Janie Crouch - Battle Tested

Steve ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I’m not trying to be an ass. You’ve caught me off guard on multiple levels here. But I need some answers.”

“Okay. I have a room at a hotel a few miles from here. Let’s go there.”

* * *

ROSALYN WAS ALIVE.

Rosalyn was alive and pregnant. Steve could hardly get his head around the first part, much less the second.

She was sitting right in front of him in a pretty scary run-down hotel room they’d driven to in her car, eating a packet of crackers. He was sitting in the desk chair that he’d pulled over and placed right in front of the bed just watching her. Like her eating crackers was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

Did she need more food than that? Was she taking care of herself? Had she been seeing a doctor throughout her pregnancy to make sure everything was okay?

Was the baby honestly his? They had used protection. But he knew accidents still happened.

He wanted to believe her when she’d said yes. She’d taken off her jacket and he could more clearly see the outline of her stomach under the T-shirt she wore. There was very definitely a baby bump. Not one that had her waddling or anything like that, but very definitely pregnant. Someone as petite as Rosalyn couldn’t hide it.

He wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about her pregnancy but had so many other questions to ask that those got pushed to the back burner.

Steve sorted through important information for a living, made decisions on where Omega’s Critical Response team would go and what they would do, based on his reading of a situation. Knowing what questions to ask to get the information he needed was his job. And lives depended on his ability to do it well.

But damned if he knew where to start with Rosalyn.

The dead body seemed the most reasonable place.

“So the woman I identified in the morgue—”

“Like I said, my identical twin, Lindsey Rose Mellinger. My mom—in a fit of soberness—thought it was quite clever.”

Rosalyn and Lindsey Rose. “The reversal of each other. Well, almost.”

She nodded. “Yeah. And it ended up being true in just about everything. We were twins, but we were complete opposites. Very different from each other except for how we looked.”

“When was the last time you saw your sister alive?”

Tears came to Rosalyn’s eyes, but she brushed them away. “At least a year and a half ago. We’ve never been close but grew even further apart as adults. Lindsey was in and out of drug rehab all the time. She still lived in Mobile.”

“And that’s where you’re from?” Steve already knew the answer to that but wondered if she would lie.

“Yes, but I haven’t lived there for nearly a year.”

Steve wondered where she’d been for the past six months, but he’d get to that.

“Do you know anything about your sister’s death?”

She shook her head. “No, but she was murdered, wasn’t she?”

“What makes you say that?”

This time the tears overflowed before Rosalyn could wipe them away. “Lindsey was in Pensacola because I asked her to meet me. We were supposed to meet at a restaurant a few blocks from here two days ago, but she never showed up.”

She gave him the name and address of a local café. Lindsey’s body had been found inside her car very close to that area.

“Lindsey’s pretty flighty,” Rosalyn continued. “I thought she’d just gotten the day or time wrong. Or that she was high again. I didn’t know she was dead until a waiter showed me a tiny section of the local paper that stated the police were looking for information about a deceased Jane Doe who looked exactly like me.”

Rosalyn stood up and grabbed a tissue from the box on the small desk. “I was coming by this afternoon to identify the body when I saw you.”

“You said she did drugs a lot, so what makes you think she was murdered? Don’t you think it’s more likely something happened with her drug abuse?”

“Normally, yes.” She sat back down. “But I suspect foul play because she was meeting me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Rosalyn’s blue eyes bore into him. “You saw her body, right?”

Steve nodded.

“I’ll answer your questions, I promise. But first please tell me, was she murdered?”

Steve couldn’t see any good in lying to her. “Yes, I’m sorry. She was strangled in her car.”

Rosalyn began to cry quietly, holding her face in her hands. Steve moved to sit next to her. No matter what had happened between the two of them, he would never deny comfort to someone who had lost a family member.

“I had hoped you would tell me something different. That it was related to drugs,” she finally said.

“I don’t understand why you don’t think it would’ve been.” In Steve’s experience, when regular people heard a family member had died, they did not assume it was murder. And if Lindsey had been involved in illegal drugs, Steve didn’t know why Rosalyn didn’t assume the murder wasn’t centered around that.

Because Rosalyn knew something. Something she wasn’t telling him.

“Rosalyn.” He tilted a finger under her chin so she was looking directly at him. “Tell me. Whatever is going on, I need you to tell me.”

She tried to look away, but he wouldn’t let her.

“I can’t.” Another tear slid silently down her cheek. “I can’t risk you too.”

Steve stared at the tiny woman—tiny, pregnant woman—determined to protect him. Why would she care about him if he was just someone she had scammed and robbed? Either way, he was getting to the bottom of all this.

“I can take care of myself, Rosalyn. Just tell me what’s going on.”

At first he didn’t think she was going to answer, but finally she did.

“For the past year someone has been stalking me.”

Steve sat up straighter. “Stalking you how?”

“Mostly he leaves notes. Ones he slides under my door while I’m sleeping at night.” She shuddered. “Although on occasion he has emailed, texted or called me.”

He’d been in law enforcement long enough to take stalkers very seriously. Especially ones who were close enough to leave notes under doors. That meant they were close and probably deadly. “What types of messages?”

“Never anything threatening. Not even ‘We’ll be together forever’ stuff. Usually just little comments about something that has happened in my day.”

Odd for a stalker, making it about her rather than about him. Stalkers were usually caught up in their own fantasy world and tried to make their victims a part of that.

“And you reported it?”

“Yes. I told my family first about a year ago. They just accused me of wanting attention. I decided to move across town, just to get rid of the weirdo, hoping that would stop it all.”

“But it didn’t?”

“The first night I moved into my new apartment, someone slid a note under my door.”

Steve frowned. The guy had been following her closely. “Did you go to the local police?”

“Yes, I talked to them in Mobile, but I had thrown a lot of the letters away, so they didn’t believe it was anyone wishing to do me harm.”

It was easy to be frustrated with the Mobile police for doing nothing to help Rosalyn, but the truth was, funds were always limited in local departments. If the notes weren’t threatening Rosalyn in any way, it would be easy to not give them or her much attention.

She stood up and began walking back and forth.

“It got so bad that after about a month I chose to just leave town. I had a pretty big savings account, so I quit my job and decided to go somewhere different. Anywhere different. I didn’t have a moving truck, didn’t grab a bunch of suitcases—I just got in my car one morning and left.”