by T. R. Ragan
The short middle-aged woman who answered the door had brown eyes and dark, wavy hair that fell over her shoulders.
Hayley told the woman who they were and asked if she was Robin Santos.
The woman nodded, but didn’t invite them in—her expression difficult to read.
“Your brother said today would be a good day for us to visit.”
The woman nodded again.
All right, then. Talking to the lady was going to be like pulling teeth. “We need to ask you a few questions. Would it be OK if we came in for a moment? This won’t take long.”
Reluctantly, Robin Santos stepped back and allowed them inside.
They followed her across a tiled entryway that led to a big, open family room tastefully decorated with leather couches and a stone coffee table. An upright piano sat against one wall, and a mahogany shelf filled with books covered the opposite wall. A large-paned window overlooking the backyard revealed a large pond surrounded by rocks and potted plants.
Robin Santos glanced at the clock before gesturing for them to take a seat on the couch. “My girls will be home soon. I need you to leave before they arrive.”
Hayley opened the file she’d brought and got right to it. Robin Santos wasn’t the only one who wanted to make this quick. “I read the police report,” Hayley said. “You and your brother believe your husband emptied the bank accounts before running off with another woman, is that right?”
“Yes,” she said as she paced the room, unable to stop moving. “Can I get you two some water?”
“That would be great,” Kitally said, eliciting a sigh from Hayley.
As soon as the woman walked off, Hayley said, “She’s not being cooperative and we don’t have much time. If she offers you a sandwich, the answer is no, thank you.”
“OK, Mom.”
For the first time ever, Hayley wished Jessica was still her partner.
Robin brought them water, and then took a seat on the chair across from them. Once again, she looked at the clock.
“Could you give me the name of this other woman?” Hayley asked.
Robin shook her head. “I have no idea who he ran away with. There were so many women, it would be impossible to narrow it down.”
“He was an accountant?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did he have any close friends?”
“If you count hookers and one-night stands, then yes. He was seldom home, so I really don’t know.”
“What about your neighbor, Helen Smith?”
“What about her? She’s a nosy busybody. My husband talked with her every once in a while because he felt sorry for her.”
“According to the police records, Helen told police that he worked from eight to five, came straight home every night, and rarely left his house.”
“Helen Smith doesn’t live here, does she?”
Hayley frowned. The woman seemed dead set on being as unhelpful as possible. She obviously had no interest in finding her husband—that much was clear. “I would like to talk to your daughters.”
“Absolutely not. I forbid it.” She stood. “That’s enough. It’s time for you both to go.”
“You do realize we’re only trying to find your husband so you can collect child support?”
“I understand my brother was trying to help when he hired a private investigator. It’s true that I have no idea how I’m going to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, but the thought of ever seeing that man after what he did to my—to me—it’s more than I can handle right now.”
Hayley looked over her shoulder as they walked back to the car. Robin Santos peered through the curtains, watching them leave. “That is one strange woman.”
“You think?”
Hayley shot Kitally a look. “Yeah. I do. She’s hiding something.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure yet, but she’s got something. That was like interviewing a suspect, not a client.”
“Maybe she’s just bitter,” Kitally said. “Her no-good husband slept around and she’s pissed off.”
Hayley shrugged. Kitally had a point, but still. There was something running under the woman’s hatred for her husband. It smelled like fear to Hayley. But of what? There was nothing in the police report about the husband being abusive, so why would Robin Santos be so adamant about not wanting to help them find her husband? “We need to talk to her daughters.”
As they drove away, Kitally said, “That will be easy enough.”
“How do you figure?”
“Didn’t you notice the window on the second floor?”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“How old are her daughters?”
“Fourteen and sixteen.”
“Well, one of them, probably the older one, is sneaking out her window at night. She just opens her window and grabs hold of the tree branch right outside her window. It’s got thin, white bark—you can see where she grabs it, and where she shimmies down the trunk. Little game trail through the shrubs, too. She’s a regular. All we have to do is come around here after ten o’clock on any given weeknight and wait for her to sneak out.”
As she waited for the light to turn green, Hayley looked at Kitally, really looked at her. She had the fashion sense of Heidi Klum and Lady Gaga mixed together. She talked too much. She was unethical and had absolutely no patience for laws and rules. A machete was her weapon of choice.
Kitally also had a knack for this line of work. Lizzy would be unwise not to hire her.
CHAPTER 17
Lizzy found a parking space in the hospital’s underground garage and then took the elevator to the third floor. An hour ago, someone from the hospital had called to tell her that her father was out of surgery and had asked for his daughter. Lizzy knew darn well they had called the wrong daughter, but she wanted to talk to him. Alone. She might catch hell later for not telling Cathy, but she didn’t care. She’d been thinking about her father a lot lately . . . maybe because of the whole wedding thing, she wasn’t sure. But she needed to resolve this strange disconnect between herself and her father. She needed to do it for her sake, and maybe his, too.
After watching her father sleep for forty-five minutes, Lizzy stood to stretch her legs. According to the nurse, he had been wheeled out of the recovery room about thirty minutes before she’d arrived. He was pale, but not as yellow as the last time she’d seen him.
She walked across the room to admire the flowers and cards lined up on a long shelf near the window. They were on the third floor. She could see the parking lot below.
She bent over, stretched until her fingers touched her toes. A pink envelope had fallen under her father’s hospital bed. She had to get down on her knees and scoot halfway under the bed so she could reach it. Back on her feet, she took her seat next to her father’s bed and examined the envelope. “Grandpa” was scribbled in letters obviously written by a small child. Had he saved an old card from Brittany, his only grandchild? It was hard to imagine her father having such a sentimental side.
Lizzy knew it was wrong to pry, but she didn’t care. And besides, it was pretty much her profession. She opened the envelope, then unfolded the piece of paper inside.
Scribbled in the upper right corner was a bright yellow sun. The artist had drawn the picture with pen, then used crayon to bring life to the sun, trees, and grass covering the distant hills. In the center of the picture stood a stick man and a stick child. The man was Grandpa, because the word Grandpa was scribbled close by with an arrow pointing to the man with no nose, just a very round head, two eyes, and a big smile. The kid had the identical face, just smaller, with the arrow coming from the name Emma.
Emma. Lizzy had never heard anyone in her family utter the name Emma. She examined the envelope closer. There was an address label in the upper left corner of th
e envelope: 202 Hickory, Portland, Oregon.
Her father’s finger twitched. Moving quickly, Lizzy pulled out her phone and took a picture of the address label and another of the drawing. After she put her phone away, she slipped the picture back into the envelope, slid it under a pile of cards, and plopped back into her chair.
Pulse thumping, looking around for something to do, she shuffled through her purse and found the brochures Jared had left on the kitchen counter. There was one each for Belize, Paris, and Hawaii. The yellow sticky note read, Where do you want to go for our honeymoon? Lizzy thought about what Jared had said the other night about quitting her investigation business. Although she liked the idea of having more time for him, something tugged at her insides every time she considered letting the business go.
Was she being selfish?
She looked back at her father. He used to tell her all the time that she was a selfish child. Maybe it was true. If giving up the business would make Jared happy, why wouldn’t she do it?
Was she afraid of happiness?
Happiness always lingered right there, just out of reach. She could see it, but she never really got to touch it. If she’d never been kidnapped by a madman at the age of seventeen, what would her life be like now? What sort of person would she be?
Why did she feel as if she were always being tested, over and over again?
What if she sold her business and moved to another country—would the evil in the air disappear then?
Was Jared willing to give up his career with the FBI, his fight for right and justice for all? If so—if they both gave it up—would they still always feel a calling to fight the devil?
All these years, all she’d been through, and she still didn’t know herself. Life could be so unsettling, so strange. She’d been a PI for ten years now. The only time she felt truly alive was when she was chasing evil. She tucked the brochures back into her purse and let her gaze drift back to her father. Where did her parents fit into this life of hers? Her father was dying, but everyone died sooner or later. Did this old, feeble man with hatred in his heart deserve her sympathies, her worry, her last thought before drifting off to sleep at night?
In that moment, she somehow knew or at least felt that he did deserve her love. He was family. He was her father. She would keep coming to see him because she wanted to, and not out of some misplaced allegiance. She would come to this room that smelled of antiseptics and decay, and if he didn’t want to listen to her tell him stories or talk about her life, that was OK. She would just sit there and make sure he knew that she was there for him if he needed her. She would do it for herself and not for any other reason.
Another selfish act? Perhaps.
She looked at his thinning hair, remembering the thick, dark strands he used to have, and how annoyed he would get when she and Cathy tried to clip bows and ribbons to his hair.
Had her father, she wondered, had a relationship with his father before he passed away?
She tried to recall an old memory of her grandparents, any at all, but came up with a big blank. Except maybe of one particular Christmas, when a large box had arrived. The package was for Cathy and Lizzy. Her father had looked angry, bordering on furious, as they ripped open the box. And when he saw them jump with joy at all the presents inside, he went berserk. They never did get to unwrap the gifts. In fact, not only did he return the large box to its sender, but he also took all of their gifts away that Christmas.
Why had he done that? Why was he always so angry? Why didn’t she know the answer to this? Was it important—did it even matter?
Shit.
She was angry, too. She could feel the resentment in her bones. After all this time, she was still mad as hell. Cathy was right. Lizzy had always known she had a rebellious streak, one of the reasons she’d always understood Hayley so well. But she’d never stopped to put much thought to where the anger came from. She blamed the obvious people and events—Spiderman always at the top of her list. A killer. A madman. But he wasn’t the root of her problems, she realized.
For the first time in her life, she understood that her anger flowed from a place much closer to home.
Her dad had been wrong to blame her for having a lapse in judgment. She had told a lie, told him she was saying goodbye to her girlfriends who were going off to college at the time, when she was really meeting Jared. That was the night she’d been taken. The night her life changed. How many times had her therapist—and Jared, for that matter—told her she’d done nothing wrong? Why hadn’t she listened to them? Why had it taken her so long to understand that everyone made mistakes and they shouldn’t have to suffer their entire lives for those missteps? She was done punishing herself. It was time to lay the blame at the feet of its creator.
Her father strained to open his eyes. Even after he’d succeeded, he appeared to be straining to see her. “Michelle?” he said, his voice a raspy whisper. He looked around the room. “Is Emma here, too? Where’s Emma?”
CHAPTER 18
Hayley put her bowl in the sink, sprinkled it with dish soap, scrubbed and then rinsed it.
When she’d placed the bowl on the rack to dry, she stared out the window. She looked across the street, from the crumbling swing set to the broken-down truck with the For Sale sign on the windshield, to the drug dealers standing on the corner. But the only thing she saw in her mind’s eye was Brian as he slammed the heavy blade of an axe into her mother’s skull, leaving her with a permanent look of bewilderment. Mom must have been wondering why the man she’d stood by for all those years would do such a thing.
Hayley narrowed her eyes. It wasn’t the man her mother had been addicted to; it was the drugs. Brian knew how to reel people in and squeeze them for all they had—their money, their hearts, and ultimately their souls. There had been a time when she was just a child that she had trusted Brian, but she no longer allowed her mind to wander that far back in time.
He was the devil and this time the devil was going to see the bowels of hell firsthand.
Hayley took a deep breath. Mom had been one of those women who just didn’t get it—who either didn’t like to or didn’t know how to think for herself. For as long as Hayley could remember, her mother had let Brian make all of the decisions. In her drug-induced stupor, Mom allowed Brian to rape her only child. And yet Hayley had never stopped loving her.
And she refused to let Brian have the last word.
The man had killed her mother. And for the past two years, he’d managed to escape her and the police. But she could feel it in her bones, taste it on the tip of her tongue, sense it as an animal senses the coming rain. His time was up.
Lizzy’s dog knocked into Hayley’s leg, reminding her she needed to feed the animal. Lizzy owed her big-time for this. The only good thing about the mangy animal was that Hudson liked to play with him. It gave him something to do when his lost cause of a mother left him by himself.
She grabbed the last can of dog food and dumped its disgusting contents into a bowl that she left on the floor.
After making quick work of sharpening her knives, Hayley pulled up her pant leg and strapped on a sheath. With her knives in place and her baton attached to her waistband, she covered herself with a black knee-length coat and walked out the door into the cold night.
Halfway down the steps down the outside of the garage, she saw Hudson sitting outside on the main house’s porch step. Damn it.
“It’s late. What are you doing outside?”
“Mom told me to wait out here until she’s done.”
“What is she doing?”
“Talking to a man.”
Hayley stepped past him and tried the door. It was locked. She knocked, but nobody came.
The kid was locked out of his own fucking house at eleven o’clock at night. Shit like this made her blood boil. “Come with me, Hudson. I want you to do me a big favor and watch the dog f
or a little while.”
“Mom told me to stay right here.”
She bent down so she was eye level with the kid. “Look at me, Hudson. You’re too little to be outside by yourself. We both know that. Usually—in fact, ninety-nine percent of the time—I would tell you to do what your mom says. But tonight’s not one of those times.”
“This is in the one percent where I don’t listen to her?”
“Who are you, Einstein?”
He smiled and she ruffled his hair. Then he followed her back to her place above the garage.
“Have you named the dog yet?” he asked when they stepped inside her apartment.
“Nope.” She poured some chicken noodle soup into a bowl and warmed it up in the microwave. After setting the bowl in front of Hudson, she disappeared inside her bedroom to grab the tools needed to get inside Hudson’s house.
Before she left her apartment, she told Hudson not to leave until his mom came to get him.
“Can I name the dog?”
“Go for it, but you might want to give it some thought before you decide, because the dog will be stuck with whatever name you pick for the rest of its life.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Eternity,” she said before she walked out the door.
She took the stairs two at a time, crossed to the house and knocked on the front door. “Becca, it’s me, Hayley. Open the door!”
She gave her time, knocked a few more times, before she set to work with her tension wrench. Seconds later, she stepped inside. It was a small house. Most of the lights were out. A vanilla-scented candle burned nearby. The house was dirty, but it wasn’t a pigsty. She’d seen worse, way worse. Halfway down the hall, she heard grunts and moans. Quietly, Hayley opened the bedroom door and stepped inside.
Nobody noticed her.
Becca lay on the bed with her eyes closed, smoking a cigarette, her head knocking against the headboard while some skinny white boy rode her hard, trying to hit gold.