationed on base, and off-base communication in his part of Afghanistan had been unstable.