Page 24 of Luck of the Devil (Harper Adams Mystery #3)

I wasn’t sure how long it took me to wake up, but I stirred a few times, only to fall back asleep. Finally, I opened my eyes and took a moment to orient myself to my new reality. To being here with Malcolm, on our way to see my grandparents after all those years.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked softly.

I took a second to assess. “I have a headache, and my stomach feels gross, but … better?”

He grinned. “I told you that you needed sleep.”

He was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.

I glanced out the window, seeing nothing but countryside. “Where are we?”

“We’re about an hour out of Jonesboro.”

Anger surged me. I jerked upright and the throbbing in my head intensified. “You said you’d wake me after an hour! I could have been working!”

His brow lifted slightly, and he jerked a gaze toward me for half a second before focusing back on the road. “And how do you feel?”

I gritted my teeth. “That’s beside the point.”

He smirked. “What’s done is done. You’re awake now, and we have decent coverage to connect the laptop to a hotspot on one of our phones.”

It wasn’t worth a fight, especially since I did feel better. With a sigh, I reached for the laptop at my feet, then placed it on my lap.

“You missed a couple of calls and a few texts,” he said, pointing to my phone in the console.

I picked it up and checked the screen, wondering who would be calling me.

Either Louise or my dad, because there really wasn’t anyone else.

Only the calls weren’t from either of them.

Both were from the same phone number. It looked familiar, and it took a moment to recognize it as the cell number Mason Deveraux had called me from last week.

His calls were an hour apart. Dread burrowed in my gut. Why was a man as busy as the lead prosecutor for the attorney general of Arkansas putting so much effort into calling me when I was the one who’d contacted him?

I flipped over to my messages and saw that Becky Comstock had sent me several texts, each one with a video clip, only the thumbnails were gray images that had the videos’ numeric labels rather than images.

“My neighbor came through,” I said.

“She sent the video?”

“About ten of them.”

He shot me another glance. “Ten? Didn’t the neighbor say the woman only came over once?”

“Yeah. Maybe she went through the video files and found some other visits.”

She didn’t send any messages with the videos, but if she’d sent something helpful, I’d be happy to ignore the lack of niceties.

I opened the first video. My mother’s house was centered in the frame, which meant she’d been flat out spying on her.

But I immediately forgave her once a black sedan pulled up in front of the house.

The back passenger side door opened, and a woman got out.

She shut the door and started heading up the front walk, as the car drove off.

I kept my eyes glued to the screen, disappointed, but not surprised when I didn’t see a license plate.

The woman reeked of confidence, from her perfect posture to her lifted chin and brisk stride.

The front door opened and my mother appeared in the opening.

Once the woman reached the porch, my mother stepped to the side and let her in. The video stopped seconds after that.

“ Shit .”

“What?”

“I can’t see her face.”

“Can you see the driveway?”

“A little.” Hopefully one of the videos would show my mom and the mystery woman walking out to her car.

I pulled up the next video. After a couple of seconds, I could see the lower half of my mother’s body and her suitcase as she rolled it down the driveway alongside her car and then brought it to the back.

She stood behind it for several seconds while she lifted her suitcase, presumably to put the bag in the trunk, then she walked along the side of the car again, opened the door, and got in.

Seconds later the car backed up, out of the frame, and the video ended.

I told Malcolm what I’d seen. “The woman wasn’t in this one.”

He nodded to the side of the road. “There’s a rest stop up ahead. I’m gonna pull over so we can watch the rest of them together.”

I set my phone in my lap, trying to temper my disappointment.

While the two videos I’d watched corroborated Becky Comstock’s version of events, there wasn’t a good enough image the mystery woman for me to show to my mother’s friends.

There were plenty of other videos, but I had no idea what they showed.

Mrs. Comstock claimed she’d only seen the woman that one time.

Malcolm pulled into the parking lot and pulled into a space in the back. “Show me.”

I started with the first video, then moved on to the second when he didn’t make a comment. After it played, I said, “At least we know Mrs. Comstock was telling the truth, but the woman’s not even in the second video. The first video is helpful, but not enough.”

“Play the next one,” he said, his gaze still on the phone.

I closed the second video, then returned to the text string and clicked on the third.

The video began to play, and I immediately recognized that this one was from different a camera, aimed at my mother’s driveway and the neighbor to her left.

It showed my mother walking down the driveway, pulling her suitcase behind her.

The woman was walking in front of her, moving around to the passenger side of the car, only a tree branch from the across-the-street-neighbor’s tree blocked the view of the top of her body.

My mother walked to the back of the car and put her case in the trunk, then got in and backed it up into the street.

But when she pulled into the street, I could see the mystery woman’s face in the passenger seat.

She’d rolled down the window, making the view as perfect as it could be from such a distance.

She looked to be in her fifties or early sixties.

The car pulled out of the frame as my mother drove down the street.

“Recognize her?” Malcolm asked.

“No,” I said as I pushed out a heavy breath. I looked over at him. “Do you?”

He looked slightly surprised, then said, “No.”

His reaction caught me off guard, not because he was surprised but because he’d let that surprise show. He was the master at covering his reactions, so if he’d wanted to hide his reaction, he would have. Did this mean he was letting me see the real him?

“Let’s look at the other videos and see if there’s anything else there,” he said.

I didn’t respond, simply loaded the fourth video. I cringed when it showed two dark figures slinking through the shadows as they crept down my mother’s driveway and to the back of her house.

“Is that Pinky and his dimwit Brain?” Malcolm asked. I knew he was talking about the men who’d broken into my mother’s house the previous week.

“No,” I said as the video kept playing, even though nothing was happening. “They came to the front door.”

Seconds later, a light flashed on in the living room window. It was covered in sheer curtains, so we could only make out vague shapes. Then the light turned off, and a bedroom light flipped on.

“There’re looking for something,” Malcolm said. “When was this recorded?”

I stopped the video and looked at the name, which included the date and time stamp. “Two Wednesday nights ago, at 9:11 p.m.”

“Your mother’s car’s not in the driveway,” he said. “Where was she?”

I released a short laugh. “Mine’s not there either. Are you gonna ask where I was?”

“You were at the tavern with Louise and the bookseller. He was watching you like a lost puppy.”

I cringed. “First of all, don’t say that about Nate.”

“Why not? It’s true.”

“Second,” I said, refusing to admit he was right, “how do you know I was there that night?” I looked over at him and he gave me a look I was learning was his obstinate I’m not going to answer you expression.

“Seriously, Malcolm.” Sure, he’d been working behind the bar that night and had seen me. We’d even had a short conversation about nothing while I’d ordered a beer, but the fact he knew immediately that I’d been there that night threw me off.

It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d been keeping track of me. I knew some of his dangerous secrets. Maybe he’d worried I would rat him out.

And yet…

I didn’t think that was it.

“Let’s watch the rest of the video,” he said, gesturing to the phone.

“You were watching me,” I said without any hint of anger. “Did you have someone trailing me?” If so, I’d missed it, which made me feel like an idiot, but there was no doubt I’d been impaired.

“No,” he said softly, sitting back in his seat as though he realized this was about to become a discussion.

“Then how did you remember I was there two weeks ago on a Wednesday night?”

He turned and looked out his side window, remaining silent for several seconds. I was about to restart the video when he said, “I was keeping an eye on you.”

“Why?”

He was silent again, and I realized this was his way of answering difficult questions. Was he coming up with a fabricated response or was he finding the nerve to answer?

I nearly laughed at the idea. Finding the nerve? James Malcolm was composed of nothing but granite and steel.

Finally, he answered, sounding resigned, “I was worried about you.”

He was worried about me ? That nearly shocked the shit out of me.

“Because of my drinking?” It was the only reason I could come up with. I hadn’t started working the Burton case yet, and the man who’d kidnapped Ava Peterman was dead.

He turned back to face me. “Press play.”

I studied him for a moment. This man was a confusing mess, and the closer I got, the more of a conundrum he became.

But I did as he said, because if he was worried about me for some reason other than my drinking, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

At least not right now. Not until after we found who was behind my mother’s death.