Page 11 of Child In Jeopardy
Peace didn’t seem anywhere on her radar right now, but Lana was positive that catching her sister’s killer would be a start. “I keep going over every moment in the hospital,” she said, hoping that saying it aloud would trigger some fresh memory that would give them thatstart. “I don’t recall seeing Buck before then, but maybe he was around.”
Lana stopped, muttered some profanity and then groaned. “I work for a security company, installing systems and setting up protocols to keep people safe. I couldn’t do that for my own sister.”
“Trust me, I get that,” he said.
Of course he got it. He was a cop, and his father was dead. “I believe it was Buck who called Stephanie this morning.” Heavens, had it really been less than twenty-four hours? In some ways, it seemed an eternity.
“Austin PD will have her phone,” Slater reminded her. “They might be able to figure out if it was Buck.”
She knew the odds of that were slim, but, yes, the cops would try. Still, she figured Buck wouldn’t have been careless enough to use a phone that could be traced back to him.
“The hospital cameras were tampered with,” she explained. “And it’s no easy feat breaking into my house. I keep all the doors and windows double-locked. I have to assume that Buck or his accomplice has the skill set to do those sort of things.”
“Yes, but he didn’t disable your security system,” Slater pointed out in a tone to let her know he was giving that some thought. “Why not? I mean, if he was able to tamper with the hospital cameras, why not do that at your place?”
Lana immediately thought of a possibility. “My system isn’t easy to disable.” But then she had to shake her head. “The same should have been true of the hospital cameras.”
“True, and that could mean Buck didn’t care if you knew he’d broken in. Maybe he thought if you were there, he could just overpower you before anyone could respond to the security alarm.”
The thought of that sent a shiver down her spine. Because Buck could have possibly done just that.
Slater reached over and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “We’ll catch him. Something might turn up in his background check that’ll tell us just what his skill sets are when it comes to tampering with equipment.” He eased his hand back and gave her another quick glance. “Or it could be someone you know. Someone who would have known how to access your house.”
He sounded very much like a cop right now, and she was thankful for it. Focusing on the investigation was the only thing taking the edge off her nerves.
“I don’t have a boyfriend or anyone like that I’d trust with my security codes,” she stated.
Slater glanced at her, maybe a reaction to the no-boyfriend admission, but despite everything going on, she felt the blasted attraction again. Lana blamed it on the emotional cocktails swirling around in her body. Slater was like a safe harbor right now, and that had likely amped up the heat.
Or at least that’s what she was telling herself.
This wasn’t the time or the place to get into the fact that she’d always wanted him. And that he’d always been off-limits because of Stephanie. Now he was off-limits because it wasobvious Slater wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with attraction and such.
“How about your parents?” he asked.
She opened her mouth to say they wouldn’t have broken in, but Lana had no idea if that was true. “They might have hired someone to break in if they thought Stephanie was there. But I can’t see them hiring, or even knowing, someone like Buck.”
“Maybe,” Slater muttered, not sounding at all convinced of that. “Consider this. Your parents find out Stephanie’s dead and they know she visited a surrogacy clinic. They must believe the baby was born from that surrogacy and isn’t their grandchild because they didn’t even ask to see him.”
No, they hadn’t. At the time, Lana had been thankful for that because she hadn’t wanted the risk of them trying to take the baby. But they hadn’t even asked if he was all right.
“I think I know what might be playing into this,” she said. “Might,” Lana emphasized. “My father’s planning on running for the state senate next year. A murdered daughter will generate press, but it’ll be the sympathetic kind. Some people, though, are opposed to surrogacy, and it could be my parents would rather keep that hush-hush.”
“Your dad would be that worried about negative press?” Slater asked, but then quickly waved that off. “Yeah, he would be. So, how exactly would he handle things if he finds out there was no surrogacy and that Stephanie has perhaps been in hiding all this time?”
“He wouldn’t handle it well,” she was quick to admit. “Neither would my mother. Or Marsh, for that matter. The plan is for Stephanie to marry Marsh in that whole traditional wedding deal that’ll flash across society pages all over the state. It would considerably sour the image if Stephanie had just given birth to another man’s baby. Right now, the surrogacy story likely suits the three of them just fine.”
But not Lana. Because she was certain the surrogacy was a lie. A lie that had led to her sister’s murder.
Lana was still considering that when a sound cut through the cruiser. She instantly got a jolt of adrenaline before she realized it was her phone. Austin PD came up on the dash screen, and because she figured Slater would want to hear this conversation, she took the call on speaker.
“I’m Detective Lisa Thayer,” the caller said after Lana had identified herself and informed the caller they were on speaker. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but I’ll need to reschedule your interview. The ME is finished with an autopsy, and I need to get a briefing from him.”
“My sister’s body?” Lana asked.
The detective paused. “Yes,” she finally said. “And I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you there for that,” she was quick to add.
Lana wasn’t sure she could have handled that anyway, but she was hoping the autopsy could confirm how Stephanie had died and who had killed her. She thought the “who” was Buck, but unless he’d left some form of trace evidence or DNA, then it would be hard to pin the murder on him. Just because Lana had seen him near Stephanie’s hospital room, it didn’t prove he’d been the one to kill her.