Gingerbread Man by Maggie Shayne Read Free Book Online Page A

time I've seen one."
    "Because you're a cop?"
    "Yeah. Partly that."
    They looked at each other for a moment. Then he took a cell phone from his pocket and dialed the chief's mobile number as Holly recited it to him.
    While he spoke to Chief Mallory, Holly looked around the cabin. There were a half dozen foam coffee cups around, most of them with coffee still in them. There were newspapers spread on the table, a T-shirt flung over the back of a chair, and she could see the unmade bed through the open bedroom door.
    The man was messy.
    She was uneasy. She disliked questioning her own senses. She disliked it more than just about anything she could think of. But for the life of her she couldn't be sure of what she had actually seen, and what her mind had embellished.
    "No," he was saying on the phone. "It looks like Holly scared him off before he had time to take anything. Okay, sure. Thanks, Chief." He hung up and turned to face her. "Chief says to wait here. He'll be out in a few minutes to take a look around. Then he'll take you home himself."
    She nodded. "I should have known better," she muttered, half to herself. "Bad things always happen when I take the long way home."
    * * *
    THE CHIEF ARRIVED with one of his officers right behind him. Bill Ramsey, the lanky blond one, and that was a good thing because it provided someone to sit with the still-shaken redhead while Vince and the chief took a look around. Though Vince really didn't expect to find anything.
    And he was right. There wasn't much to find. One decent footprint in the soft ground underneath the rear window that probably belonged to Holly. It was too damned small to be a man's. And there wasn't anything else.
    The chief glanced back at the cabin. "You working on anything that might make someone nervous, Detective?"
    Vince shook his head slowly. "I told you, I'm here on vacation."
    "Right. And this library book connection ... ?"
    "It's probably nothing."
    "Right," the chief said. "And you say Holly didn't actually see anything?"
    Vince shook his head. "Does she ... um ... have a history of this sort of thing?"
    "What sort of thing is that?"
    Now the man sounded slightly defensive.
    "Well, seeing things that aren't there."
    "No. She's honest as the day is long. But... delicate."
    "Delicate in what way?"
    The chief sent him a look that told him that was none of his business. "What I want to know is, what was Holly doin' out here in the first place?"
    "Don't know. She never really said."
    The man was too sharp for Vince's comfort, but he supposed he was going to have to tell him the truth sooner or later. He just hoped it would be later. He wasn't altogether sure he even trusted the man yet.
    Finally, the chief realized he wasn't going to get any more information, and took Holly home.
    It was a relief to be alone. For a long moment, Vince just stood on the small porch, arms braced on the railing, staring out at the water and trying to get a grip on his blood pressure. If he'd needed a warning, this had been it. He hadn't talked a woman through a panic attack since the runaway teen he'd tried to help last year. He'd known better than to get too involved, but he had let the kid hole up at his place until he could get her into a good halfway house. Why? Because she was needy. Homeless, unstable, and had the crap beat out of her the night she stumbled onto his path. He did not do well with needy women. He'd put his heart and soul into seeing Shelly through her crises, and he thought he'd helped. He really did.
    Until she turned up on a restroom floor with her wrists slashed.
    And here was another one—maybe not just like Shelly. None of them were just alike. But he'd been around long enough to know damaged goods when he saw them. Red was on shaky ground, and there were deep secrets haunting her eyes.
    He had a weakness for needy women. A tendency to get involved, to try to fix things for them. He knew it, recognized it as a character flaw, and recently had managed to walk