Leslie Parrish - Fade To Black

Then someone spoke. “Please just put it down. Put the gun down. You know you don’t want to do this.”

Mitch Flanagan. He stood right inside the open door, his own weapon drawn, his bad arm down at his side. He’d come back on duty a day early, and she thanked God for it. Other than herself, she couldn’t imagine anyone better to have arrived first. Especially because right beside him was another deputy, a rookie named Joanie who’d been on the job for less than a year. Joanie’s weapon was also drawn, but she looked a whole lot more nervous.

They both faced someone inside the house. Stacey strongly suspected she knew who that someone was.

Quietly stepping onto the porch, she caught Mitch’s eye. He glanced back and forth between her and the armed perp, murmuring, “The sheriff’s here. Why don’t you let her come in? You can talk to her. See how we can fix this situation.”

He was good. Calm and reasonable, he tried to soothe the shooter, gain his trust. Which immediately tipped her off more to what was going on. Whoever the perpetrator was, his weapon was not aimed at her deputies. Because Mitch wouldn’t be trying to talk to him; he’d already have shot to kill. He was too damn good not to.

Suicide . She knew before she stepped into the door that whoever had fired the shots now had a gun to his own head. And she could imagine why.

Then she stepped inside, saw who it was, and realized she’d been wrong. Totally, horribly wrong.

The body lay on the floor a few feet from her deputies, inside the living room of the small, shuttered house. He was sprawled on his back, arms and legs splayed.

There could be no question he was dead. Half his face was gone. Blood and brain matter thickly coated the worn carpeting, splatters of it on the walls and on the small shepherd and shepherdess figurines on the nearby table. Not to mention the woman sitting beside it.

“Winnie?” she said softly, moving inside.

She fought to control her shock and mentally readjust to the situation. After hearing the address, she’d been sure that Stan had finally gone too far and killed his wife.

Not this.

Winnie Freed sat on her dingy sofa, motionless and silent. In one hand, she held the same framed picture of her daughter that Dean had commented on last weekend. In the other, a semiautomatic. It was aimed at her own head.

“Please put the gun down. Let’s talk about it.”

The woman appeared to be in shock. She didn’t look up, simply staring at the face of her lost child. Her bottom lip was swollen and bloodied. One of her eyes had been recently blackened; Stacey had no doubt by whom. Streaks on her face indicated that she’d been crying, but now she was calm. Quiet. Looking at the little girl she’d lost, oblivious to the husband she’d killed.

“Winnie, please. Don’t do this. Lisa wouldn’t want it.”

“He hurt her,” the woman whispered. “He hurt her over and over and over.”

Damn. “You didn’t know.”

The woman’s hand shook, moving closer to her temple. “I didn’t want to know.”

“You tried to protect her. You told me you took her to the doctor all the time.”

“I did.” She laughed bitterly. “And I congratulated myself on having such good instincts, because she was physically healthy. But that was because he wasn’t beating her with a strap, or was punching her kidneys so the bruises wouldn’t show.”

She said the words matter-of-factly, as if those occurrences were a regular part of life. For Winnie, they probably had been. At least since she’d married the guy whose head she’d just blown off.

“I went to see him this morning. Doc Taylor.”

“After Stan did that to you?” she asked, easing further into the room.

“Yes.” Winnie looked up, saw her moving closer, and stiffened.

Stacey froze, then spread her fingers wide on the grip of the Glock. She slowly lowered it, sliding it back in its holster, trying to calm the woman down, remain entirely unthreatening. No way was she going to be responsible for a suicide-by-cop. Not in her town. Not with this woman.

“Stacey…” Dean growled in warning.

“It’s okay,” she insisted. She did not, however, move into the line of sight between her two deputies, or Dean, and the armed woman on the couch. She was sympathetic, not stupid. If Winnie lowered the weapon and even came close to pointing it at her, either Dean or Mitch would take the other woman out without hesitation.

“What did the doc say?” she asked, staying a few feet away.

“He said my Lisa had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen. She came to see him.”

Not news to Stacey. But obviously it had been to Li sa’s mother.

“Then he told me Stan had been with her and had offered to pay for an abortion.”

Son of a bitch.

“Doc thought Stan was being a concerned stepfather.” The tears began to roll again. “I knew better right away. He wouldn’t have paid for a gallon of water to douse Lisa if she had been on fire.”

“What did you do?” She edged closer. One single step.

“I came home. Waited.” Her lips curled into a sneer. “He’s been off for a couple of days. People at work thought it was odd that he didn’t seem to want to stay home with me after the news about Lisa got out.”

Another step. Stacey nodded in sympathy, as if the two of them were having a normal conversation. As if Winnie weren’t on the verge of taking her own life and Stacey weren’t desperate to stop her. “What did he say when you confronted him?” she asked.

“He denied it at first. Then claimed she’d been coming on to him and he was just a poor, weak man.”

They had reached critical mass here. Suddenly Stacey realized the implications. If Winnie survived this, anything she said now could prove very important.

“Winnie, I have no doubt Stan beat the daylights out of you and has been for a long time. We’ll take pictures of your face. Doc will testify about the years of abuse I suspect you’ve undergone.”

The woman looked at her as though she’d sprouted two heads. “Why should I care?”

Stacey pointed to Lisa’s picture. “Because she would care. She loved you and she wouldn’t want you doing this.” Nor would Lisa want her mother going to prison for the rest of her life for killing the man who’d abused them both for more than a decade. Physically, sexually, emotionally.

Stacey didn’t condone murder. But she could honestly see how someone in Winnie’s position could snap. And she thought a jury would, too.

“She was my beautiful little girl,” the woman whispered, again staring down at the photograph. “I should have been there for her. I didn’t do right by her.”

“Do right by her now. Live to see her killer caught and prosecuted. Stay alive and fight for justice.”

The woman froze.

Sensing she was getting somewhere, Stacey continued. “We’re getting closer to finding him, Winnie. I know you want to know who did it. See him put away to rot in a cell for the rest of his miserable life.”

She doubted the Reaper would rot in jail for long. He’d killed in at least three states with the death penalty. But she wanted Winnie focused on life. Not death.

“Killing yourself means Stan wins and that he destroyed you both. You know that’s the last thing Lisa would want to happen. And it’s the last thing you want to happen. Don’t give him one more piece of yourself; he took enough while he was alive.”

A tear fell off Winnie’s face, having ridden the deep lines of sorrow in her cheeks until it dropped onto Lisa’s picture. The sadness rolling off the woman was a physical, tangible thing that filled the room, the house. For a long moment, Stacey thought she’d lost her. Because, really, how could Winnie go on? How had any of the parents of those poor college kids gone on?