The waitress came and set down their drinks and left again.
“There are no answers in that folder,” Craig said as he placed his hand over hers and squeezed it gently. “Only possibilities.”
Craig drew his hand back and fought the urge to press his fingers against the glass of Coke. He looked past her, down the aisle. The chain of bells jingled again as a man in a lumber jacket entered, making a great fuss as he greeted the waitress, and sauntered over to the counter. He was talking past the waitress too, and laughing. Craig guessed he must know the cook, who was occasionally visible through the opening in the wall where orders were set when ready.
From the corner of his eye he could see Summer’s shoulders lift and fall, and then she opened the folder.
The man in the lumber jacket took off his cap and unbuttoned his coat while he sat down at the counter and talked to the waitress. There was the faint ding of a bell, and he stood, buttoned up his coat and put his cap back on. The waitress grabbed a bag and started packing wrapped items in it before she poured a coffee, passed it to him along with the bag of food and rang up the order on the till. He fished out his wallet and handed the waitress some money, argued with her over his refusal to take his change, and then turned and stood beside a booth, gabbing with a couple men who’d come in shortly after Craig had.
As he waited for some sign to tell him Summer was ready to talk, he wondered how he expected to know she’d processed the image and was able to discuss it. He’d been doing this long enough to know that you could never predict the way a person would respond. The man in the lumber jacket waved and went to the door, the bells clanging as it slammed shut behind him. From the pass-through he realized how much time had passed.
The waitress came with his food and he nodded his thanks, her service providing a natural opening for him to shift his focus back to the table he sat at and the person across from him. He didn’t push it, instead taking the time to eat slowly, which was necessary because of the pain when he moved his jaw.
Summer hadn’t moved or said anything. Craig glanced at her as he pushed his plate aside. The image the lab had generated was in her hand, her dark eyes staring at the face, probably trying to find some point of likeness between the picture before her and the face she remembered from more than three years earlier.
She set the picture down and whispered, “I don’t know.”
Craig nodded. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this—”
“You need a blood sample.”
“We don’t have dental records. It’s the best way.” The echo of déjà vu was in his words. He’d said them to Summer before, told her they might have to ask for a sample, just in case. Something they’d need to do if they found Kacey’s body.
He’d never imagined the request would come eighteen months later, more than three years after her sister had gone missing.
“I understand. I already went to the coroner’s office, earlier.”
Craig watched her as she shut the folder and pulled her coat on. “I’m sorry.”
Summer stood and offered him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s been more than three years, Constable Nolan. I’ll just have to wait a little longer.”
She hoped.
“I have to go out of town for a few days, to follow up on a lead,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that you can call my cell if you need me. Don’t try to reach me at the station.” He passed her a business card with his phone number on it. “Do you want—”
“The only thing I want you to do is find out if this is my sister.”
She turned and walked away, her coat wrapped tightly around her small frame, the way it had been the night he’d first seen her standing outside the station.
Another one of her tells. Something she did when her whole world was falling apart and she needed to find a way to hold it together.
He looked at his knuckles and straightened his fingers, pushing past the pain as the dried blood glue cracked and bled again.
He knew how she felt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tain held up his ID. “I need you to put a call through to Summer Young’s room,” he said.
The hotel wasn’t ostentatious, but it was a neat and tidy establishment with a large foyer, a marble floor and a vaulted ceiling. Words had a way of reverberating around the room.
Sam, the hotel clerk, smiled politely, discretely keyed some information into a computer, then picked up the handset of the guest phone and dialed a number. Tain had watched closely, the man’s practiced fingers moving too fast for Tain to make out the extension number.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Sam’s smile hadn’t wavered since they’d approached the counter. “There’s no answer.”
Tain turned and started walking to the door.
“We can leave a message,” Ashlyn said.
“We need to find her.” He turned around. “What was Craig doing, bringing Summer here?”
“It wasn’t him.”
A voice from his past, behind him. He didn’t hear her footsteps but felt her move around him, closer to where Ashlyn stood.
“Craig never asked me to come here.” Her voice was as calm as her face. There were no lines hinting at anxiety or tension, confusion or concern. She looked unaffected, as though Tain had just asked her if she liked the hotel instead of asserting she’d been asked to come to the city to ID her sister’s body.
“But you have spoken to him?” Tain asked.
Summer nodded.
“When?”
The first lines crept into Summer’s brow as she looked at Ashlyn, gave a tiny shake of her head and turned away.
Tain reached out for her before she could leave. “Please, Summer. It’s important.”
She didn’t pull away from him, but she didn’t turn around either. “Let me go, Elim.”
He walked around in front of her. “This isn’t personal, Summer.” The look on her face as she met his gaze was like a knife in the heart, but he couldn’t undo what had been done. For a few moments they stood, looking at each other, and then she turned away.
“I just met with him.”
“Where?” He reached for her face and turned it so that she couldn’t avoid his gaze. “Summer, is the girl—”
She pulled back from his hold as she shook her head. “We don’t know.”
He let go of her and she wrapped her arms around her body and blinked as she looked from Ashlyn to him. “I’ve given blood so that they can check the DNA.”
“Is that where you saw Craig? At the coroner’s office?” Tain thought back to when they’d driven by the office earlier, when he’d seen Summer. That had been hours ago.
“No. It doesn’t matter. He was leaving town.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No. He only said that if I needed him, to call on his cell, because he’d be out of town following a lead.”
Ashlyn stepped forward then, reached between Tain and Summer and put her hand on the other woman’s arm. “Can you tell me how he is?”
Summer’s dark eyes were wide as she looked at Ashlyn. “What do you mean?”
“Is he okay?”
“He was bruised. There were cuts on his hands. They weren’t…He wasn’t like that when I saw him earlier. I don’t know what happened to him.”
She walked around Tain, and he let her go. The look in her eyes had been raw, and in her words he’d found more answers than he could have hoped for.
Craig was still working on the case. He hadn’t told Summer he’d been suspended, but it sounded as though he’d been in a fight.
The clippings found around Millie’s body hadn’t just contained information about cases Tain and Ashlyn had worked. They’d covered Craig’s major cases, until he’d left the Lower Mainland on temporary reassignment.
He marched outside and down the street to the car and kicked the door. It hurt like hell, but it reminded him he could still feel.
Tain leaned against the car drawing
deep breaths. After a moment he looked up. Ashlyn was lowering her cell phone and closing it.
“Sims,” she said. “I asked him to follow up on the apartments we missed in the second canvas.”
It was a good idea and made him think Ashlyn was handling this better than he was. She’d had the presence of mind to follow up on tangible leads, to leave no stone unturned, no matter what the circumstantial evidence suggested.
“Where now?” Ashlyn asked.
Tain turned and leaned back against the car for a moment before he straightened up again. “The coroner’s office.”
PART FOUR
THE PAST
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Twenty-one months ago
Jenny paced back and forth in the dark at the far end of the diner. They were concealed by shadows that would keep her from being easily identified at that distance, but she was unwilling to risk moving into the light and taking the chance that there might be someone inside who’d recognize her.
“We’ve gone a long way,” he said.
“They’re truckers. You think this is far to them?” She stared at him. Maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe she should have found some other way, just ran as far as she could…
Bobby would find her.
He’d always told her he would. Promised he’d never let her go.
“Look, do you want to do this or not?” he asked. “I’m not going to push you…”
She paced back and forth a few more times, then spit out an order. “Bacon cheeseburger and fries. No pickles or onions. And a strawberry shake. I’ll wait in the car.”
Jenny stomped back over to the vehicle and yanked the door open. After she slammed it shut, she slid down in the seat, fingers tapping the door frame as she peered out over the dashboard, scouring the parking lot.
Keeping watch.
She looked at the man who’d brought her there, the one who’d driven with her in silence for more than two hours before he’d insisted they stop and get something to eat and talk. His patience was wearing thin. She could tell.
He wanted the answers she’d promised him when she’d called.
After a few minutes, he walked down the sidewalk that ran the length of the building, to the entrance at the far end. She glanced in the side mirror, then at the door of the diner and saw him hesitate, looking back in her direction before he turned and went inside.
No vehicles arrived or departed during the twenty minutes she waited for him to return. He scurried back with a paper bag in hand, was quick to shut the door and extinguish the interior light of the car, fumbling in the trickle of light from the building to read the labels on the food and make sure she got what she’d asked for.
She fought to keep from cramming the food in too fast. Bobby had been in a mood lately. Complaining about girls who get fat.
He hadn’t been giving her much to eat, and now that she was throwing up every morning, she was even scrawnier than usual.
If Bobby suspected, she didn’t have much time. That’s what she’d figured when she turned it all over in her mind, again and again.
Jenny turned to the RCMP officer beside her. It was the only way out she could see, the only hope she had. Get Bobby cornered on the drugs and the smuggling. She knew enough about the operation. There had to be a way to catch him.
And if it all went bad, it would go straight to hell, but she couldn’t think about that now. She’d made one deal with the devil, and it had cost her. Now, she was making a deal with a different devil, in the hopes that it would save her.
Jenny took a deep breath and started to explain how she’d gotten involved with Bobby Hobbs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eighteen months ago
It took a moment to realize that the groan she heard was coming from her own body. The first attempt to sit up was met with a searing pain that shot up through her back, into her neck and shoulders, and kicked her in the head.
“Mrs. Wilson?”
She opened her eyes and blinked at the brightness.
“Maybe she hit her head harder than we thought.”
Ashlyn turned toward the sound of the voice. Nolan, feigning humor, a tinge of genuine concern not fully masked by the look of casual indifference he’d adopted.
“She remembers where she was going. That’s a good sign,” Sullivan said as he appeared beside Nolan. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine, sir,” she said as she forced herself upright. A wave of black rose up within her and for a second she felt her body wobble, but she refused to reach out and steady herself with her hand. “A little stiff, touch of a headache. Nothing a couple of Tylenol won’t cure.”
“Or a night in the hospital.”
A nurse appeared on the other side of the bed and began nudging Ashlyn back down against the pillow.
“Sir—”
“Don’t argue with me, Hart. You can barely sit up without falling over. You’d be no good to us back at the office right now.”
“But Mrs. Wilson—”
“Nolan’s already filled me in. I’m just glad you two didn’t run that errand together, or you might both be on a morphine drip tonight, and lucky for you he wasn’t far behind when you hit that deer. You did a number on that car when it flipped into the ditch. Mrs. Wilson can wait until tomorrow. Nolan can head out there and talk to her in the morning.”
“I-I hit a deer?” She blinked.
“You don’t remember?” Sullivan asked.
She thought back over the flashes that were clear. Talking to Mrs. Wilson, going to the shack, seeing Nolan’s Rodeo turn onto the Johnson property…
“It’s not surprising it would be a bit hazy.” Sullivan glanced at Nolan. “We’ll get a full report from you when you’ve had a chance to rest.”
They were moving away from the bed. She glared at Nolan, but he didn’t look at her.
“Doctor says you should be back on your feet within a day. Two at the most. Don’t worry. If you aren’t up to it, we’ll keep you in office tomorrow. Just get some rest.”
In office. All this time Nolan had been finding reasons to leave her behind and now she’d handed him one she couldn’t argue against.
Sullivan was already out the door. Nolan paused and turned to look at her.
He’d told their sergeant that they were going to meet at Mrs. Wilson’s…
The blur of the truck going past her and the sense that something about it was vaguely familiar was hazy. She knew she saw it just before she hit the deer, and there’d been a noise…She remembered seeing Nolan’s Rodeo turning on to the Johnson property before that. He must have been headed to Mrs. Wilson’s if he’d found Ashlyn’s overturned car, but he’d gone to the Johnson residence first.
Had he already known what Mrs. Wilson had to say?
She felt her eyes widen. Nolan stared back, unblinking, and his expression didn’t soften as he said, “Get some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Something about his tone suggested it wasn’t a conversation to look forward to.
Ashlyn didn’t respond as he walked away.
“Ashlyn. I’m surprised.”
That wasn’t what she’d expected to hear Sergeant Steve Daly say. He’d been her mentor from The Depot—the RCMP academy where all cadets did their training—and had been transferred back to the Lower Mainland only a few weeks earlier. She’d been on one of her temporary assignments then, and the last time she’d talked to him was by phone before she’d left for Nighthawk Crossing. “Sis too soon ta call?”
“No. It’s just that in the past, you’ve always been in touch within twenty-four hours. I didn’t expect you to wait this long.”
There was a projected lightness in his tone that was trying to conceal the concern she detected. She smiled, then winced. Ashlyn may not have hit her head as hard as they thought, but her face had struck the steering wheel. When the nurse had helped her to the bathroom she’d seen the purplish-blue patches expanding on the right side.
“Mmmm sa
hry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Reawy, Sssteve. I—”
“Ashlyn, it’s okay.” He paused. “You sound…a little out of it.”
“Ssss jes…” She rubbed her forehead, took a breath and focused on enunciating every word. “It’s been busy.”
“How are you settling in?”
A fire, a confrontation, a partner who dumped her every chance he got, a body, a lie…
“Ashlyn?”
She exhaled. “SSSSs all sech a mess.”
“What happened?”
“Uh hit a deer.”
“You hit a…Please tell me there isn’t a bad joke about women drivers somewhere in this.”
“No, it’s not thahht. I jess…it’s juss…” Her head was starting to clear a bit, and she focused on every word to get it right. “We’ve been working pretty much nonstop since we found a body.”
“You couldn’t tell me where you were going before you left. Are you sure you can talk about it now?”
Ashlyn rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. I don’t know why they wanted it kept quiet. This task force, the case, it’s a real mess.”
“Wait. You’re on the task force, the Missing Killer?”
“The what?”
“It’s what the press are calling it now. The girls go missing for a long time and are murdered months after they disappeared. Some reporter must have thought it was clever.”
“Good thing the press doesn’t know the holdbacks. I can just imagine what they’d come up with then.”
“So you’re in Nighthawk Crossing.”
“Um hmm.”
“And?”
“I’m in de hawshpital.” She felt the clouds coming back to cover her brain and tried to keep her eyes open, but they pushed shut despite her efforts.
That was met with silence.
“I’ll be awwite.”
“Well, good. You want to talk to me about what’s going on?”
She glanced at the cup on the portable tray table beside her. “I jest took some…sumthin for de pain.”
Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers) Page 20