Page 43 of Unexpected Danger (Mountain Justice #2)

Brodie returned from serving papers and sat down to check his messages when there was a knock at the door.

“Sheriff?” Juanita Andrade, the new dispatcher, stood in the doorway.

He motioned her in. “Hello, Juanita, what can I do for you?”

Her shoulders drooped as if she carried the weight of the world on them. In a voice barely above a whisper, she asked, “Can I speak to you?”

“Sure.”

Juanita thumbed in the direction of the door. “Can I close that?”

Brodie nodded, and Juanita shut the door before taking a seat in the chair across from him. Deputy Dwyer peered through the window, his brow furrowed. Brodie gave him the thumbs up and returned his attention to Juanita. “Is there something wrong?” Clearly, she was not her usual bubbly self.

Her chin quivered. “Oh, yes, Sheriff, very wrong.”

Brodie’s mind could go to a million places, and he hoped he would be able to help his new employee with whatever ailed her.

Brodie pushed the box of tissues in her direction.

Her cheeks were dotted in red splotches, and her black hair hung limp to her shoulders, so uncharacteristic of the usually put-together dispatcher.

He didn’t have the schedule memorized, but he hoped Juanita had some time before she had to report to duty.

Brodie waited for a few seconds for her to gather herself.

“Everything is so wrong. Have you ever been disappointed in someone and in yourself?” Her voice cracked, and she averted her gaze to something on the wall behind Brodie.

“I have.” Brodie could be hard on himself when he made a mistake.

He’d never liked failure. He thought of Londyn.

She’d disappointed him, but he’d also disappointed himself when he hadn’t done everything he could to stay in touch with her.

To maybe have convinced her to return to Pronghorn Falls before Dustin Haack decided to put her life in jeopardy.

With effort, Brodie returned his attention to Juanita.

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong? Maybe I can help.

” He was next to clueless when it came to women’s emotions.

Having grown up with three brothers, tears were not an everyday occurrence.

On the rare occasion Mom had been upset, everyone took notice.

“I had no idea about…no idea he was how he is. And then I just—I really—I thought he was the one.” Juanita wrapped her arms around herself. “All of my sisters are married, and here I am.” She plucked another tissue and slumped in her chair.

Brodie wasn’t sure he was the best person with whom she should discuss her relationship woes. “Maybe you could talk to Deputy Overton about this.” He wasn’t trying to pass her off, but this was awkward.

Juanita shook her head. “No, I have to talk to you about it.”

“All right.” Brodie assumed that the guy she had spoken about nonstop and was so enamored with had broken up with her.

He searched for the words to say and asked God for wisdom.

He lowered his head and attempted to catch Juanita’s eye, but she kept her focus on her hands.

Hands now folded so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Juanita…”

She finally looked up at him as a tear slid down her cheek.

“You’ll find the man God has planned for you, but don’t waste your time on ones who don’t appreciate you.”

“I know. I do know that. And thank you, but there’s more.” Brodie’s phone rang, and he flicked a glance at the receiver before choosing to allow it to go to voicemail.

Juanita hiccupped. “Do you need to answer that? Because I don’t want to take you away from important things.”

“It’s fine. It can go to voicemail.”

Brodie felt ill-equipped to deal with this issue. “Juanita, you know that I care about my employees and that I have an open-door policy. I am here to help if I can.”

“Thank you.” Juanita craned her neck toward the door. Her gaze then darted from Brodie to the desk, then back to Brodie again. “As you know, I met him at the bar, and we went out five times in two weeks. We seemed to hit it off. Now, looking back, he probably just said all the right things.”

“What is his name?” Call it the investigator in him, but Brodie felt he’d be better able to assist Juanita if he knew the heartbreaker’s name. Had he ever met the guy? Did he have a prior record?

“Linder. But I don’t think that’s his real name.”

The latter part of Juanita’s statement took Brodie aback. He knew guys lied in the dating world sometimes, but if Juanita suspected he was lying, why had she…

“Anyway, we were hanging out a lot, and he told me he was thinking about a future together. So here I am, thinking all about marriage and family and children.” Juanita blew her nose, and her next words choked out between mournful whimpering.

“I’d already told my family I’d met the one, but then I saw him with someone else. ”

Brodie shifted in his chair. “I am sorry to hear that. Are you sure you don’t want to discuss this with another woman?”

“No, Sheriff, I have to speak with you.” Juanita wrung her hands.

“I confronted him when I saw him with the other woman, who is a nurse at the hospital. I had the unfortunate instance of meeting her when I had to go there to visit a friend of mine who’d recently had an operation.

Linder apologized and told me she meant nothing to him.

He went out of his way to reconcile with me and bought me this beautiful backpack purse I had my eye on at a store downtown. ”

“Well, maybe nothing is going on with the nurse.”

“That could be the case, but Dorena later told me they were exclusive and had been dating for some time.”

“Did you say Dorena?” Brodie’s spidey antennae went into overdrive.

“Yes, she’s the nurse.”

Brodie was about to inquire further when Juanita continued, her words tumbling from her mouth in a rush. “It’s not so much that he apologized. I could probably forgive him and move on if that were the case. But it’s what I discovered and what I’ve done that are the issue.”

“What did you discover?”

“I discovered that I—"Juanita bit her lip. “I discovered that I was dating a man who also had another name and is the one you have been searching for.”

Pronghorn Falls law enforcement was currently only searching for one individual. “Do you mean Dustin Haack?”

“Yes. But at first, I talked myself out of it because he told me his name was Linder. But when I saw that flyer we distributed...”

Brodie spun in his chair and reached for a paper from the other side of his desk. “This flyer?”

Juanita nodded. “Yes. Things started fitting together. His name might be Linder, but it’s also Dustin Haack. It began to make sense why he kept asking me to do things for him. Things I did at first. Information I shared,” She palmed her face with both hands, and her breathing shuddered.

Brodie attempted to wait patiently, but the questions filled his mind in rapid-fire fashion.

Juanita removed her hands from her face. “He told me the reason he was asking all these questions was because his dad was a cop, and he’d always been interested in law enforcement. I’m such an idiot for falling for this.” She started to sob again.

Pieces of the Haack puzzle were slowly beginning to fit together.

“Dustin Haack, who told you his name is Linder, asked you for information that you, as a dispatcher, were privy to and not allowed to share?” Brodie’s toes curled in his cowboy boots.

It was obvious Juanita had been duped, and he was grateful she’d come forward, but if Brodie had known earlier, he might have caught Haack by now.

Juanita sniffled. “Yes. All kinds of information, especially about when law enforcement answered certain calls, and other things, too. And I didn’t realize he and Dustin Haack were one and the same, and then when I did realize, I didn’t want to believe it.

Not when he told me he cared about me, and I’d fallen in love with him.

” She picked at her purple-painted nail. “I’m in a lot of trouble, aren’t I?”

A mixture of anger, irritation, and pity for Juanita rose within Brodie.

Juanita had been feeding Haack an impressive amount of information, making it more of a challenge to apprehend him.

Putting Londyn in further danger. Brodie ran a hand through his hair.

“I’m going to record this, and I will also need a signed statement from you. ”

“Okay,” Juanita muttered. “Whatever you need, I will cooperate.”

Brodie Mirandized Juanita before pressing record and videotaping her as she repeated everything they’d discussed so far. After she had done so, he continued with further questioning.

“He was buying me all kinds of presents and treating me like a princess, and I thought he was so charming and handsome, and I told him about when the police were going to be arriving in certain situations.”

“Did it not occur to you that he was committing crimes?”

“Not at first. Then I went through this thought process that you guys had the wrong guy. No way could it be Linder. He could never hurt anyone, and you have no idea how convincing he is. Then I asked him about it.”

Brodie scribbled down the notes. “When you asked him about it, what did he say?”

“He told me about an ex-girlfriend named Londyn, who was out to get him and would do anything to destroy his name. He said she’d done it before in another town and that she had followed him to Pronghorn Falls.

He was so persuasive. He even got tears in his eyes.

I’ve never seen a guy with tears in his eyes unless someone died. ”

“Go on.”

“He told me some things that Londyn had done to him, and it didn’t sound far-fetched to me at all. But now I can’t believe I fell for it.” Juanita began to sob uncontrollably then.

It made sense that this was the way Dustin was continuing to elude police—since Juanita fed him information and warned him of law enforcement’s location and ETA after he’d committed a crime.

Brodie had to hand it to Haack. It was well planned, and Brodie hazarded a guess that his crimes were committed only when Juanita was working her shift.

While Brodie couldn’t believe someone could be as na?ve as Juanita had been, he also knew Haack had fooled Londyn as well, and she was anything but foolish and na?ve.

“What kind of information did you give him?”

She lifted her head and swiped the tears with her hand. “I told him whenever I received a call about a crime in progress. Any crime. Do you remember that time when you had to follow him up into the mountains and he was in a sports car?”

“Yes.”

“I told him when you pursued the perpetrator and where law enforcement was. And other times too, like the time after there was that issue at the animal hoarder lady’s house.” Perspiration shone on her brow. “And other information.”

“Can you elaborate?” Brodie waited for Juanita to offer clarification.

She wouldn’t meet his eye, and instead stared again at that space on the wall behind him.

“He asked me a lot of questions about your family’s ranch, and I think he already knew some things, like where the ranch was, but he also asked about your brother’s house. I found some information in the database and gave it to him.”

Brodie closed his eyes and prayed that God would help him contain his frustration.

He already knew how Haack found Mom’s house due to the tracker on Londyn’s SUV.

No wonder Haack knew where to go the day he showed up at Roarke and Mila’s.

No wonder he knew where to send Ms. Corker when they kidnapped Londyn.

“He asked me things like your brother’s name and your brother’s wife’s name and if there were any children, and he disguised it in a pleasant conversational tone when we were talking. It wasn’t like he was interrogating me about these questions. He sounded genuinely interested.”

“Why did he say he needed to know this information?”

“He’s the CEO of this huge development corporation that is interested in offering your family a high dollar amount for the ranch because they have been wanting to find some property to develop into a dude ranch.

He said he hoped your family would take his company's offer, seeing as how you had a family member who was dying of cancer, and you needed the money.”

“A family member dying of cancer?”

Juanita bobbed her head. “Yes. That’s what he said. I felt sorry for you, and I knew your dad had been killed a few years back, so I wanted to be helpful.” She tugged at the sleeve of her shirt. “You don’t really have someone in your family dying of cancer, do you?”

“Thank the Lord, we do not.”

“I’ve been so stupid. I know I shouldn’t have given out any information, and I look like a dummy, but honestly, he was so convincing. You have to understand how he is.”

“What made you decide to stop helping him?”

“After I saw him with the nurse, I reevaluated. I stayed up all night thinking he’s not who he said he was if he has someone else on the side, so what else is he lying to me about?

” Juanita wrung her hands. “I saw the flyer with Linder on it before, and I was thinking about it, and I thought maybe I should tell you about him. I know I am so fired.”

Brodie didn’t elaborate that being fired was probably the least of her worries. Misuse of computer information came to mind, as well as other charges. “I do appreciate you coming in and talking to me.”

Juanita nodded slowly. “I couldn’t live with myself if something happened, and I could have prevented it. I know I’m gullible, but I didn’t do this on purpose. Please believe me.”

Brodie withdrew a bottled water from the case to the left of his desk and offered it to her. He did believe Juanita, but needed to do his best to appear unbiased. “Did Linder, aka Haack, ever tell you where he was staying?”

“No. His work is headquartered in Indianapolis. Because that’s so far from here, he was staying in a hotel for a couple of weeks while he was looking at ranches to purchase.”

Haack certainly excelled at lying, manipulating, and fabricating false identities.

“Whenever we would go out, we would always meet at my place or at the restaurant, never at the hotel, so I’m not even sure if that’s true.”

“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

Juanita shook her head. “I don’t think so, other than I really am sorry.”

“You did the right thing coming to me.” After a few more minutes of talking with Juania, Brodie stopped recording and encouraged her to write down and sign her confession.

So much more made sense now.