Page 107 of Devoted in Death

“Janelyn,” Peabody provided when Eve turned to her.

“Janelyn. Peabody’ll send you the data. Last stop, as of now, is McAlester. Talk to the warden at the prison, and check out a bar called Ringo’s where Parsens worked while James was in a cage. See who knows what. I’m going to bag these two, Santiago, and what you and Carmichael pull out of Oklahoma’s going to sew them up tight.”

“Light a candle for me, LT.”

“What?”

“I lost a bet with Carmichael, and she gets to drive. The speeds you can get up to out here? She’s pretty damn scary.”

“But you’ll get there fast. I know when you know, Santiago. It’s busting wide now.”

“We’ll bang the hammer here. NYPSD West, out.”

“Peabody, get them all the data they’ll need. Anybody has anything for me that can’t wait, say it now,” she told the room at large. “Otherwise, I need ten.”

She gave it five seconds, turned and went into her office. Shut the door. After tossing her coat aside, sat down and wrote everything up.

Updated her board with all the fresh data.

Sat down again, put her feet on the desk, and let herself think.

A guy walks into a bar, she thought, only there was no lame punch line to this one.

Something sparks between these two—two people, aimless, low-rent as Peabody said. Without that meet, without that spark, maybe they just stay low-rent and aimless. But that spark lit up something vicious inside them.

They like the vicious, she concluded, it’s part of what binds them together.

Eve studied the board where she now had Darryl and Ella-Loo front and center.

She’s the smart one, Eve decided. As far as smarts went. He’s the romantic. Gets busted for trying to cop a traditional engagement ring.

“I bet you found that stupid but touching, right, Ella-Loo? He did that on his own, a surprise for you. But you got yourself another crap job and waited for him. Three and a half years, that’s love, of its kind. That’s devotion. Must’ve gotten knocked up on a conjugal. Another tie that binds? I bet you timed that one, too.”

She rose, paced.

How the hell were they traveling, abducting, torturing and killing with a baby to deal with? Ditch the kid? Couldn’t just dump it on a doorstep—why have one if you’re going to toss it to fate or strangers?

She circled around that, wondered if Ella-Loo subscribed to the Stella school of motherhood. You have a kid because it may be useful or profitable, and keeps your man locked to you.

Then she let it slide away as she couldn’t see how it applied, for now, to the investigation.

Wait for your man. Head east when he’s sprung. In the same truck he boosted from Hanks. A truck that’s showing its age now, and Darryl hasn’t been able to maintain it in those three and a half years.

Does what he can when he gets out, but it gives up on that quiet road over the Arkansas border.

And that’s where it really began, she thought. That’s when the spark went off like a rocket.

“I know you now,” she murmured. “We’ll get more, but I know you. And I’m going to find you.”

Soon, she thought, it had to be soon, or it would be too late to save Jayla Campbell.

She’d lost track of time again. The pain, beyond imagining, woke her. But the ferocity of it radiating everywhere let her know she was still alive.

Jayla Campbell, she thought, fighting through the haze of pain. I’m Jayla Campbell, and I’m alive.

She turned her head, very slowly, as even that had agony raging. They hadn’t hurt him again—Mulligan, Reed Mulligan. When they’d found him unconscious on the floor, they’d hauled him back onto the makeshift table. They’d treated his broken wrist with some ice, even given him some sort of meds.

He had to be strong enough, she’d heard them say, to rape her again.