Nowhere to Hide by Nancy Bush Page A

liked Kathryn. She’d been nice to him, he’d said, over and over, like a litany. Treated him like an equal. It didn’t stop Braden from firing him, though maybe it was a blessing in disguise because Nigel purchased a small vineyard nearby and began cultivating his own Pinot Noir grapes.
    But September hadn’t known any of that when she was a girl. She’d only known that her mother was gone, and then her sister, and that she’d wanted something special her senior year and she’d done her damnedest to make Jake Westerly notice her . . . and had succeeded.
    She forcibly shut her mind down to those events, concentrating instead on the fact that, when they’d hooked up, Jake had mentioned the accident that had taken her mother’s life, saying Kathryn’s death had really hit his father hard. His words made September feel even smaller and meaner that she already had for the rash accusations she’d hurled when she was eleven. She’d been just a kid, sure, but the way she’d transferred her pain to Nigel—going so far as to tell him it was his fault , and she hated him !—was like a splinter under her skin to this day, one that still had the power to hurt at unexpected moments. Nigel’s dismissal from The Willows by Braden was another attack on an innocent man.
    “But she was still married to you,” Gretchen questioned Dempsey, unable to keep from inflecting disbelief into her words.
    “I didn’t see her much,” he muttered. “Stayed with her parents some . . . or at friends, whoever they were. That other policeman asked me all this, y’know.”
    Gretchen finished wringing Greg Dempsey dry of any useful information, and she and September headed back outside to the department issue Jeep. Gretchen swung into the driver’s seat and September climbed into the passenger’s.
    “What a shithead,” Gretchen observed as they drove away. “His wife gets strangled, carved up, and raped and all he can do is talk about what a bitch in heat she was.”
    September nodded.
    “Weasel knew Sheila from The Barn Door. He ever meet this guy?”
    “Called him a narcissist,” September said. “We should talk to him about Dempsey. I know he checked on Dempsey’s whereabouts during the time Emmy Decatur was killed and basically cleared him.”
    Gretchen snorted. “Yeah, what was that again?”
    “Dempsey has the graveyard shift at a convenience store off Vick Road. The one in the strip mall. I think it’s a 7-Eleven. He was there. Cameras on him all night.”
    She made a growling sound and said, “Maybe he switched the tapes.”
    “He’s a bastard,” September said, “but I don’t think he’s good for it. He didn’t react when you introduced me just now. I was standing right there, but he barely noticed me. He didn’t send my artwork to me.”
    “If it’s all connected.”
    “You and Auggie . . . you think I’m reaching?”
    Gretchen made a face. “Nope. I just wish assholes like Dempsey were wiped off the planet. All right, what’s next? This Jake Westerly?”
    September said carefully, “Let’s go see the Schenks, Sheila’s parents.”
    She made a grunt of acceptance. “I’m going to call this deputy—Dalton—and see what he thinks about Dempsey. I don’t blame him for wanting to pin the thing on him, but he sure dropped the ball.”
    “D’Annibal basically squeezed it away from county.”
    “Only after Emmy Decatur’s body was found,” Gretchen reminded her. “Sounds like Dawson was just sitting around on his ass like George does instead of getting anything done.”
    “Is that the tack you’re going to take?”
    Gretchen turned to September, a little surprised. “You want to get warm and fuzzy on a homicide case?”
    “No.”
    “I know you don’t like my style. And you know what? I don’t fucking care.”
    “Why don’t you let me talk to him?” September suggested.
    “Think you can do better?”
    “Probably not,” she hedged. She didn’t want to get on Gretchen’s bad side, but