The Game Changer, стр. 67
However, it was not lost on me that Chief Henderson never joined in the chase. Had Brooks been bluffing when he picked up his radio? Was he letting us solve the case first after all?
Daisy let out a yelp. “Through the square! Oh, sweet muffins, we’re going through the square.” She rolled down her window and hung the top half of her body out, waving her arms around. “Get out of the way, people! Save yourselves!”
We zipped through the square and past the Hibiscus.
And nearly rammed into Wickham Birkland at Tutor and Oak, missing his fender by mere inches. He instantly got red in the face and stormed out of his car, ranting. I paused and rolled down my window.
“Have you ever thought that maybe it’s you?” I asked, then kept going, leaving him looking perplexed at the four-way stop.
Soon we were on the highway, racing toward River Fork. And still no Chief Henderson. I started to feel a curious warmth toward Brooks that was more than just the electricity I’d been feeling. He was a good guy. And he believed in me. He didn’t think I was a failure in my career, and he liked the same speck I liked. There was a lot about Brooks Hopkins that was just…right.
Wilma Louise took the first exit into River Fork, jerking hard onto the ramp at the last possible second. I followed her. She rolled through a stop light at the top of the exit, cutting off two oncoming cars. Both honked at her, skidding to a stop. Slowly, slowly, they started up again, backing up traffic in their hesitation and putting at least a dozen cars between us. Shoot. She was going to get away.
“What do you think—pumpkin or apples?” Daisy asked.
“Huh?” I was afraid to take my eyes off the truck, which was getting smaller and smaller in the distance.
“Well, lemon is my favorite, but it’s kind of a spring flavor. I was wanting to do something a little more seasonally appropriate. But I can’t decide between pumpkin and apples.” I flew over a pothole, making her voice break on the word apples. She gripped the handle and kept going. “I mean, pumpkin is great. Everybody loves pumpkin. But it’s overdone. Although I do have a pumpkin buttercream that is to die for—what?”
I was giving her an incredulous look as I got stopped behind another traffic clog caused by Wilma’s erratic driving and confused drivers trying to get out of the way for Brooks, who was still running his lights behind me. I could barely see the truck up ahead now. “This is what you’re thinking about right now?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“We’re in the middle of chasing down a murder suspect, and your mind is on buttercream.”
“I’m a professional,” she said. “I have an audience to satisfy.”
“Oh, brother.”
“What? I stress-bake, okay? And I don’t know if you noticed, but this is a highly stressful situation.”
The light turned green and I left rubber on the pavement in haste to get to Wilma Louise. We turned, and then turned again. And then we got to a railroad track. The arms had just come down, and we could hear the whistle of the train. “Yes!” I exclaimed, following Wilma Louise toward the tracks. “We’re caught up, she’s ours n—”
Daisy and I both screamed and covered our eyes as Wilma gunned it and wove through the safety arms only moments before the train sped through.
“Did you see that?” I asked, uncovering only because I hadn’t heard a crash.
“Is she dead?” Daisy asked, eyes still covered.
“No,” I said. “She got away.”
There was a knock on my window, grim-faced Brooks on the other side, reminding me of the first time I met him. I rolled down the window.
“Did you see that? She’s crazy. Only a murderer could be that crazy,” I said. Not exactly true, but it sounded good. “And now she’s gone. And who knows where she went?”
“Eventually she’ll go home,” Brooks said.
I grinned. “ It just so happens we know exactly where that is. Follow me.”
Chapter 25
She wasn’t there, but we didn’t expect her to be. We parked our car around the corner to wait. Brooks parked his cruiser behind us.
“You don’t happen to have a gyro on you, do you?” I asked.
Daisy looked thoroughly confused. “Huh?”
“Never mind. Stakeout inside joke.” So inside, I was the only one who knew it.
“Let’s look around,” she said.
We got out of our car and I mimed to Brooks that we were going to scope out the house. He mimed back that he didn’t fully agree with that decision, but he also looked like he understood now that he couldn’t stop me. We canvased the Farleys’ yard, peeking into the few windows that didn’t have their shades pulled—with me taking the front and east side, and Daisy taking the garage and back. The house looked dusty and unused. Wilma Louise hadn’t been home much, apparently. Maybe she’d been living it up since Farley had been run down. Almost like someone who was celebrating.
I sat on the front porch and thought about how jealous it had made me to think about Trace with his bevy of better-than-Hollis women. And that was after we’d broken up. Would I have been driven to kill if we’d still been together and I’d found out he was seeing another woman?
I would like to think not.
But Wilma Louise Farley sure didn’t seem the type, either.
Maybe we had the wrong person again. It was possible. She could have been running from us because of all the press surrounding the coach’s death. It wouldn’t be the first time someone ran from a reporter just to get away