“Good idea,” Laura said. She paused to look at her own phone, letting Nate go on ahead while he made the call for a second before rushing to catch up. Still nothing from Chris. He hadn’t even messaged her to ask why she had tried to call him.
What was she going to do about all of this? She didn’t want to just let it go. Not like Nate said. It was too important—Chris was too important. If she lost him over this…
“Alright, thanks,” Nate was saying, taking the phone from his ear. “Come on. I have the location.”
“Great,” Laura said. “At lease the construction is real. Now we just have to hope that Aaren Mullins is actually part of it.”
“I think he will be,” Nate said with a grim tone, his mouth a line pulled tight. “I think that woman, whoever she is to him, knows he’s bad news. She wasn’t even surprised to see us on her doorstep.”
“It’s not a good sign,” Laura agreed, as they emerged from the building and out to the car. “Let’s hope he’s not going to fight us on getting taken in.”
***
“That’s him, over there.”
Laura shaded her eyes and followed the line of the rolled up plans the foreman was using to point. “In the yellow vest?”
“No, the orange, to the left,” the foreman said. “Aaren Mullins. He’s only been working for me a couple weeks. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Well, that’s what we need to find out,” Laura told him. She neither smiled reassuringly nor frowned with worry, keeping her face smoothly neutral so that he wouldn’t be able to read anything into it. “We’re going to need to talk with him somewhere a bit more private.”
The foreman nodded. “Understood. You want me to call him over?”
Laura glanced at Nate and then shook her head. The flight risk from here was a concern. He would have enough of a lead to get pretty far away. They needed to walk right up to him before he could get wind of the fact that they were there to arrest him.
If he got away around here, where they were in unfamiliar territory and couldn’t rely on the help of the local Sheriff, there was a possibility that he would be given the chance to kill again before he was caught.
“Thanks,” she told the foreman, and then began to walk across the ground of the construction site toward the man he had pointed out.
She watched him closely as they walked over, even while trying not to make it look like she was watching him. She didn’t want him to get spooked and run before they got there, but equally, she didn’t want to look away and miss the moment when he did run. She kept her head down a little. Thankfully, Mullins was busy laying bricks, with the noise of the cement mixer not too far away from him, and he clearly had no idea that anyone was approaching him.
Not until they were right on him, and he finally looked around, coming face-to-face with Laura—and behind her, the much more imposing figure of Nate.
“Aaren Mullins?” Laura said—or rather shouted over the sound of the cement mixer—before he had a chance to say anything himself.
“What?” he asked, his tone and expression hostile from the very beginning.
“We’d like to have a word,” Laura said, indicating an area off to the side of the site—much closer to where they had just spoken to the foreman, where it was quieter.
“Who are you?” he yelled back, clearly not buying whatever they were selling.
Laura had no choice. She opened her badge and showed it to him. “We need you to answer a few questions.”
His face immediately turned even more hostile, shutting down like a wall of the bricks he was using. “No.”
He turned away, like he was just going to get on with his work and ignore them.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to insist,” Laura said, a headache starting to form as she shouted over the noise yet again.
“I’m working,” he snapped, turning on her again so quickly that for a moment she thought he was going to try and hit her with the trowel in his hand. Nate must have thought the same, judging by the way his arm appeared out of nowhere to flash between the two of them protectively.
“We’ve spoken to your foreman, and he’s cleared you to speak with us,” Laura replied, trying to remain calm. “If we just step to the side, we can get this taken care of.”
“No!” he yelled. Only this time, he was yelling because he was yelling, not just so she could hear him. “You spoke to my boss? You had no right to do that! I can’t get in trouble on this job as well, I only just got it!”
‘As well’ was interesting. Laura was beginning to think that there was no way out of this other than to take him to the Sheriff’s station in cuffs.
“You can talk to us here, or you can talk to us in an interview room in handcuffs,” she said firmly.