Christy Barritt - Key Witness

At least she’d now have some proof of who these men were. Maybe it would help the police put them behind bars.

Elle reached into her pocket and opened the phone. She held her breath, afraid of making any noise or drawing attention to what she was doing. Her heart rate slowed a moment when no one seemed to notice her. She felt the buttons until she found 9–1–1. She prayed the man wouldn’t notice his phone was gone, that he wouldn’t realize Elle had taken it.

“Any of you want to be next?” Ringleader’s voice didn’t rise in pitch. He sounded so detached at the moment that Elle felt a chill race through her.

“She’s dead. Is she dead? Did you kill her?” Shortie’s voice, on the other hand, rose in panic. “What are you doing?”

“They’re going to pay!”

As the minutes stretched on, Elle watched the two men pace and listened to them mutter. Every second Julie was without medical care put the woman more at risk. Elle wished more than anything she could go check on the teller, that she could give the robbers the money so they’d be gone.

The phone burned in her pocket.

Had the dispatcher heard what was going on? Had they sent help?

Elle prayed that the answer was yes.

Shortie looked at the front door. “Do you hear that? Sirens. We’ve got to run before they get here, man! The police are right around the corner.”

Ringleader grabbed his bag of cash and darted to the door.

Elle breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t noticed his cell phone. No one else had been hurt.

Just as the robbers stepped out the front door¸ the Ringleader reached for his waistline. Felt the empty space where his phone was. Then he looked up. Looked at Elle. He knew she had his phone. She’d been closest to him. Certainly, her gaze held telltale guilt. The robber’s eyes narrowed before he pulled his finger across his throat.

Elle sucked in a breath. He was going to find her. And when he did, he would kill her.

* * *

Mark Denton saw the robber make the throat-slitting motion as he ran from the bank.

He looked over at the raven-haired beauty and saw that her face had gone ghost-white.

What Elle had done had been incredibly risky, but she may have just saved all of their lives—at least the life of the bank teller.

With the men gone, Denton jumped from the floor and propelled himself over the counter. The bank teller had been shot in the stomach. Blood stained her shirt. Denton took off his jacket and placed it over the wound to stop the bleeding.

“Someone wave the ambulance inside. She needs help. Now!”

Elle rushed to the door. She paused momentarily at it, as if she were afraid the robbers might be waiting on the other side for her. But she stepped outside anyway.

Denton already admired her spunk and guts. Not everyone would have handled themselves so well in a situation like this. Denton, a former SEAL, now worked special operations for a Department of Defense contractor, and even he’d been thrown off-kilter some. He knew moves that could have taken down the robbers, but there were two of them and they had guns. Plus, there were too many people who could have been casualties if something went wrong. He’d taken the restrained approach. He hoped it had been the right one.

“It’s going to be okay,” he told the teller. Her eyes drifted shut, as if she were losing consciousness. He had to keep her lucid until the paramedics got in here.

“They’re on their way!” Elle shouted from the door. “Over here!”

A moment later, two EMTs came into view, pulling a stretcher behind them. Elle closed her eyes, as if praying. This teller was going to need some prayers, not just to recover from the physical wounds but to overcome the emotional impact of what had just happened to her, too. He lifted up a prayer, as well.

As soon as the EMTs took over, Denton stood, his hands and undershirt now covered with blood. But he was alive. As of right now, they were all alive. The police began swarming the place and soon Denton would have to give his account of the incident. For now he was satisfied to know that everyone else was okay.

Elle approached him, taking in the sight of his blood-stained hands. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. That was a gutsy move on your part, though.”

“I saw an opportunity and had to take it.” She shoved her hands into her coat and pulled out the phone.

He reached for it. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

Denton opened the phone, anxious to see if the robbers had any personal identification on the device. He scrolled through the menu, but saw no names or phone numbers saved.

“Probably untraceable.”

Elle nodded and pulled a hair behind her ear. “I figured as much.”

Suddenly, the phone buzzed in his hand. Elle’s eyes met his. “Is someone calling?”

Denton noted the Unknown Caller on the screen before flipping the phone open. “Looks like a text message.”

Elle leaned over his shoulder. “What does it say?”

Denton’s throat felt dry as he read the words. He glanced up at Elle, trying to soften the message. It was no use. “It says, ‘I’ll find you and kill you.’”

TWO

Elle held a cold compress to her cheek and leaned back into the padded leather chair at the police station. All of the witnesses from the bank had been questioned separately, and Elle had poured out everything she could remember. Right now, her cheek and head throbbed, and she desperately wanted to go home, take a long bath and fall asleep.

Sleep. She wanted a restful sleep, but knew she’d have nightmares for a long time about what had happened. The violence she’d seen today was so out of the realm of her upright—perhaps uptight—little world.

One of the officers went to get her some water, so she stood and stretched for a moment. Were the other witnesses still here? Suddenly, the room she was in felt too small and suffocating.

She stepped into the hallway and heard Denton’s voice in the distance. She followed the sound, for some reason finding comfort in the man’s presence. She crept down the hallway until she reached another office, this one with the door open. Denton sat across from a detective, leaning back in his chair as if exhausted. His voice still sounded steady and strong, though, as it drifted into the hallway.

“One of the men was definitely more dominant. If I had to guess based on his speech pattern, he’s from the Northwest and most likely a blue-collar worker. He had a slight limp and, from the way he carried himself, I’d say he was in his mid- to late-twenties.” Denton spotted Elle and straightened. “Hey there.”

She stepped into the office, lowering the compress to get a better look at Denton. “You picked up on all of that?”

He shrugged, a hint of cockiness in the action. “I’m good at being observant.”

“I thought I was, too, but I didn’t notice half of that.”

The phone rang and the detective across the desk held up a finger as if to say “wait.” Elle leaned in the doorway, watching the detective’s expression change from serious to disgusted. She braced herself as he hung up and turned to them. “That was the officer I sent to the hospital. He told me that the teller just passed away. This investigation has just moved from armed robbery to homicide.”

Elle’s heart sank. She’d hoped the EMTs had arrived in time and that everything would be okay. She sank into the chair beside Denton, suddenly light-headed.

“She was saving to go to college, you know.” Julie’s bright, smiling face stained her memory. “She wanted to be a teacher.”

Denton raised an eyebrow. “She told you that? Were you friends?”

Elle shrugged. “I’ve been going into that bank every week for the past three years. You start to feel like you know each other. Her life was worth so much more than the money those men got away with.”