Maybe that’s why Josiah hadn’t affected her so much.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen something like that.
JJ folded her dress, placed it in the bag and straightened her new clothes. The scrubs fit her nicely.
Price had a good eye.
Well, at least for clothes.
He still had no idea she was the masked person from that morning.
She was going to have to work hard to keep that from happening.
She went back into the lobby to tell him thank you but hesitated before she could say a word. Like in Josiah’s house that morning, JJ could with absolute sincerity say that Price was a good catch. Attractive, attentive and as far as she knew from talk around town and knowing Winnie, a good dad too. There was also a calm about him. He seemed more collected than she would have thought was normal.
He was a good man, most likely.
Probably a good deputy also.
Too bad for him his luck ran out when he met her.
CHAPTER FIVE
The field had been for sale since the late nineties. No one had bought it in the years between then and now. What was more, no one would buy it in the future. It wasn’t Old Man Becker’s land, but it might as well have been.
“No one wants to be next to Old Man Becker’s land, so it’s been sitting empty for years,” Price told JJ. He pointed toward the trees that lined the field in the distance. “There’s an access road there that technically cuts the Becker land off from this but, well, it’s usually only used by the workers and teens off doing something their parents don’t want them knowing about. You said Josiah was coming from that way, toward the county road?”
JJ had put her hair up in a ponytail. It swished from side to side as she turned to the direction Josiah had come.
“I can’t for sure say where he started but he definitely was coming from that direction.”
They had already run down everything that JJ had seen and done since Price had left her house. Then she had said it all again to Rose when she had come upstairs to the surgery suite’s lobby. JJ had been the one nice enough to offer to take them out to the exact place she had found Josiah before Rose had brought it up herself.
Then Price had been the one to offer her the ride.
“Winnie’ll have my head if she knows I’m not being as courteous as ever,” he had defended himself to Rose’s eyebrow raise. “Plus, it’s not like we have a lot of manpower to push off everything on you and Darius. I’ll get the story from her, take some pics, mark with a flag and wait for y’all to come out.”
Rose must have been more stressed than usual. She dropped the subject with a quick thanks. Then she’d gone to talk to Lily, who had gone wide-eyed at the actual appearance of a uniform and badge.
Now, the field in front of Price and JJ was hot, bare and sporting a trail of blood that led him right to the tree line and back to the access road. There the trail stopped altogether. JJ followed but kept her eyes to the ground. She didn’t speak until she was at his side.
“There’s not enough blood here,” she said after a moment. She ran her finger, pointing down at the ground and back toward where she had originally found Josiah. “There’s more back there because he stopped but there’s only some spots leading back to here.” She nodded to the road. “And since it ends at the road, I’m guessing that means he definitely didn’t get his injuries out here. He was either dumped here by car or escaped from one.”
Price felt his eyes widen. A half smile tugged up the corner of his lips. JJ saw the change and immediately shook her hands in defense.
“I watch a lot of crime series,” she said hurriedly. “There was an episode like this on an old show I watched. The woman escaped her kidnappers, and we spent half of the episode trying to figure out where the original attack took place.”
Price nodded.
“Well, however you got there, you’re not wrong.” He put his hands on his hips and looked down at the last drop of blood in the area. “It definitely seems like Josiah exited a vehicle here.”
But had anyone followed him?
“Why didn’t anyone stop him from going through the field?”
Price turned back to JJ again.
Her brow was drawn in.
