Footprints of a Dancer (Detective Elliot Mystery) Read Online Free Page B

it—Gerald was in trouble.
    Laura Bradford, at least the one Elliot had known, had never officially enrolled at the university. Elliot had spent the afternoon and part of the night finding that out, though it hadn’t surprised him. He’d never seen Laura in any of the classrooms or hallways or even on campus, unless she was with Gerald. Elliot thought about Terri Benson and he wondered how close Terri had been to Laura back when they all hung out together.
    Elliot had always wondered if Laura’s being in Stillwater involved more than scholastic endeavors, or even being Gerald’s girlfriend. He’d suspected she had her own agenda. When she stopped coming around, he’d fallen back on that, figuring she’d found whatever it was she’d been after and with nothing else to keep her there, she’d gone back to wherever it was she’d come from. But what, exactly, she’d been after, he wasn’t sure. He’d learned at an early age that he was more intuitive than most people, but his uncanny guessing-game talents had their limits.
    Elliot kept going back to Angela Gardner, the anthropology student. It had been shortly after Gerald’s encounter with Angela and her teacher, Professor David Stephens, that Laura had disappeared. After that, Elliot would see Gerald and Terri now and then, but the meetings at Joe’s began to taper off, never going further than casual conversation, until they just quit meeting altogether.
    Elliot retrieved the scrap of paper that had been found in Gerald’s hotel room, focusing this time not on the name of Professor David Stephens, but rather on the previously unintelligible series of numbers and letters on the reverse. Gerald had a habit of scribbling things down in a hurry and he’d often run everything together, his own brand of short hand.
    In light of this, Elliot saw the message as it should be, and W14SCheyenne became West 14 th Street and South Cheyenne Avenue. It was an address, or at least an intersection.
    Elliot glanced at his watch. 11:30 p.m. He laced up his shoes and grabbed a jacket from the closet. In the hallway, he considered the weapon that hung there.
    He put on the shoulder holster and slid his jacket over it as he left the house. Inside the garage, he thought about the pickup, a better choice on such a night, but he’d recently acquired a Harley, one of those spur of the moment things he had to admit feeling a little silly about.
    He straddled the bike and hit the garage door opener. When the garage door closed behind him, he fired up the Harley and motored out of the neighborhood.
    The road unfolded in front of the handlebars, and while Elliot twisted the grip of the Harley, he wondered about the sanity of his actions, driving around this part of town at this time of night, but as soon as he crested the hill that overlooked the address Gerald had scrawled onto the paper, he knew this whole thing was a bad idea.
    Elliot slowed the bike and brought it to a stop, hoping that the darkness and the vibration of the bike had caused a visual distortion, and he had not seen who he thought he’d seen in the mirror.
    But there she was, Laura Bradford, standing not more than three feet behind him, those haunting black eyes that he’d never been able to completely eradicate from his mind staring right at him.
    He tore his concentration from the mirror and twisted around.
    She wasn’t there.
    Elliot wanted to blame his failing visual acuity on lack of sleep and poor eating habits, but he knew better. There was another avenue to explore. His believing that Laura was a vision didn’t necessarily make it true. Each time he’d seen her, it had been dark, and had occurred in areas where deception was possible. She could have simply stepped off the trail and disappeared into the darkness. Even now, she could have darted behind a tree or a building. He thought back to a time when his mother had passed in her sleep and he was with her, in the house, by himself but not alone, and it was a