The chart she’d tucked into his hand was startlingly detailed. Each person in her life was listed: Thad, Meg, Joe, her parents, and details about each one. He looked at Thad’s name.
Thirty-six, DOB September 12. Medications, Xanax as needed. Dark hair, brown eyes. Six feet. Ring size, ten. Shoe size, eleven. Decent in bed. Funny, superficial, sarcastic, down-to-earth. Ambitious to a fault.
For Meg, she’d written: five-seven. Perfect, too perfect. Shoe size, eight. Pant size, ten. Driven, used to be loyal, sarcastic, pragmatic. Blond hair, blue eyes. Has a secret bank account and trust issues. Probably because she’s been cheating on Joe, so she subconsciously thinks he’ll do the same. Good at her job.
Mom: busy, gossipy. Loves her kids. Loves her dog.
Dad: stern. Loves me.
Jenkins didn’t know what any of this had to do with him.
“Simon, come eat,” his wife urged him. “You’re not taking care of yourself lately.”
He stood and kissed his wife of twenty years on her forehead. “I don’t have to, Becky,” he said. “You do that for me.”
She shook her head in annoyance, but her eyes beamed. She loved him, and it showed. “Come sit,” she told him. “I made your favorite.”
She bustled around the table and poured him a scotch, setting it next to his plate. She poured it neat, without adding ice. He’d always liked it that way, straight from the bottle like God intended. She sat next to him, and they held hands while she said a short prayer.
Then they ate together, homemade bread and thick beef stew, his mama’s recipe.
“This girl bothers me,” he admitted to his wife as he buttered his bread. “Her family, they’ve done her wrong, and she seems so...delicate.”
“Fragile?” Becky suggested, and he nodded right away.
“Yeah. That’s a better word. She doesn’t seem like she belongs to this world, if that makes any sense. Her head’s always someplace else. Imma ’fraid they’re gonna take advantage of her.”
“Not while you’re around,” Becky said knowingly. She patted her husband on the knee. She knew him, backward, forward and sideways. “You always get sucked in.”
“I do not,” he announced gruffly, and shoved a bite of meat into his mouth.
“What about that girl last year...the mama of four kids? She couldn’t pay you and you took the job anyway. Her husband wasn’t going to give her any support at all.”
“She does own his Porsche now,” Jenkins acknowledged. Becky smiled.
“And his house, and his business.”
“Well.” Jenkins was indignant. “He should not have been out tomcatting around with his personal trainer.”
“That poor girl couldn’t compete,” Becky said with a shake of her head. “She didn’t have a penis.”
They chuckled a little, because they could. That “poor girl” had been well taken care of as a result of the evidence Jenkins had gathered, proving her husband was in a secret gay relationship. She was now remarried to a loving accountant who hung on to her every word.
“You’ll take care of this one, too,” Becky said. “You always do. I love that about you. Your big ol’ heart.”
Jenkins grunted, but he beamed on the inside. He loved his wife. Her opinion was everything to him, and always would be. That’s why he couldn’t figure out men like Thad. If they weren’t happy at home, they needed to fix it. Not go looking for even more problems.
After Becky had cleared the dinner dishes and wiped off the table, she turned to her husband. “Go get your stuff. I’ll help you look through it.”
It was their routine; they’d done it with every case.
They sat at their kitchen table, shoulder to shoulder, and looked through everything he had accumulated. Jenkins couldn’t remember how many cases Becky had helped him with.
“You like this as much as I do,” he told her as he handed her the files.
She smiled, the tiny wrinkles forming a web at the edge of her eye as she did.
“Perhaps.”
She pored over the pictures with him, flinching over some. “I can’t believe what blood will do to one another sometimes,” she muttered. He agreed.
“Didn’t you say she told you about a journal?” she asked, turning to him. He nodded.
“Yeah. She did. She told me where it was hidden in case I ever needed it.”
“Well, if your gut is worrying you about this, I’d say you need it.”
Jenkins had to agree. His gut was rarely wrong; he’d been doing this too long for that. Something was niggling at him, something persistent. He needed to know what it was.
“So get that journal.”
Jenkins waited until Becky went to bed. She retired every evening at 8:00 p.m. ever since she was a grade-school cook and had to get up at 4:00 a.m. every day. Doing that for thirty years had made it an ingrained habit in her. She’d do it until she died.
Jenkins left home and went to Gen’s, knocking on her condo door at eight thirty, an excuse at the ready.
He was just checking in to see if she needed anything else for her divorce attorney.
She answered immediately and was delighted to see him.
“Simon!” she exclaimed, and she hugged him. “How are you? Would you like something to drink?”
She let him in and he saw a couple half-empty wineglasses sitting around.
“Did you have company?” he asked curiously, sitting down on the sofa. She shook her head.
“Not since earlier.”
She didn’t specify who it was, and he didn’t want to seem like he was curious.
She seemed a bit tipsy, and she perched in the chair next to him, her legs tucked childlike beneath her. Her eyes were wide and glassy, and her cheeks were flushed pink, as though there was something exciting on the horizon.
“You seem happy,” he observed, and she laughed.
“Did you ever think I’d be happy again?” she asked him. “I thought my life would be over. But here I am. I’m thriving, Jenkins. I don’t have him holding me down anymore, no more of his rules, no more of his nonsense. I have this place to myself and my life back.”
“Your husband had rules for you? You never said.” Jenkins lifted an eyebrow. If he ever tried laying down rules with Becky, he didn’t even want to venture what would happen.
Gen laughed. “He was a control freak. Meg can have him. They’ll fit like two gloves.”
“How much did you have to drink tonight?” he asked her.
“Only a bit, Jenks,” she answered.
She got up and went over to the glass door that led to the balcony and slid it open and went outside.
Leaning against the balcony railing, Gen looked down.
“The whole world is small,” she called back to Jenkins. “Come see.”
“Are you drunk?” he said, coming over to tug on her hand. “Come back inside.”
“No, no.” She shook him free. “I’m part of the stars out here, Jenkins. I’m a comet.”
“You’re not a comet,” he told her. He took a step forward, and she took a step back.
“I want to fly,” she announced. “I think I can.”
“Gen, are you okay?” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not acting right.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, then tilted her head and howled, a long pitch that lifted the hair on Jenkins’s arms.
“Let’s go back in,” he said firmly, and he pulled her arm this time. He was, after all, bigger.
“You don’t seem yourself right now. It can happen sometimes in these moments. The emotions are too big to handle. You shouldn’t drink when you’re feeling bad, Gen. It only makes it worse. It makes the emotions even bigger.”
He locked the balcony door and stood in front of it, staring down at his client.
She stared up at him, outraged.
&
nbsp; “You need to sleep it off,” he instructed her, like a firm father would. “You’ve mixed alcohol with extreme emotion, and that never ends well.”
“I wasn’t going to sleep here tonight,” she said. “I was going to sleep at the condo. Thad still doesn’t know about this place.”
“I don’t think that’s wise. Text him and tell him you’re staying overnight with a friend. He doesn’t deserve to know the details anymore,” he told her.
She lifted her eyebrow.
“Just text him and tell him you won’t be home tonight. You’re separated. He might be sleeping in your guest room, but you don’t owe him any explanations.”
“You got that right,” Gen agreed cheerfully, pulling out her phone to obey.
“Now go in. I’m going to wait here until you’re safely asleep.”
“You’re like a granddad,” she decided. “A big ol’ granddad.”
He rolled his eyes and sat while she got ready for bed. Once she was actually in the bed, he turned off the light to her room and left the door cracked. Like a father would, he had to acknowledge.
He sat in the living room, waiting until her breathing turned deep and even, then he got up, very quietly, and went into her bathroom.
As she’d instructed him earlier, there was a tile above the toilet that slid back. He reached up, tall enough that he didn’t have to stand on her toilet. He felt the journal and pulled it out.
Then he sat on the sofa and started reading.
It started out fairly sane, but he could tell when she’d been drinking while she wrote. It made her particularly mercurial. She drew pictures, stick figures of her and Meg, one of them in a cage. The other stood on the outside and laughed. He wasn’t sure who was who.
Other stick figures showed Thad jumping off a building, or Thad getting hit by a train.
Gen was obviously furious and it showed. This was a journal of revenge, an outlet for her rage. He understood that. It was a private diary; she could write whatever she wanted. He’d seen far worse in his day, and he wouldn’t judge her for it.
The thing that bothered him was that she’d said to come get it if he needed it. Why would he need this?
He skimmed through the drawings, getting to pages where she’d written. Some were neat. Some were scrawled. There were red wine droplets on the pages.
She reads to me sometimes. She thinks I don’t know, but I do. She always wanted to be me, Diary, and now she is. She thought my life was gilded, but now she sees the tarnish. Now she sees the cage.
He read through existential musings and dark thoughts.
They think I don’t know why they lie to me. They think they don’t know it’s so they can be alone. Even when we were kids, I never could figure it out, but now I do... Meg has always wanted Thad. Always, always, always, always. Now she can have him. No more locks, I’m free.
It was hard to work through the nonsense. Situations like this were so caustic, so explosive. Mix them with alcohol and they were much more potent, and it showed in this diary.
My sister wants my ring, I can tell. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it enough that she has taken my whole life? She told me today that it’s the prettiest thing she’s ever seen. Who would want someone else’s ring? It’s cursed. Whoever wears it will be cursed to a life of misery.
This journal was nonsense.
He put it back into the ceiling and went home, sliding into the dark bed, careful not to disturb his wife.
46
Hawkins, Now
Nate Hawkins leaned back in his office chair, tipping it, then dropping. Tipping, then dropping. His eyes didn’t leave the file on his desk. Meg’s face stared back at him in the pictures that Jenkins had taken on surveillance.
These were the photos of Gen’s apartment, and the pictures that were plastered on the walls. So, so many of her sister. It was as if Gen were obsessed with Meghan somehow, something different from the affair.
But that wouldn’t make sense. Meg was the one who had been in her sister’s shadow all these years, not Gen.
But out of 231 photos, 129 were of Meghan.
Did Meg somehow sense this energy focused at her? She and Thad claimed that they hadn’t known Gen knew about them, but perhaps they were lying. He didn’t know. But he knew the photos made him damned uncomfortable.
His desk phone rang.
“Hawk, you’ve got some folks here to talk to you. About that missing woman. They say they are her parents.”
Damn it. He looked at the clock. It was 3:00 p.m. He was scheduled to meet with Gen and Meg’s parents. Time had gotten away from him.
He went to retrieve them, and found a travel-weary older couple in the waiting room. Meg was with them.
“It’s good to meet you,” Mitch McCready shook his hand firmly.
His daughters had his eyes, Hawk noticed.
“Can you tell us what is happening?” his wife, Ginny, asked. “Meg says there’s been no leads and no explanations, and that doesn’t make sense at all. You should look at Thad. Are you investigating him? He was cheating on my daughter.” Ginny’s cheeks flashed hot, and Mitch grasped her shoulders.
“Calm down, Gin,” he murmured to her. “The man is trying to help.”
“Come on back,” Hawk told them. “I’ll tell you where we are at.”
He guided them back to his office and Meg trailed behind. Her perfume was soft and flowery, a breath of fresh air in the stale police station.
When the McCreadys were seated, he poured them coffee. Meg declined with a grimace.
Dishwater.
The corner of his mouth unwillingly twitched. Meg noticed and smiled. An inside joke, however small.
“Well, Detective,” Ginny said, politely now. “Are you looking into Thad? I’m telling you, anyone who would do what he did... He was so coldhearted. I can’t begin to fathom it. Anyone who would do that deserves some examination, I think.”
She stared at Hawk without flinching, although Meg did. Behind her mother, Meg’s face burned hot and red. Thankfully, her father wasn’t an observant man, and her mother’s back was turned. She exhaled slowly, once, then twice.
Above her mother’s head, Meg caught Hawk’s eye. Please don’t tell her. It was as if she were speaking out loud. Her eyes were blue and pleading, and Hawk looked away. He’d already said he wouldn’t say anything unless he had to. Jesus.
He found himself hoping, though, that the McCreadys didn’t ask.
He didn’t want to let her down.
It was a kick to the gut when he realized it.
He didn’t want to let Meghan McCready, a suspect in his active missing-persons case, down. His pulse quickened, then raced. This wasn’t a complication he needed in his life. This wasn’t professional, and he was always, always professional. Black-and-white, neat and tidy.
“Yes, Mrs. McCready. We are currently investigating every avenue, looking at every angle.” He was pretty sure Meg flinched again. He continued, “I promise you, I’ll do my best to find your daughter.”
Ginny searched the detective’s eyes, hunting for sincerity. She’d been on this earth for over sixty years, and she knew when smoke was being blown up her ass. It wasn’t now. The detective was telling the truth. She relaxed.
“Did Meg tell you everything about Gen?” Ginny hesitated. “Do you have everything you need to know?”
“Mom, yes.” Meg was impatient now, annoyed. “I’ve been here for the past two weeks. I’ve been through everything with him. You can send him her dental records to examine if you want.”
As soon as she said that, everyone froze.
The police often used dental records to identify a body.
Meg blinked and swallowed hard.
“That’s not what I meant,” she stammered. Her mother looked away pointedly.
“I can have them sent to
you,” Ginny told him. “But let’s hope it’s never necessary.”
Hawk shook her hand gently. “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. McCready. But I do have an important question.”
Meg’s stare penetrated deep into his, but he didn’t look at her.
“Do you have any idea where Gen’s laptop is? It’s not at the hotel, it’s not at her apartment in Chicago, and Thad says it’s not at the condo.”
“That’s strange. She never went anywhere without it,” her mother replied. “Maybe she took it with her.”
“No. I was there when she left. She just said she was going out for some fresh air.” Meg shook her head. “It was nighttime. She didn’t take her laptop. She just grabbed her purse and then my coat when I reminded her it was chilly out.”
“Maybe it was in her purse?” Ginny suggested. But Meg was already shaking her head again.
“No. Her purse was small. Way too small.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” Ginny answered. “All I know is, I can’t imagine she left that laptop.”
“Okay, then. I’ll let you know when I know anything more,” Hawk assured her, and handed them each a card. He escorted them back to the waiting room and only curtly acknowledged Meg when she said goodbye.
He felt her staring at him, like electricity snaking on top of water. He turned sharply and returned to his desk. When she was gone, he felt alone.
Jesus. He needed to stop.
He sifted through the file again, and as he was halfway through, his phone rang. He answered, and it was an account manager from the Black Heron Insurance Company. Yesterday, when Hawk was going through the Thibaults’ joint bank statement, he’d found a couple payments to the insurance company, beginning just two months ago. Since Thad and Gen had both health insurance and life insurance from another company, it caught Hawk’s eye. Interested, he’d put a call in.
“Detective Hawkins?” the man on the other end asked.
“Speaking.”
“This is James Aberdean over at Black Heron returning your call. I’m sorry for the tardiness, I just had to look up the account information,” he said.
And confirm the warrant, Hawk thought, annoyed.
The Last to See Her Page 22