Page 7 of Aaron (Dresden Pride #1)

Mackenzie, Mac for short, watched the elderly man walking around town.

She wasn’t here for him, but one of his grandsons, and she no more wanted to be here than she did have a job that required her to spy on police officers when someone thought that they were dirty.

She had better things to do than that bullshit.

When her pump signaled that it was full of gas, she put the hose back in its slot and went into pay.

There in the flesh was the very person she was here to investigate.

Mr. Alaric Dresden. Police officer for the local police department.

When he nodded at her, she returned the same gesture.

It was polite and didn’t require speaking to him.

But she needed to soon so that she could get back home to her own life.

But the people above her decided that she could cozy up with the young officer and find out what had been happening with the women of their town.

So far, there has been a report that five women have gone missing in the last two years.

She didn’t think it took her all that long to figure out that they were all abused women who finally got a break and left their spouses.

But it did seem suspicious that there was always a police officer around who took the abuser to jail just as the women, in these cases, disappeared.

And it was always Alaric who did the arrest.

There were other things going on, too. After checking with the bus station that ran out of the little town, she found that not one of the women got onto the buses when they left.

There had to be a way for them to just disappear.

Was he driving them to the next town or city?

Did he have a network going on where he had some of his brothers taking them out of town?

It was mind-boggling to her that anyone cared.

The women were safe and sound, she was sure of it, and got out of a terrible situation that left them in good health.

“Stupid men.” She smiled at the cashier when it was her turn to pay.

As she was walking out of the station, she heard a man complaining.

To her, all men complained more than they should, but she stopped to listen when he said that his wife of ten years had been kidnapped and the police weren’t doing a thing about it.

She watched him telling anyone who would pause in their getting gas that they’d had a good marriage and that she was taken from him because he’d been just too good to her.

Mac would bet anything that she’d been abused on the first day they’d been married and had finally gotten a way out after all this time.

And he wasn’t a good husband. She looked at her watch and saw that it was nearly one in the afternoon.

So that meant that the deadbeat man didn’t have a job either.

Sometimes she hated the way her mind worked.

She was buckling herself into her car when someone knocked on her window. Looking at the man who claimed that his wife had been abducted, she rolled her window down just enough that she could hear what he was saying.

“You’re fresh, aren’t you?” She asked him what he’d said.

“Fresh, like nobody had a go at you or nothing. I got a house that we can go to if you want. I don’t have a wife no more, and the police aren’t helping me to find her either.

You follow me into town and I’ll show you a good time. I’m known as quite the catch.”

“Thanks, but no. I have to get to work.” She rolled her window up even as he was still talking.

Christ. Fresh? What the hell had the man been thinking she was?

Driving to the end of the station’s lot, she pulled out her notes and started making notes on the man.

His name was Larry Palmer, and he’d been the last person to have his wife ‘taken’ from him.

No wonder she left him if he was so nice to have around. Gross.

Leaving to go to the place where she was staying, the bed and breakfast in town was all she could get that didn’t take her an hour each way to get back to her rooms. She found the place right on Main Street by its big sign advertising that it still had vacancies.

She’d only packed enough stuff for a few days.

Not wanting to be here in the first place, she thought this entire adventure was a waste of time.

The women weren’t kidnapped or buried in some freaky cemetery.

They had simply gotten smart and left their husbands so that they could sleep at night and not be beaten to shit every day.

She knew all about abusive men, as her father was the worst of them.

Her mother wouldn’t leave her dad, no matter how much she begged her to do it. Dad would say he was sorry about knocking the shit out of her for something so stupid, and Mom would take him back. Every single time.

Even when she had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks, the injuries were so bad, she’d say it was her fault that he’d had to knock her around, and would go right back to him and the house of horrors.

The house that she lived in wouldn’t have been worth the match it would have taken to burn it down with.

Mac left home when she was eighteen, and he started knocking her around.

Her mother told her that it was her fault for her dad beating her and that she should just keep her mouth shut and do what he wanted.

It was easier that way. No way was she going to put up with that and had pressed charges against him.

Fat lot of good it had done her. Mom had bailed him out when she got her next check, and they’d be so ashamed that she’d done that to her loving father.

Once she left town, she never heard from her family at all.

Nor did she try to contact them. That, she discovered the hard way, was the best way to deal with her father.

The room she’d rented was nice. A little overdone in the décor part, but she only had so sleep in the room and do a little bit of work.

As soon as she got her computer hooked up, she made sure that it was locked up so that no one would know why she was here.

She could almost read the headlines on some tabloid that said she was an alien kidnapper of abused women .

For as much as she hated what she was doing here, she loved her job.

This was the first time she’d been told to investigate a fellow officer, and she thought that it had been a joke when she’d been told what to do.

It took her almost being written up before she realized that they were serious and that she was seeing what a single man had done by taking five women away from their husbands and dismembering them or something equally nefarious.

Shaking off her anger at her job, she started walking down the main street of the cutest town that she’d ever been to.

There were two pizza shops and two restaurants that bragged about being the destination on Friday nights after a good game.

A large high school, a middle school, and an elementary school were all within walking distance of each other.

There was a pool with a snack bar, a dairy bar that served good burgers, and a large field to play baseball and soccer in the spring and fall.

She knew from her investigation of the town that the school kids walked to school within the city limits, that basketball and football were the town’s only source of entertainment.

The Boy Scouts had metal drives—that had taken her a while to figure out.

She thought it was music, and it had been actual metal that they’d been collecting for the kids’ uniforms. Two stop lights and a train that ran through the town daily.

They had recently had a school shooting that had turned out well for everyone involved.

Also, she thought that this was funny as hell; they had two cruisers that the people in uniform traded using every day.

She did wonder what they did for riding in when there was an emergency at both ends of town, but didn’t waste time on it.

They made it work, and that was all that mattered.

People were friendly as she took her tour. She saw the beautiful library that had been on her list of places to visit. She got to hear bits of gossip while out and about, too.

There was some speculation on who was going to be mayor in the next election, as well as who was going to be announcing the football games when it was time to start them up. They hoped it was the same man as last year, as he had a clear voice when he said the boys’ names when they had a good play.

The band was having a sale on candy bars, the big kinds, and there was some wondering if the mayor was going to be buying them up to give out at Halloween next month. He usually could be found eating most of his stock, too. Apparently, he was a large man, like the chief of police was.

Once she was at the other end of town, she turned and crossed the street to walk back on the other side.

She would usually run the sidewalk in the morning, but she’d hurt her ankle in the last raid she’d been on, and it hadn’t felt right since.

She knew that she’d broken it, but the doc told her that it was only a good sprain.

There was nothing good about it as far as she was concerned.

Sometimes at night, she’d have to soak it in warm water to get the swelling to go down.

“Hello.” She was startled out of her thinking when a small child stepped in front of her.

“My name is Katherine, but everyone calls me Rinny.” She told her what her name was and how everyone called her Mac.

“Whatcha doing walking so fast? Momma thinks that someone is going to be sorry when you get back to them. Are you mad?”