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“I, um, oh, God.” She hesitated. “I, um, I think . . .”
“Is something wrong?” His senses heightened as he waited.
“I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was tight. “I mean, I probably shouldn’t even be calling you, but Jonas . . . he took my car. I don’t mean he stole it. I loaned it to him and he’s been gone a few hours and he’s not answering my calls or texts and . . . oh, shit. I’m worried.”
“You think something happened to him?” So at least they knew now where he’d been.
“I don’t know. But he just got out of the hospital and he’s not used to driving anymore and . . . Oh, forget it. Forget I called. This was a mistake. I’m sorry. He’s fine. Everything’s fine!” She cut the connection and when he tried to call her back, she didn’t pick up.
Within seconds he’d pulled up her driver’s license information and found the make and model and plate numbers of her car, then put out a BOLO, Be On the Look Out, for Mia Long’s fifteen-year-old Honda Accord. Then he grabbed his jacket and sidearm. He’d been looking for a reason to get up and move, and Mia Long’s call seemed like the perfect excuse; her apartment seemed like the perfect place to start. Until they heard back from the Seaside Police Department.
When he reached Johnson’s desk, he found her on the phone and staring at her computer screen. She must’ve heard him approach because she held up a hand, listening to whoever was on the other end of the call while he was on one foot, then the other.
“Yeah, thanks,” she was saying, nodding and looking over her shoulder. “Tell me what you find when you get in.” She disconnected and spun her chair around. “That was my ex-brother-in-law,” she explained. “Walter Robinson isn’t at his house and not answering his phone, the only one listed in his name or his company’s name: Robinson Electric. It’s odd because that phone is his business’s lifeline, you know, to schedule jobs and such. Voice mail is full. They’re gonna go inside. The guys watching the place. Probable cause.” When he was about to ask, she said, “No time for a warrant.”
“As long as it doesn’t screw the case against him.”
“It won’t.” She eyed his jacket. “You going somewhere?”
“To Mia Long’s apartment, and I’m going to call Alex Rousseau on the way.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Jonas McIntyre was there.”
“Oh, wait.” She let out a long breath. “Let me guess. He’s MIA again.”
“Yeah, but this time he’s in Mia Long’s car. Already got a BOLO for him.”
* * *
Kara shivered as she stepped into her parents’ master bedroom and heard the wind rattling the panes of the windows. An empty bed frame had been pushed against one wall. Water had seeped through a crack in the window, running down the wall and causing the paint to peel and the floorboards to buckle.
This was where Mama and Daddy had been found, lying in their bed, both dead. Whoever had killed them had moved quickly, able to slice each throat quickly, without a struggle. Thankfully. She silently hoped that the sleeping pills they’d downed had been powerful enough so that they had been out of it, totally unaware that they were being attacked and killed.
Her stomach roiled again.
She wanted to run, to get as far away from this old house with all its secrets, all its horrors, as she could. Instead, she leaned against the doorframe and said to Tate, “This isn’t working.” A few new fragments, bits of recollection had come to mind, but the images she saw behind her mind’s eye, those burned into her memory forever, were of the dead. She thought of them asherdead. The family that she’d lost.
No, not lost.
The family that had been violently stolen from her.
Tate placed a hand on her shoulder. “If you want—”
“Stop! Don’t say it, Tate. Don’t even think it. I don’twantto leave any more than I don’twantto be here, but let’s just get through it.”
“I’m just following your lead.”
“Fine,” she bit out angrily. He was right. They’d decided back on the drive to the mountain that they would break in and re-create the night of the attack. If Kara could stand it, she would relive the horrid events and talk them out, tell him what she remembered, what she felt, what she sensed. “Just give me a second.”
“Okay.”
Kara closed her eyes, determined to break through, determined to remember it all.
And if she did, what then?
Setting her jaw, she broke free of Tate’s embrace. “Come on.”