The loud noise of a heavy cart reached her ears a moment before a loud crash.
“Damn it!”
Noelle looked up and she could see that Tracy did the same, turning her head to look over the thigh-high table in front of them.
A large, wheeled cart laden with potted starter plants had collided with a standing display of seeds and gardening gloves.
The manager, who’d greeted all of them with bright smiles and a cheerful greeting stormed across the room. “Damn it, Andy. Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”
The man he was hissing at, kept his chin down and his eyes were glued to the ground.
Noelle felt for the man.
No one liked making mistakes.
And no one liked being yelled at in public.
It would be bad enough to have the garden center’s management breathing down your neck, but in public?
That made everything worse.
“You just love to piss me off, don’t you?”
The manager had hissed the words in a whisper like voice, but Noelle had excellent hearing.
A quick look to her side said that Tracy had heard it, too.
“We... We should move over by your mom.”
The suggestion was good.
And Noelle made a move to follow Tracy, but she stopped short when the man whose eyes had been glued to the ground looked up and met her gaze.
Andy.
That was the name that the manager had used, but Noelle knew, deep down in her bones, that the man’s name wasn’t Andy.
At least it hadn’t been about twenty years before.
The man on the other side of the thigh-high table of starter plants was Anthony ‘Tony’ Coolidge.
The bone structure that had been hidden by the grainy photo she’d been shone was clear as day now.
The man had aged in the twenty years since the photo had been taken at the market. His face had thinned. His whole body had lost a good deal of weight, making his bone structure so much more visible than the photo she’d been studying for hours and hours.
There it was.
The man she’d been asked to draw.
The man that McCrae’s team was searching for.
The man who’d killed Aracely Santos.
Noelle tore her gaze away from his, hoping that he wouldn’t see that she’d recognized him.
Hoping that she could get to Tracy and the others so that they could leave the garden center and alert the team.
Hoping, but things didn’t always work the way she wanted it to.
