Scene of the Crime: Return to Bachelor Moon by Carla Cassidy Read Free Book Online Page B

back. He’d worked with them long enough to know they could handle almost any situation that might fly their way.
    Gabriel knocked again and heard a faint cry from inside. “I’m coming. Hold your damned horses.”
    Gabriel drew his gun from his holster, not liking the man’s tone nor his delay in opening the door.
    When the door finally opened, a man in a dirty white T-shirt and a baggy pair of black slacks stared at Gabriel and then the gun he held in his hand.
    “It would be a great blessing in my life if you’d just shoot me, but I would like to know why you’re doing it before you pull the trigger,” he said.
    Gabriel holstered his gun and instead pulled out his identification. “May we come in and have a chat with you, Mr. Walker?”
    “Why not? I haven’t broken any laws. Drinking too much, being slovenly and wishing yourself dead isn’t a crime if it’s done in the sanctity of your own home.” He opened the door wider to allow them inside.
    The blinds were partially pulled as if to ward off any sunshine and cheerfulness. The living room reeked of alcohol, stale cigarette smoke and old food. Gabriel’s initial assessment was that Brian Walker was a man on a mission: to wish himself dead.
    “Mind if my partners take a look around the house?” Gabriel asked as Brian eased into a recliner where he’d created a nest of trash around him.
    “Help yourself.” Brian waved airily and picked up a glass with contents that looked like scotch. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a drink.”
    “Thanks, but no.” Gabriel lowered himself to the sofa.
    “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” Brian said, and then took a deep swallow of his drink.
    “And what’s that?”
    “How hard the mighty fall.” Brian took another drink and then set the glass on the nearby end table. “A little over two years ago I was happily married, mayor of this little town and encouraging my beautiful, divorced daughter to follow whatever dream she had in her busy, ditzy head.”
    “And then Samantha was murdered,” Gabriel added, his gut already telling him that this sad, broken man had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Connelly family.
    Brian nodded. “And within that moment of insanity in Frank Mathis’s violence, he ripped apart my entire world. A month later my wife had left me, I had resigned my position as mayor and had crawled into the bottom of a bottle and a hole that I have no desire to ever crawl out of.”
    “You’ve heard that the Connelly family is missing?” Gabriel asked.
    “I heard, but if you’re here because you think I had something to do with it, then you’re wasting your time. I never held Daniella responsible for what happened to Samantha. Daniella was just another victim of Frank Mathis’s craziness. The only difference between her and Samantha is that Daniella was lucky enough to survive his insanity.”
    By that time Andrew and Jackson had returned to the living room, indicating with shakes of their heads that they’d found nothing to link Brian to the Connelly family disappearance.
    Minutes later the three agents were back in their car and headed out to check on another man, who Sheriff Thompson had mentioned might have reason to harm Sam Connelly.
    “You can’t help but feel bad for Brian Walker,” Andrew said from the backseat. “Poor guy lost everything he loved—his job, his wife and his daughter.”
    That’s why it is easier not to love, Gabriel thought. Better to keep people at bay, better to not expect kindness or love from anyone else, because when it went bad, it went so terribly bad. Certainly Gabriel had learned, at the absence of his mother’s knee and at the end of his father’s fist, that some people weren’t meant to be loved.
    “I think we can pretty much rule Brian out as a suspect,” Jackson said. “I’m not sure his alcohol-addled brain could summon the cunning and savvy that our attacker had to possess in order to control the kidnapping of