RING LEADER

  SEARCH AND RESCUE COZY MYSTERIES, BOOK 6

  PATTI BENNING

  SUMMER PRESCOTT BOOKS PUBLISHING

  Copyright 2024 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying, or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Also by Patti Benning

  Author’s Note

  Contact Summer Prescott Books Publishing

  CHAPTER ONE

  “What if she says no?”

  Evelyn Foster peered around the tall form of the man she was with to make sure her friend hadn’t arrived yet. Thankfully, the only other person in the parking lot was a tall, pale woman with dark hair and a bob cut. Definitely not Tiana. This was a clandestine meeting; it wouldn’t do for Tiana to see her with Levi. Levi was Tiana’s boyfriend, after all.

  And he was going to propose to her this evening.

  “She’s not going to say no,” Eve replied, reaching up to straighten his bow tie before stepping back to give him a once-over.

  He was more dressed up than usual, but then this restaurant, Stone Table, was one of the nicest in the area, set right on Lake Superior’s coast with an outdoor balcony that had a dramatic view. It was too cold for outdoor seating right now, but eating here was still a treat, and it was the perfect place for a public proposal. With a little luck, Tiana wouldn’t guess what was going on until Levi got down on one knee.

  “But what if she does?” he fretted. He touched his pocket, and she knew he was checking the engagement ring she had helped him pick out—she and Tiana had exchanged photos of their favorite engagement rings years ago for that very purpose—for the thousandth time.

  “Levi, she loves you. You two have already talked about getting married. You know she wants you to ask her, and you know she wants a surprise, public proposal. There is absolutely no way she says anything but yes tonight. Now, get inside and make sure everything is ready. She’s going to be here any minute.”

  Eve leaned back against her station wagon and crossed her arms as she watched him begin making his way toward the restaurant. She had been waiting for tonight for a long time. Keeping a secret from her best friend was hard, especially since she worked side by side with said friend five days a week and more often than not, saw her on the other two days as well.

  She was glad Levi had asked her to help him plan the perfect proposal for Tiana, but holy smokes had it been a stressful few months. Every time Tiana picked up her phone to change the music while they were driving, or to take a picture of her and her dogs while they were out hiking, she had thought Levi was certain to text at the wrong moment and the whole plan would be out in the open.

  But, somehow, they had managed to keep it a secret. Tiana might have suspected something when Levi asked her on a date to Stone Table when he got back from his most recent trucking haul, but Eve had managed to frame it as her idea, only to back out of going at the last minute.

  Of course, what Tiana didn’t know was that Eve was still going to be there. She and two of their mutual friends, Alice and Aidan, were going to be hiding out in the back of the restaurant until they saw Levi get down on one knee. Eve had borrowed a camcorder from Sophia, who used it to record some of her horses’ training sessions and would be recording the whole thing. As soon as Tiana said yes, they were going to jump out and surprise her, and have an impromptu engagement party right then and there.

  The restaurant was in on the plan thanks to Lucas Baker, Eve’s friend and sort of mentee, who worked there as a waiter. He was on good terms with the owners, who had been very understanding when he needed to take some time off after his brother’s death, and they had been happy to help, provided Tiana tag them in the pictures she posted online after the engagement party.

  So far, everything was going according to plan, but the evening was still young. It wouldn’t be a complete disaster if Tiana guessed what was happening before Levi took out the ring, but Eve thought she would be happier if it was a true surprise.

  That was why her station wagon was currently parked on the far side of the dumpster at the corner of the building, where Tiana would hopefully fail to notice it when she pulled in.

  Speaking of her friend, it was true that she would arrive any minute, which meant Alice and Aidan had better hurry. Eve waited near the dumpster impatiently, watching for her friends, and when Alice’s sedan pulled into the lot, she waved at them so they would know where to go.

  As soon as they parked, they got out of the car and hurried over to her. Aidan and Alice were siblings. Eve tried to ignore the butterflies in her stomach that seemed to swarm whenever Aidan was around and gave them both a quick critical look.

  They were both dressed up for the evening. Like Eve, Alice was wearing a dress, though unlike Eve—who was tall enough that she normally wore flats—she was in a pair of heels that Eve envied the second she saw them. Sometimes being tall sucked, but she liked being able to reach the cupboards over the fridge without a step stool, so there were benefits too.

  Aidan was wearing black slacks and a dark green button up that brought out the green in his grey-green eyes. He was very handsome, and Eve briefly wondered what it would be like if she was here on a date with him, just the two of them, before she snapped out of it and focused on the task at hand.

  “You both look wonderful,” she said with a smile. “We should head inside. Lucas will show us where to wait so we’ll be out of the way. I’m going to start recording as soon as Tiana sits down, but Levi isn’t going to propose until Lucas dims the lights. That will be our sign to get ready to jump out and surprise her.”

  “Is Levi inside already?” Aidan asked. “He must be nervous.”

  “He is, but he’ll do just fine,” Eve said. “Come on.”

  She gestured for them to follow her and led the way to a side door, out of sight of the parking lot. Someone had propped it open with a brick for them. The door led to a hallway that the kitchen opened up into, and the three of them lingered there, out of the way of the nearly constantly swinging doors, until Lucas found them.

  “There you are. Follow me, and hurry. We need to pass through part of the dining area, but she isn’t here yet.”

  Lucas led them to a private room right off the dining area where, with the door cracked open, they had the perfect view of the table Levi was sitting at.

  “Will this work?”

  “It’s perfect,” Eve said. “Thanks for helping.”

  “This is a good distraction from an otherwise bad week.”

  She frowned. “What happened?”

  “You know how I just moved to a new apartment? Well, the last place I was renting from said I would be getting my security deposit back, but they changed their mind. I was counting on that money.”

  “You should complain. They shouldn’t be able to just change their minds like that.”

  “Maybe, don’t know when I’d have time, though. I’ve got to work extra to make up the difference.”

  He briefly double-checked with Eve that the plan was to let them get their drinks before he dimmed the lights, then hurried off to get back to work.

  The restaurant was busy tonight, and the private room was stuffy. Across the dining room, the door to the balcony was propped open to let a breeze in. It was chilly outside, but the restaurant offered a special that came out on a sizzling stone plate, and the heat from the popular entree combined with the number of people there meant the dining room was quite toasty.

  Aidan and Alice helped Eve set the camcorder up on its tripod on a table they dragged over to the door from the other side of the private room. She zoomed the lens in, so it was getting the perfect, steady shot of Levi and the table.

  She was just wondering where Tiana was when the door opened and in she came. Eve had spent the earlier part of the evening getting ready with her, before a faux emergency made her “cancel” her plans to join them for dinner, so she already knew her friend looked gorgeous. She was wearing an elegant dress and a pair of brand-new hoop earrings Levi had gotten her as a gift the last time he was home

  Careful not to jostle the camera, Eve started the recording, and the three of them crowded around the little screen to watch as Lucas approached to take their drink order.

  It was hard to contain her excitement as she watched them talk. Levi said something that Tiana responded to with a laugh, then she leaned across the table to kiss his cheek. In just a few minutes, the two would be engaged, and Eve thought her heart would explode out of her chest with happiness when
that happened.

  “Oh, no. Don’t distract them,” she muttered as a woman from another table got up and went over to Tiana and Levi. She must have been someone Tiana knew, because they chatted for a minute or two before Lucas returned with their drinks. Thankfully, the distraction was enough to make the other woman return to her own table. Her date, a handsome man with slicked-back brown hair, leaned closer to say something to her as she sat down. He reached for his water glass, revealing a tattoo on his wrist, then paused to stare at another woman, this one with pale blonde hair, who had just walked into the restaurant.

  Then the lights in the restaurant dimmed and Eve’s attention snapped back to Levi and Tiana. Levi rose to his feet and Tiana looked up at him, confused at first, then with wide eyes as he reached into his pocket and started to go down on one knee.

  Before he could complete the motion, a deafening sound like a thunderclap made Eve’s ears ring and people started screaming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It took Eve about two seconds to realize the sound had been a gunshot. It took another second after that to realize someone had been hit. For a horrible, heart-stopping second, she thought Tiana was the victim, but then she spotted her friend being held protectively in Levi’s arms as he tried to shield her from whatever was going on.

  Then her eyes found the woman Tiana had been talking to less than thirty seconds before sprawled on the floor, a dark red stain spreading across her chest.

  Yanking the private room’s door the rest of the way open, Eve hurried out into the dining area, too intent on helping to consider how risky it was when there was an active shooter somewhere nearby. She had gone through a first aid certification program as part of her training for the search and rescue group she volunteered with and made sure she got recertified every year. She might not be as effective as a paramedic at saving lives, but she would never be able to let someone bleed out on the floor while she watched and did nothing.

  By the time Eve reached her, the woman’s date was kneeling next to her on the floor, his eyes wide as he stared at the gunshot wound.

  “Call nine-one-one!” Eve shouted at him as she grabbed two of Stone Table’s fancy cloth napkins off the table and wadded them up before pressing them to the wound. It wasn’t actively bleeding anymore, which she knew was a bad sign.

  Bleeding meant the heart was still pumping blood.

  “Eve?” Tiana’s voice reached her ears through the din of the chaos as the people in the restaurant panicked. “What are you doing here?”

  Eve looked up at her friend, who was still shielded in Levi’s arms, but she didn’t have time to reply. Aidan joined her, kneeling on the injured woman’s other side, and she refocused her attention on him.

  “Alice is on the phone with the police,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Put pressure on the wound,” she said, letting his hands replace hers on the wad of napkins. “I need to check for her pulse and see if she’s breathing. If not, I’ll need to start CPR.”

  Even as she went through the motions of checking for signs of life and then CPR, something she had always hoped she would never have to do, in her gut, she knew it was hopeless. The bullet looked like it had hit the woman right in the heart. She had probably died seconds after it struck her.

  Still, she tried, all the way up until the paramedics got there and called the woman’s time of death.

  It wasn’t until Eve was being questioned by a county police officer about what happened that she remembered the camcorder. She had knocked it over when she ran to help the woman who had been shot, but it was still recording, and when the officer pressed the stop button, the file saved itself to the camera’s SD card.

  “This will be a huge help,” he told her. “Good work.”

  Numb, Eve could only stare at the camcorder, vaguely wondering if Sophia would be mad about the police taking it into custody. She didn’t feel like she had done a good job at anything tonight. She certainly hadn’t been intending to catch a murder on camera when she set it up to record Levi’s proposal.

  The chaos the gunshot had set off subsided slowly as the police questioned witnesses and began to send them on their way. The shooter hadn’t been caught. Eve didn’t even know where the gunshot had come from—it had all happened so fast. She didn’t get a chance to ask her friends if they had seen anything until the responding officers cleared them all to leave and they met by the dumpster outside, where the cars were parked.

  When they were finally all together again, they exchanged hugs before words. Tiana’s face was tear-streaked, and Eve’s heart ached for her friend. This should have been one of the happiest nights of her life.

  “Did anyone see what happened?” she asked once they had ascertained that they were all all right—physically, at least.

  Aidan shook his head, and Alice said, “I was behind both of you, I couldn’t see anything.”

  “I was looking at Levi,” Tiana said. “When he got down on one knee, I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. Though for a second, I thought I saw…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Never mind.”

  Levi indicated that he hadn’t seen anything either—he had been focused purely on Tiana. Eve’s own gaze had been affixed to the camcorder’s screen, which had been focused on the couple as well.

  “I saw the police officer take the camcorder away,” Alice said, as if reading her thoughts. “Maybe you caught whoever did it on video.”

  “I don’t think it did. I had it zoomed in on Levi and Tiana. I guess it might have caught a reflection.”

  It was a scant hope, but all she had to cling to right now.

  “How well did you know her?” Levi asked Tiana. It took Eve a second to realize he meant the woman who had been shot. She had almost forgotten Tiana had been talking to her less than a minute before she was killed.

  “I know her through work,” Tiana said. “Her name’s Jodie. She came into the dental clinic a lot last year to get some work done on her teeth that she hadn’t been able to afford before. We hit it off, and always say hi to each other when we see each other out and about. Or, we did. I can’t believe she’s gone, just like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eve said. “This was supposed to be a special night. I can’t believe this happened — and that her killer got away with it. How could no one have seen anything?”

  “Everyone’s eyes were on Levi and Tiana,” Aidan said. “Which was exactly what we wanted.”

  Tiana sniffed and looked up at her boyfriend. “Were you really going to propose?”

  “I was,” Levi said. “I’ve been planning tonight for a while, with Eve’s help. I was trying to make it special for you.”

  She threw her arms around his neck. “It was perfect! Well, it would have been, anyway. Poor Jodie. Who would do that to her?”

  Eve had only moved to the small town of Granite, Michigan that summer, so she hadn’t had a chance to get to know Jodie when Tiana did. From the brief glimpses she had gotten of her at the restaurant, she had seemed normal. Not like someone a gun-wielding maniac would have in their sights.

  She thought back to the few seconds she had been focused on Jodie after the other woman finished greeting Tiana. She had been with a man, someone who seemed to be her date. He had been focused on her, up until that woman with the pale blonde hair entered the restaurant.

  With a jolt, she realized she hadn’t seen that woman again. After the lights dimmed and the gun went off, she had vanished.

  “Guys, I think I might have seen something after all,” she said. “I need to go back inside and talk to the police.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  After she told the police about the blonde woman she had seen right before the lights dimmed, they started questioning everyone who was still there a second time. Eve felt a little bad for delaying their departure, but it was worth it when one other witness, an elderly man who had been on a dinner date with his wife, revealed he had seen her too.

  Like Eve, he had lost track of her after the lights dimmed and the gun went off, but at least she knew she wasn’t going crazy. She tried to remember how wide of an angle, exactly, the camera had caught, but with the camcorder already in police custody and no backup files to check, she had no way to be sure whether or not the woman was in the image.