Lover Beware 03 - After Midnight

under arrest. If he were just being brought in for questioning, the police wouldn't have cuffed him, which must mean they had enough evidence to carry out the arrest.
    There was no question in her mind about why he was being taken in. After spending just fifteen minutes in town she'd soon discovered there was no other topic of conversation than the home invasion, but everything in her rejected the thought that Rider could have had anything to do with the Dillon murder. In all the time she'd known him, they had barely spoken, let alone touched on subjects like values and ethics, but at an instinctive level she knew Michael Rider to his bones. The sexual attraction aside, she would trust him before she trusted Sergeant Tucker.
    The doors of the police station swung closed, and Jane lifted a bag of groceries out of her trolley and dumped it in the chilly bin in the rear of her station wagon, automatically placing ice packs in with the groceries so nothing would spoil in the heat. She noticed her hands were shaking, and remembered she hadn't stopped to eat lunch, she'd simply finished her lemonade, showered and changed, and left for town. But that wasn't the only reason she was shaking. She was furious—quietly, deeply furious. She wanted to march into the police station and demand to know what Tucker thought he was doing—
    "Do you reckon he did it?"
    Jane glanced at the red-haired woman who'd paused beside her, a toddler clasped on one hip. Yolanda Perkins was a plump, happily married mother of four. She and her husband, John, owned a small farm, and John also operated a lucrative earthmoving business. Yolanda had often been heard to say that, given John's indifferent skills with anything that had hooves or ate grass, the D-eight bulldozer was the only thing that kept them solvent.
    Jane lifted her final bag of groceries into the rear of the station wagon and transferred her attention to the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, which included a TV news crew, who had materialized out of a brightly painted van.
    "No," she said flatly. "He didn't do it."
    Macie Hume, the barmaid at the local pub, stepped out of 190
    FIONA BRAND
    the shade of the supermarket overhang, a shocking pink hand-bag, which clashed wildly with her lime green microskirt, in one hand, and a polystyrene cup of coffee from Stevie's take-out bar in the other. She eyed the police station and grinned.
    "I don't care whether he did it or not, I can think of a better use for those cuffs."
    Marg Tayler, who had managed the local drapery since time immemorial, and whose family Tayler's Creek had been named after, emerged from the narrow frontage of her shop, crossed her arms over her thin chest, and eyed Macie. "He's taken," she remarked gruffly.
    Macie set her coffee down on the car parked next to Jane's, rummaged for sunglasses, and slid them onto the bridge of her nose. "Do tell. Who's the lucky girl, then?"
    "That's nobody's business but his own."
    Macie settled her hip against the car bonnet and sipped her.
    coffee. "I might decide to make Rider my business. I'd hate to see all that man go to waste."
    "Like you haven't tried already," someone called from beneath the shady overhang. "What are you gonna do, Macie, write to him in prison?"
    Macie sipped her coffee and flipped her middle finger in the general direction of the comment.
    Marg frowned at the gathering crowd, her eyes glittering with the light of battle. "Why don't you people just go home and leave the boy alone. When he's been here at all, he's never done anything but help." She fixed an older man with a sharp glare. "You can attest to that, Mason. Didn't he help dig that cow of yours out of the river last spring?"
    Mason Wheeler, another local identity whose family had been one of the original settlers of Tayler's Creek, looked uncomfortable. "That he did."
    "And did he try to shoot you while he was about it?"
    A crease formed between Mason's bushy eyebrows. "Don't be ridiculous—"
    "I'm not being ridiculous." She tapped her forehead. "I'm using this. Wish Tucker was capable of doing the same; maybe then we'd get some crimes solved. For my money, Tucker needs to retire. I'd put Rider in the job."
    Mason looked outraged. "He can't take Tucker's job. He has to be trained."

    After Midnight
    191
    "He's trained," Marg retorted flatly. "Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bougainville, Timor... You want me to go on?"
    Mason crossed his arms over his chest. "That doesn't mean he can do a policing