Cold Case Witness

A DANGEROUS HOMECOMING

When her big-city dreams come crashing down, Gemma Phillips returns to her small hometown—and finds herself the target of a violent stalker. And her attacker may be linked to the robbery she witnessed years ago…a case reopened after the police discovered a body, supporting her claims of overhearing a murder. Now there’s only one man who can save her: lawman Matt O’Dell. For Matt, solving this decades-old mystery will finally allow him to distance himself from his father’s criminal past. But Matt’s drive to close the case soon turns personal. He needs to guard his reputation…but first, he must protect the woman he’s just discovered he loves.

“Cold?” He raised his eyebrows.

“No, really, I’m okay.”

She accidentally looked in the direction of the crime scene, and shivered again. Matt jogged to his car, retrieved a jacket and returned. Gemma thanked him and slid her arms into it, reminding her skittering heart that this wasn’t high school, wearing his jacket didn’t mean anything, and he was just being chivalrous—Southern, really—to make sure she wasn’t cold.

“Ready now?”

Technically, she could only answer yes. Gemma had run out of reasons to delay this walk. So she nodded slowly, followed Matt as he started off down a path that she knew from experience would lead them from the clearing into a thick forest, dense with live oaks and Spanish moss whose shadows choked out the sunlight.

No, she wasn’t ready. She never would be.

But someone was out there, someone who knew what she’d seen, and they wanted her dead. Sometimes people had to do things they weren’t ready for.

So Gemma took a deep breath and stepped farther into the dark woods. Out of the light.

And back into the place that haunted her very worst dreams.

SARAH VARLAND lives near the mountains in Alaska where she loves writing, hiking, kayaking and spending time with her family. She’s happily married to her college sweetheart, John, and the mom of two active and adorable boys, Joshua and Timothy, as well as another baby in heaven. Sarah has been writing almost since she could hold a pencil and especially loves writing romantic suspense, where she gets to combine her love for happily-ever-afters, inspired by her own, with her love for suspense, inspired by her dad, who has spent a career in law enforcement. You can find Sarah online through her blog, espressoinalatteworld.blogspot.com.

Cold Case Witness

Sarah Varland

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you,

for My power is made perfect in weakness.

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

—2 Corinthians 12:9

To the women who have experienced pregnancy/infant loss,

who know what it’s like to feel as though that loss defines you at times.

That’s not how God sees you.

He sees grace. He sees hope. He sees you.

I pray for continued healing for all of us.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my family for being encouraging, helping when you can, answering questions and all around being the best family anyone could ask for. I love and appreciate all of you.

Thanks also to my friends, both writing friends and “normal” friends. Your encouragement and friendship has been so important to me during the writing of this book. I can’t thank you enough.

Thanks to Sarah, my agent. Working with you has been fun so far! I love that we are both juggling these jobs with the raising of little boys. Thanks for all you do.

Thanks to Elizabeth, wonderful editor and fabulous brainstormer. The work you have done already on this story has amazed me—thank you.

And thank You, Lord, for letting me tell stories and for teaching me things through them.

Contents

COVER

BACK COVER TEXT

INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TITLE PAGE

BIBLE VERSE

DEDICATION

Acknowledgements

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

Dear Reader

EXTRACT

COPYRIGHT

ONE

The steps groaned, the only sound in the south Georgia silence, as Gemma Phillips took another step toward the place she’d promised herself she’d never go again—the place where her nightmares had begun a decade before.

She took another step anyway, and another, until she was at the top of the stairs, hand poised to knock on the door of the portable office building where the Treasure Point Historical Society—and hopefully her future—awaited.

A month ago, Gemma would have said this job, helping the town develop and implement a marketing plan for the new museum being built on the Hamilton Estate, was beneath her. If she had her choice, she’d still be anywhere but here. But her job in Atlanta was gone and so were her savings. Treasure Point, where she could stay with her sister rent-free while job hunting, had looked like her only option—still did, unfortunately. And this job was the only one in town remotely close to what she enjoyed doing. She needed this to work.

But first, she needed to wow the historical society members. Surely after ten years, the cloud that had seemed to follow her, the looks people had given her, would have dissipated. Even small towns forgot eventually...

Gemma took a deep breath and knocked, shivering in the slight breeze that rustled the Spanish moss draped in the live oaks around her.

The door opened immediately, as though they’d been expecting her to arrive now. But Gemma knew without glancing at her watch that she was seven minutes early, just like she’d planned.

“It’s you.” An older woman gave her a disapproving stare. Not the first she’d gotten in this town, although she didn’t feel she deserved them. Gemma’d been a straight-A student, always been nice to dogs and old ladies, and still, she was no stranger to that disapproval.

“Yes, ma’am. Were you expecting someone else?” Right before a scheduled interview time? Gemma added the last snarky question only to herself.

Cindy Anne didn’t answer, only spun gracefully and walked into the office building. Gemma shut the door behind herself and lifted a hand to wave at the other committee members, who were already seated at a long table on the far side of the one-room building. The man in the center didn’t look familiar to her, but he stood and reached his hand out. “Jim Howard. We’ve spoken over email.”

Gemma nodded. He was the director of the Treasure Point Historical Society, and the one who’d not only replied to her inquiry about the job but had treated her kindly with every response. Since he appeared to be the one in charge, maybe this would go well after all. “It’s nice to meet you.” She gave her best smile, tried to talk her shoulders into relaxing.

Gemma sat down, noting as she did that the metal folding chair sat directly in the line of sight of the window, in full view of dozens of tall oak trees, branches camouflaged by Spanish moss, where someone could be hiding.

Not that it mattered. She had nothing to worry about, not really. She was jumpy because she was back here on the Hamilton property for the first time in years, where her nightmare had both started and ended a decade before. Moments like this, when chills sneaked up her spine, were just aftershocks from those few months in high school when it had felt as if her whole world was being shaken. No one was after her now. No one needed to be. She was just ordinary. Normal.

“We’re ready to begin.” Jim gave her a small smile, which she tried to return. At least he was being kind, which was more than she could say for Cindy Anne.

Gemma sat up straighter, caught the window in her peripheral vision again and, again, tried to ignore it. She had to stop letting the past color every aspect of her future. It was time to prove to herself, to the town and most important to her parents, that she was more than the shy girl who in high school had testified at the trial of a smuggling ring and sent its members to jail. This job—marketing—was something she was good at. All she needed was a chance to make a good impression.

“Why don’t you tell us a bit about your work history? Your résumé is impressive.”

Gemma tried to keep her smile relaxed, but already she could feel her confidence building, excitement starting to buzz in her chest.

The next ten minutes were straight out of a best-case scenario. Everything pointed to Gemma getting this job.

And then Cindy Anne spoke up for the first time since she’d let Gemma in.

“And what about your past? To what degree do you believe it will negatively influence your attempts to bring positive publicity to the Treasure Point History Museum?”

Silence. Even the near-constant sound of bugs that Gemma associated with this part of Georgia was absent. Just this eerie, empty space where noise should be.

And for a moment, Gemma wanted to walk away. Let them—let the whole town think whatever they wanted. It shouldn’t be this hard to interview for a job. She was qualified and capable. And her supposedly shocking past consisted of testifying against a bunch of criminals. She’d done the right thing. But for reasons she’d never been able to understand, she’d started being looked upon with suspicion ever since she’d discovered and helped break up a smuggling ring. If she could rewind the clock, go back to that night and unsee the crime, she would. Ten years later and she was still dealing with the fallout.

She made herself answer in a level voice. She’d faced people far more intimidating. But she’d never had so very much at stake. “I don’t believe my past has anything to do with this job.”

“Now, Cindy Anne...” another member spoke up. “I thought we’d agreed to give her a fair chance. She’s the best qualified candidate.”

Gemma wanted to let the words lift her spirits ever so slightly, but she was probably their only candidate. Not a lot of small-town people were drawn to marketing. It seemed for her whole childhood that everyone around here had a “what you see is what you get” view of life. And it wasn’t that Gemma disagreed entirely with that perspective...but she’d always felt it was honest but still logical to be careful which side you presented, to let people see what you wanted them to see.

Around her, the committee argued. Gemma stared out the window, noticing someone walking near the edge of the woods.

He was a Treasure Point police officer, but he looked too young to have been on the force during the case in which Gemma had testified. Her shoulders relaxed some at that realization—she didn’t have to hold against him the way some of the officers in that case had treated her.

The man came closer to the building, looked up at the window. Had he caught her staring?

Something about him was so familiar...

Then it hit her. Matt O’Dell, son of one of the men her testimony had sent to prison.

Their eyes met, just for a second. Gemma looked away.

If the Treasure Point Historical Society members hadn’t forgotten her past, Matt surely wouldn’t have. A shame, because he’d always intrigued her in high school. She’d always sort of wished...

“—trial period.”

“Wait, what?” Gemma snapped her attention back to the committee members. She surveyed them one at a time, studied their faces. And didn’t like what she saw.

This wasn’t going to turn out the way she’d hoped.

“We think a trial period might be wise in this case.”

Gemma shot a glare at Cindy Anne. The older woman lifted her nose and shook her head. “Don’t look at me. I think hiring you at all is a mistake.”

Gemma swallowed hard. A mistake? She pushed her chair back and stood. There was only so much she could take. If they weren’t happy with her, fine, but she wasn’t going to accept this kind of humiliation.

“Never mind,” Gemma muttered.

“Wait,” Jim called out.

She turned to face them one last time. She stared. Waited. They stared back.

“It’s your choice,” Jim said. “You can walk out of here with no job, walk away from this town again, even...but if you genuinely care about the museum, the way I believe you do, then you’ll take the two-week trial period option.”

One heartbeat. Then two. She let the silence stretch out, pretended to consider it. As though she had a logical choice. She was caught. And they knew it. She waited anyway, too prideful to seem too eager.

One more heartbeat.

“All ri—”

Her answer was cut off by screams.

In a man’s voice they were even more terrible to Gemma’s ears, especially because they echoed the screams she still believed she’d heard on this property ten years before—the screams the police told her she must have imagined, when she’d thought two of the men involved in the smuggling had started to fight.

One of them she hadn’t been able to identify, though his voice had sounded familiar. One of them—Harris Walker, who had been somewhat of a drifter but had spent time in Treasure Point regularly—had been gone by the time the police arrived. No one had ever seen him again.

These screams were like his had been, and they took her back to those terrifying moments ten years earlier, when she’d been running through the woods as fast as she could, trying not to be the next victim...

Harris had disappeared and Gemma was almost certain he had been murdered, but no one had believed her when she’d told them. Not the police, not anyone.

After the screams came a silence. The kind that chilled a person to her core.

And Gemma knew her nightmare had come back to life.

* * *

In an instant, Matt O’Dell’s patrol had gone from predictable to intense enough that he felt as if he was on the opening segment of a crime show on TV. He’d run from where he’d been patrolling in the woods when he’d heard the construction worker’s yell. He’d found a group of them clustered at the outside edge of the construction site.

“What happened?” Matt directed the question to Ryan Townsend, the foreman.

The man looked up at Matt, looked back down at something on the ground and his face paled, contrasting starkly to his sunburned neck and shoulders. He shook his head. Not really an answer.

At that moment Jim Howard ran across the gravel parking lot toward the construction area. “What’s going on?”

Matt saw several more of the historical society members clustered in the doorway of the portable office building. “Stop.” He put one hand up and said the word firmly, shaking his head. “I need everyone back inside while I deal with this.”

“But—” Jim started to argue.

“Inside, now.”

The man turned around and went back, and he and the others went inside.

Matt approached the scene cautiously, trying to be ready for anything since no one seemed able to speak. The silence was startling after the constant noise of construction. “Move.” The men stepped aside quickly. Not the way he had expected them to respond. Matt braced himself, wondering how bad it had to be to get a group of men like this to be quiet and compliant. They were nice enough guys, but they didn’t typically like being told what to do.

He looked down at the ground, wet from last night’s rain, and saw bones.

Hand and finger bones, reaching out from the dirt.

Matt felt goose bumps rise on his arms despite the eighty-degree heat. The bones seemed to be reaching up. Asking for help.

Treasure Point wasn’t a perfect town—Matt had dealt with crime before as a police officer. But nothing like this. He took a step backward, needing the distance, and looked up to meet Ryan’s eyes.

Matt took a deep breath and centered himself. “Tell me about how you found this.”

Ryan’s eyes swung to another man. “Bruce was working on leveling the site and doing some grading work. When he went on his break, I walked around a little, just to get a feel for the site. I do that with almost everything I build. I saw something sticking out of the ground over here, assumed it was a root and reached down to pull it up.” Here he started to look green. “I looked closer at it and...” His gaze dropped down to the remains.

Matt looked down, too, then glanced up at the construction worker. Ryan’s story made sense and it was hard to fake the level of uneasiness he was showing.

Someone had put that body in the ground, but Ryan was one person Matt was pretty comfortable ruling out, although he’d have to keep him on the official suspect list until he could investigate further. That was policy. Now he had an entire town full of people to consider. A whole state.

The bones looked old—old enough for the flesh to be gone—which made his chances of solving this case go down substantially. This was going to be like looking for a needle somewhere much bigger than a haystack.

The Treasure Point Police Department hadn’t had an official crime scene investigator until a year or so ago when Shiloh Evans—now Shiloh Evans Cole—had gotten certified and stopped working patrol to pursue her interest in forensics and crime scenes. A couple of the other officers could do the basic forensics work, and Matt could do it in a pinch, but Shiloh was the best. Assuming this was a crime scene, and not the accidental digging up of an Native burial ground, her opinion would be invaluable. And even if it did turn out to be an old burial ground with no crime to worry about, it was better to have been safe and called in Shiloh than to have compromised a possible crime scene and risked her wrath.

“I need everyone to move away from the scene.”

Everyone complied quickly. Almost too quickly. Matt shrugged off the suspicion. The construction workers were spooked because they had discovered the body, nothing more. Their actions weren’t indicative of any guilt. He placed the call to Shiloh, and then waited, standing guard over the body.

A police car pulled up only minutes later and Shiloh stepped out. She started surveying the scene even as she walked toward it; he could practically see the wheels in her mind turning, working at sorting out potential puzzle pieces. “What happened?”

“Ryan Townsend thought he saw a root and bent to pull it. Turned out to be a skeleton’s finger.”

Shiloh shook her head. “That’ll give you nightmares.”

“What are your thoughts?”

“You were right to call me. I think we’re dealing with something more recent than anything Native American. This was really close to the original site of the Hamilton house, before it burned down last year. That place had been around forever. They would have known better than to build on any kind of graveyard or burial ground.” She bent down, examined the bones a little more closely. “Besides, bone structure looks too big. We need to get an ME in here.” Shiloh stood and shook her head. “I don’t like how this feels.”

Ryan walked back over before Matt could respond to Shiloh. “Do you need to talk to any of us anymore? Our shift’s over, but we can stick around to give statements or anything you need.”

Cooperative. That made his job easier. “It would help to talk to a couple people, but then you’ll be free to go.” As he gave his answer, movement near the portable office building caught his eye. A woman hurried down the stairs, and straight to the cleanest, most expensive-looking car in the small dirt clearing that had become a sort of parking lot when the Treasure Point Historical Society was meeting in their office. Matt frowned. Why was she running? He hadn’t seen her at all today, so he knew she had nothing to do with the discovery of the body. In fact he didn’t think he’d even seen her around town, although something about her looked familiar, reminded him of... He squinted as he thought.

Gemma Phillips.

What was she doing back in town?

Seeing her again here of all places messed with his mind. What were the chances? This was where the worst night of both of their lives had taken place—although Matt had had plenty of nights that were a close second with his upbringing. Though he’d always wished he could get to know her better in high school since she’d always seemed sweet and fun, they’d been in very different circles. And that night had driven the wedge between them even deeper, separating them further.

She’d left town right after they graduated, before he could ever work up the nerve to see if she might ever consider being friends with someone like him.

And here she was, turning up again when crime was surfacing in Treasure Point, which was a huge rarity. Did the woman just bring trouble with her?

Matt wasn’t sure if she was leaving in such a hurry because she’d heard about the discovery of the body or if she was just anxious to get away from the place that must carry painful memories for her. Either made just as much sense. And either way, he’d put her on his list of people to talk to later. Something about the purposefulness of the way she ran... It seemed that Gemma Phillips had something to hide.

He just wondered whose life would be turned upside down by her latest revelation.

“I’m going to call the ME.” Shiloh pulled her phone out.

Matt nodded, then walked in Gemma’s direction. She was too fast for him; before he could do anything, even call out to her, she’d climbed into her car and driven away. He stood for a minute, watching her and trying to figure out how she played into this.

“You know her?” Shiloh’s voice beside him caught him off guard. Apparently she’d finished her phone call. He nodded.

“Who is she?”

“Gemma Phillips.”

“Phillips... Any relation to Claire at Kite Tails and Coffee?” Shiloh’s mention of Claire’s coffee shop made him wish he’d swung by there on the way to work this morning. He’d had a cup at home, but the way this day was going, he’d need more soon.

“Her sister.”

Shiloh’s eyes narrowed. “Is she the one who testified in that criminal smuggling case a decade or so ago? She looks younger than I would have thought.”

He nodded. “She was in high school at the time. How’d you know about that case?” Shiloh wasn’t from Treasure Point originally, and it was a taboo enough subject that officers didn’t even discuss it among themselves much.

“The smuggling ring was stealing historical artifacts. I found write-ups in old newspapers at the library when I was doing research for a history class I was teaching.”

Matt forgot sometimes that she’d had a different life before joining the police department. It was hard to imagine her as a timid history professor. In his mind, she was 100 percent law enforcement.

“Why do you think she ran?” Shiloh was full of questions today.