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“Candace,” Shaw snarled, “don’t push me.”

“Fine! Gah.” Dragging the bags she’d brought to the porch, she headed into the spare room and closed the door behind her.

Shaw dropped onto the sofa and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. What the hell? Talk about shitty timing… He couldn’t wait to hear what his mother had to say about it all. He knew his mother. LeslieHarrison would be livid, and he wouldn’t blame her.

He was pretty fucking livid himself.

CHAPTER7

“Gah, this place is depressing,”Candace mumbled against the glass of the truck’s window.

“It is what it is.” The restaurant where they’d planned to meet wasn’t that far away, and there was no way he was leaving Candace at the house alone. He was afraid he’d come back and find the entire place cleaned out. She certainly didn’t have respect for anyone else’s property. She’d already proven that. Who knew what she was capable of?

Maisey’s car was sitting in the restaurant’s parking lot, and so was Aaron’s cruiser. They stepped inside to find the three adults and two kids sitting in the back of the restaurant, and Lara was playing with a toy police car that Shaw was sure Aaron had given to her. But he didn’t get a chance to sit down or even greet the women. As soon as Aaron saw him, the big man rose from his chair and motioned for Shaw to go outside. “You go sit down and be nice,” he whispered in Candace’s ear as he pointed to the table.

The door closed behind them and Shaw turned to face Aaron. “What’s going on?”

“Hate to tell you, we got another call today. This time it was from Texas, and the news isn’t good.”

“Whaaa…”

“FBI agent out of SanAntonio. I know him; he helped when Maisey and Murielle were taken. They’ve been investigating some murders down there that are oddly similar to this one. Texas Rangers are involved too. They know about the one in Arkansas, and they found a similar one in Tennessee. They’re looking at Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama, and wondering if there are more.”

He let his head drop until his chin rested on his collarbone. It just got worse all the time. If they all were connected, this guy was far more dangerous than they’d initially realized. He was about to ask Aaron something else when the officer said, “And I talked to FrankieTravis last night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Guy knows jack shit about any of this. He says he knows Frymire, so I ask, where does he live? Frankie’s got nothing. What does he do? Drives a truck. For which company? Frankie has no idea. Where does he stay when he’s in town? Apparently he stays with Frankie. Has he ever actually seen Frymire’s driver’s license? Nope?he hasn’t. Has he ever seen Frymire’s truck? No, picked him up at truck stops and he was already inside. It’s entirely possible that he doesn’t even really drive a truck. So basically, he’s hanging out with a guy he knows absolutely nothing about, bringing him into their home, around his kids, and around his wife. A guy we suspect of killing a woman in cold blood. Gotta hand it to FrankieTravis?the guy’s obviously a fucking genius.”

“Oh, yeah. Einstein.” Everything inside Shaw was screaming.

“And it gets worse.”

“How can it possibly get worse?”

“The guys from Texas, Arkansas, Alabama… Nobody has a pic of this guy. Nobody. So the only people who know what he looks like are the people who’ve met him. We’ve got nothing we can use to find out what he looks like. I mean, there has to be footage from parking lot cams at truck stops, but unless we know which trucking company or what route, we have nothing to go on. There are literally thousands out there, and we’d never find him.”

Shaw ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “Needle, meet haystack.”

“Exactly. We need more, something concrete, and we have nothing. Do you think Cherilyn could work with a sketch artist to maybe come up with a drawing?”

“I’ll ask her, but she’s been so traumatized by the whole thing that I’d really like to leave her out of it until the bastard’s found. She’ll have to testify in court. There’s no way around that. But we need to catch this guy.”

“But with no way of knowing where he might be next, we have no way of laying any kind of trap for him. I told Frankie that if I found out Frymire had been there and he hadn’t called me, I’d lock him up myself. He promised me he would call, but I’m betting if Frymire killed that woman, he won’t be back.”

“I hope not.”

“Let’s get back inside and eat with the girls.” He laughed. “They’ve probably already started eating without us.”

When they stepped into the restaurant, Lara looked up and yelled, “SHAW!”

“Hi, honey! You girls hungry?”

Maisey and Cherilyn smiled up at him. “Yeah. Maya’s gonna chew her fist off if we don’t eat pretty soon!” Maisey said, and Cherilyn chuckled.

The older girl was red-faced, but she grinned at the teasing. “I will not.”

“Order whatever you want,” Shaw told Cherilyn and all three girls as he sat down.