Whiskey and Whispers, page 5
“It’s garbage day,” Glen explained. “Josh and Rachel were working on getting the food out for the guests this morning, and they’d forgotten to put the garbage bins out. Tyler jumped up and offered to put them out. Didn’t even wait for an answer. You know how he is. He was on it in a second. Then we heard what sounded like the backfiring of a car, and Tyler didn’t come back right away. Well…Josh looked out the front window… He saw Tyler lying on the ground.”
“That bullet was meant for me. I know it was.”
That statement came from Josh. He’d slipped into the living room after setting Finn up in the home office.
“Why do you think it was meant for you?” Tate asked. “Has someone threatened you?”
“No,” Josh replied with a shake of his head. “But Tyler was wearing my sweatshirt. Whoever did this must have thought it was me.”
It would depend on how far away the shooter was from Tyler. From a distance, the two men could be mistaken for one another. They had the same blond hair and a similar haircut. They were almost identical in height and frame. Put Josh’s clothes on Tyler…
A case of mistaken identity could be a real possibility.
“We don’t know exactly what happened yet,” Tate cautioned. “Did anybody see anything? Who all was here when it happened?”
“Winnie and Glen showed up first,” Josh said, nodding toward their friend. “Larry and Diane, right after. They like to help in the kitchen. Keith and Tracy showed up just a few minutes after it happened, and Cat, too. She arrived about then. We were expecting Leo and Shelly, as well as Lindsay, but I haven’t heard from them. Maybe they overslept or something.”
“What about Marnie? Isn’t she coming?” Glen asked. “Wait, was she at the party last night? I don’t even remember.”
“She was there but had to leave early. She had work this morning, a meeting at the station. She said she’d try and stop by if it ended in time.”
Marnie was an anchor on the local television station’s morning show. It meant she mostly went to bed at eight and was up by three to be on the air by five. She often joked that she had the hours of an insomniac toddler.
“I have a feeling she’ll be here soon, but in a more official capacity,” Josh said. “This is definitely going to make the news. Not many shootings in our little town.”
The door to the office swung open, and Rachel stepped back inside. Her eyes were still red and swollen, her cheeks damp from recent tears.
“I gave my statement,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “It’s someone else’s turn. I’m going to make the strongest pot of coffee in history, and then I’m going to the hospital. Has anyone called Tyler’s folks?”
“I can do that,” Glen replied. “I’ll call them now.”
Glen stepped into the kitchen as Finn appeared in the doorway, motioning to Tate.
“Let’s do your statement next,” he said. “Josh, then we’ll do yours. I know you’re anxious to get to the hospital.”
“I can do mine now,” Josh argued. “Get it over with.”
“I think Rachel needs you right now,” Finn said. “Tate’s won’t take long. You’ll be able to go be with Tyler very soon.”
Josh expelled a noisy breath but didn’t argue, instead striding into the kitchen to see about Rachel.
“You okay to talk?” Finn asked.
“Sure,” Tate replied. “I’m good. Yes, let’s get this done.”
They settled on the small sofa under the window. Finn made a few notes in a notebook before holding up his phone.
“I’m going to record this. Any objections? It just makes it easier later for me to refer back.”
“No problem. I’m not sure that I’m going to be any help, to be honest. It all happened before I arrived.”
“How about we start at the party last night?” Finn suggested. “You were there, right? Who else was there?”
“Yes, pretty much the whole gang from school was.”
It was then that Tate realized that Finn hadn’t been there last night. He’d gone to school with Tate’s older brother Zack, but later moved out of town. He was still friends with Rachel and Josh, though.
Finn must have noticed Tate’s expression because he chuckled and shook his head.
“Relax. I was invited, but I ended up having to work. Several of my deputies have the stomach flu. There are no hard feelings anywhere. It’s all good. Except for the fact that they might have infected everyone at the station, and we might all be sick soon.”
Now that Finn had mentioned illness, Tate noticed that the man was rather pale with a line of sweat at his brow. The sheriff might be sicker than he thought.
“I’ll cross my fingers for you.”
“I usually have good luck with viruses, but a man never knows when his luck will run out. Anyway, you were saying who attended last night.”
“Right.” Tate thought back to the night before. “Obviously, Josh and Rachel. Lindsay was there, along with Leo and Shelly. Tyler, of course. Also, Winnie and Glen, Keith and Tracy, Larry and Diane. Marnie. Cat. Then their neighbors, Bert and Lucy. The parents, too, plus a few cousins, aunts, and uncles. That’s all I remember, but there could have been others.”
“What can you tell me about Josh’s run-in with his business partner Leo?”
It wasn’t a surprise that Finn was asking about that confrontation. Had Rachel told him, or had it already hit the gossip mill?
“They argued. It got loud, but I didn’t hear most of it.”
“Did Leo threaten Josh?”
“Yes,” Tate admitted. “But he didn’t say he was going to try and kill him or anything.”
“What were his exact words? Do you remember?”
“He said that Josh would be sorry.”
Which could mean anything. Leo could be a jerk, but was he a killer? Tate would be shocked if Leo were responsible for this incident.
“You’re going to talk to Leo?” Tate asked. “He was supposed to be here this morning.”
“And he’s not here,” Finn replied. “I’m going to need to talk to him and also ask him where he was during the shooting. You were in the car, correct?”
“Yes, on my way here.”
Tate answered a few more questions before they were finished. He stood to leave but hesitated for a moment.
“What are you thinking, Finn? Was someone trying to hurt Josh? Or was it Tyler?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Finn confessed. “I’m going to have to go down the two separate paths until I can rule out one. I do wonder about Tyler because he doesn’t even live here. Who would want to hurt him? But he does visit often enough that he knows people, and they would be aware he was in town.”
“He usually stays with his parents,” Tate pointed out. “He was only staying here because his mom and dad are renovating the house. Plus, he was wearing Josh’s clothes since the airline lost his luggage.”
“You think the shooter was aiming for Josh then?”
“I have no idea. It’s easy to see why Josh thinks he was the target. If they meant to hurt Tyler, it had to be someone close enough that would know he was here this morning.”
“And you don’t want to think that one of your friends did this,” Finn replied knowingly. “I get it. I don’t want to think that either, but someone pulled the trigger this morning. I don’t think it was a warning shot.”
Too many questions, and few answers.
It didn’t matter what had been intended, to be honest. Tyler was in the hospital fighting for his life. Was he the victim? Or had he just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong sweatshirt?
If that was the case, then Josh might still be in danger.
Chapter
Six
“Do you want a ride to the hospital?”
Tate’s question took Cat by surprise. After last night, she’d been sure they were going to give each other a wide berth.
He didn’t seem angry or cold this morning. If anything, he’d asked the question gently, his expressive eyes soft and warm. This was the Tate she’d known before.
She hadn’t answered, but somehow she found herself in the passenger seat of his vehicle, heading towards the hospital.
Numb. That’s how she was feeling at the moment. Since she’d seen Tyler’s bloody body at the end of the driveway, she’d disassociated from the event to deal with her emotions and horror. In a way, this was all happening to someone else, and she was simply an observer, like she was watching a television show play out in front of her eyes.
So far, it had been working, but little by little, she was beginning to lose that objectivity. It was going to hit home at any moment, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to deal with it all.
“I’m planning to buy myself a car,” she heard herself saying, wanting to talk about something normal and boring. “I just haven’t had the chance yet. I didn’t need one in the city.”
“I’m sure it was easier not to have one,” Tate replied. “I’m sure being home is an adjustment after living in a big city for so long.”
“It is in some ways, but not in others. Some things are shockingly still the same. The town librarian is the same person. There’s construction on Valley Avenue. The pizza place still has that lunch special with two slices and a drink, although it’s fifty cents more than when I left.”
The town familiarity had been a balm to her soul now that she was back home. It was exactly what she’d needed when her world had changed so abruptly.
“Elaine Bender has been the town librarian since we were kids. She often gets asked when she will retire, and she says never. I believe her. As for Valley Avenue, they did finish their repaving project, but now they want to put a traffic light at the corner of Benson. There have been a few accidents when people turn left.”
Road construction seemed to take forever in Winslow Heights. Cat was unsure why, but projects were often measured in years, not weeks or months, if her mother was to be believed.
“And the pizza?”
“The owner, Hank, doesn’t like change,” Tate laughed. “His daughter had to twist his arm to get him to raise the price. But he would only do it fifty cents. She wanted a dollar.”
“A whole dollar? That’s highway robbery,” she joked.
“That’s pretty much what Hank said. He and the missus will spend a few months during the winter in Florida. I think his daughter plans to raise the price again while he’s gone.”
“He’s going to be mad.”
“Livid,” Tate agreed. “Listen, I wanted to apologize about last night. I acted like a jerk. I’m sorry about that.”
Cat hadn’t expected him to apologize. To be truthful, she hadn’t been blameless.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “In a way that it pains me to admit, I did want you to say that it was all okay. I have felt guilty, and I guess that I thought you could make that go away. I should have reached out, and I didn’t. That was wrong. I wish that I had. I’m not proud of the way that I’ve behaved. You weren’t out of line in pointing it out.”
“I’d had kind of a bad day, and I took it out on you. I didn’t plan to get into it with you.”
What had he planned? To avoid or ignore her? She wouldn’t blame him.
“But I brought it up.”
Because of the guilt.
“Well…yeah. I thought I’d put it behind me, but I guess - deep down - it still bothered me. But it was a long time ago.”
The way he said it… It didn’t sound like it had been a long time ago. At least, not to him.
“As someone who recently faced possibly losing my mother, I doubt it gets any easier as time goes on.”
Lily Winslow had been the heart and soul of the Winslow family. Her children had adored her, and she’d been close to all of them—a loving mother who truly wanted the best for all of her kids. Her disappearance must have left a Grand Canyon-sized hole in their hearts.
“It doesn’t,” Tate replied, his voice tight. “It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest part.”
“No information all of these years? Nothing at all?”
Tate pulled into the hospital parking lot, turning off the car before answering.
“In the beginning, we’d get leads from people. We had an information hotline open, but honestly, it was mostly pranks and cranks. A couple of psychics said they could help us, but nothing panned out. It was pretty quiet until last year, when they found a body in the woods. It wasn’t her, but it made us decide to hire a private investigator.”
“You didn’t do that before?”
The Winslow family had the resources to have an entire team of investigators at their disposal.
“Dad said that he had private investigators work on the case and that they found nothing. We…let’s just say that we’re at a point that we can’t trust what my dad says.”
“Oh.”
Tate’s relationship with his father had never been a close or easy one. Joel Winslow was a difficult man at the best of times. He hadn’t much liked Cat when she was dating his son. He’d never said it out loud, but she’d received the message regardless.
You aren’t good enough for my son.
The day Tate had left for his fancy, out-of-state college, Joel Winslow had smiled like the cat that had eaten the canary. While she’d been crying at the airport, he’d been practically spitting feathers. He’d won. She’d lost.
Joel Winslow liked to win. He hated to lose even more.
If she and Tate had somehow managed to stay together, they would have faced an uphill battle against the family patriarch.
“You’re not going to ask any questions about that?”
“I don’t see any benefit to opening up that subject,” she replied. “Unless you want to talk about it.”
“Let’s just say that some things haven’t changed and leave it at that.”
“I heard he got married last year.”
She watched Tate’s expression closely, but he didn’t reveal much.
“Yes, he married Aunt Kimberly. She’s Mom’s sister, if you didn’t know. It’s messy, to be frank, and none of us wants anything to do with it. But you know my dad, he follows his own rules, and he doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks.”
“It’s probably nice when you have fuck-you money,” she observed. “I’ve seen that in my career, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil.”
“That’s an excellent way to put it,” Tate laughed, a genuine grin on his face. “Fuck-you money. That’s a perfect way to describe it. Can I steal that? I’m going to have to, whether you let me or not.”
“It’s all yours,” she offered. “I didn’t make it up, I just remembered the phrase.”
“You don’t have fuck-you money?”
“Hardly,” Cat replied. “I made good money, but nowhere did I make that kind of cash. Plus, living in the city isn’t cheap.”
“I’m guessing you paid for your mother’s cancer treatments, too.”
She had, but no one had ever guessed that. Everyone had assumed that insurance paid for it. But that was just like Tate. He saw more deeply than most people.
Thanks to Cat’s modeling money, Grace Townsend had the best of everything—doctors, hospitals, chemo, even private hospital rooms that looked more like plush apartments. It had cost an arm and a leg, but it had been worth it. She would do it again in a heartbeat.
“She’s my mother,” Cat said awkwardly. “You’d do the same for your mom.”
“I would love the chance,” Tate replied so softly she barely heard him.
He pushed open the driver’s door of the vehicle.
“Are you sure you’re okay to go in there? I know you’ve spent some time in hospitals recently, and it couldn’t have been fun. No one will think less of you if you can’t go in there.”
“I’m fine.”
She congratulated herself on sounding confident, but inside, she wasn’t as positive. She could still see all the blood on Tyler and the ground. So much blood.
They walked into the hospital and headed for the emergency department. Rachel and Josh were already there, pacing the floors, waiting for some word about Tyler’s condition.
“They’re still working on him,” Josh said when he saw them arrive. “One nurse did say that they’re trying to stabilize him for surgery.”
Larry and Diane stepped off of the elevator, rushing toward them, wearing matching worried frowns.
“What’s going on? Have you heard anything?” Larry asked, slightly breathless.
“We got here as fast as we could,” Diane explained. “Finn is still taking statements. He doesn’t seem to understand the seriousness of the situation.”
“Someone tried to shoot Tyler,” Tate interjected. “That’s attempted murder, and that’s serious. He has to do this by the book. We don’t want a killer getting off on any technicalities, right?”
“Of course, we don’t,” Diane replied defensively. “It’s just that we needed to be here. He could get our statements later.”
“After we all have a chance to compare notes?” Tate asked. “C’mon. He can’t do that. He’s doing his job.”
“You know the one thing I’ve never liked about you, Tate, is that you have a need to be right,” Diane said, her teeth visibly gritted together. “In fact, there are many things I don’t like about you.”
“Your disdain doesn’t make me any less correct,” Tate said with a smile and a shrug, completely unbothered by Diane’s aggression. “The law doesn’t care about our delicate feelings. And unless you’re a trauma surgeon, Tyler doesn’t technically need us here.”
Diane was not a surgeon, and if anyone needed to be right all the time, it was her.
“Let’s just stop all of this,” Larry said with a loud sigh. “Honey, Tate’s right. Finn is just trying to do his job. I don’t like it either, but he has to do it. We’re here now.”
“We could have been here earlier,” Diane sniped back, her lip curled in derision. “And if you had any sort of backbone—”
“This is not helpful,” Rachel shouted over the other woman talking. “We shouldn’t be having petty arguments when Tyler is fighting for his life.”
