He showered, shaved, and dressed in jeans and boots with a long-sleeved shirt, then added a puppy paw-print tie Hannah had given him. Decided he looked pretty good except for the shadows under his eyes and some noticeable shots of silver at his temples. Okay, gray. He paused, thinking about getting older and yet feeling vital for the first time in seven years. Nothing like a murder or two to pull a man out of a slump. The hand of guilt started to press down and Nick pushed it away. “Fuck it,” he said aloud. He was
alive.
He paused outside the guest room, listened, and opened the door. Erin lay curled beneath the quilt with one hand tucked under the pillow. Something bumped in his chest and he smiled, remembering the heady sensation of having her pressed against him, their tongues tangling together.
His body stirred. Damn, he’d have to do that again soon, but finish the job this time. He wasn’t interested in a repeat of last night—pulling away and leaving her fully clothed, his hands tingling with the warmth of her flesh, his body straining to be inside her.
Yes, he definitely had to finish that soon.
He ran by his mom’s house and had breakfast with Hannah, drove her to school, then called Alayna on his way to pick up Quentin. True to form, she’d jumped at the chance to get involved in an underdog’s case, hopped on a plane, and started eating her way up the food chain of the Justice Department to get access to Justin.
“McAllister’s lawyer didn’t give you any trouble?” Nick asked.
“McAllister’s lawyer is suddenly the model of obsequiousness. They don’t want anything to happen that could be construed as a lack of cooperation or that might lead to the appearance that Sims’s rights have been compromised. That could hold up the execution.”
“So you’ve seen him.”
“I’ve seen him,” she said, as Nick headed south on Frankfurt Drive. “But he won’t talk to me about Lauren McAllister or the case. He only talked about his sister. He wants her to leave the case alone and let it go. Leave Ohio.”
“What?”
“Interesting, huh?”
“Son of a bitch,” Nick said. Erin had spent years working to free her brother and the bastard wanted her to leave the case alone.
Nick spared a thought to realize that it had only been a few days since he’d wanted the same thing. And he spared another thought to acknowledge that Justin’s actions were
possibly the actions of a man who was, indeed, guilty and had accepted his fate. The notion twisted in Nick’s heart—for Erin. “Do you need Justin in order to get to the AG?” he asked.
“Maybe not. I’m on the assistant AG’s schedule for three-thirty. I’ll push it.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey,” she said, before he hung up. “This sister of Justin’s… Did you know she sleeps with a gun under her pillow?”
Something in Nick shifted. “No.”
“I asked Justin if it was because she’d been threatened by McAllister’s camp, and he shook his head. Said she’d learned it long before McAllister came along.”
A dark, uneasy feeling took hold but there was no time to deal with it. Quentin’s ranch house came into view, Quentin standing in the driveway waiting for him.
“I gotta go,” he said to Layna. “Call me when you know something.”
They disconnected and Quentin piled into the Tahoe with a thermos of coffee. They headed to Hilltop and found Maggie in her workshop, on a tall stool etching a design into a sculpture with a tool that looked like a crochet needle. A handful of raw clay masks sat on the table beside her.
“Working,” Quent murmured, while they were still out of earshot. “While her world is crashing in.”
But Nick wasn’t surprised. He’d seen more than one survivor of death or violence dig into a project as a coping mechanism. Hell, it was the reason he had a gourmet kitchen and deck.
She kept her face down as they talked, but behind that serene beauty was exhaustion. She hadn’t had much sleep.
“I don’t know what else I can tell you,” she said. Nick had seated himself on one of the tall stools beside the work table, and Quentin remained standing. “Of course he was upset. Erin Sims said such terrible things. But I never dreamed he would…” She stopped, closed her eyes.
“Margaret,” Nick said, “we need to look at the possibility that maybe Jack
didn’t
take his own life.”
Her hands went still. “Did the coroner find something?”
“The coroner isn’t involved—there’s still no body. We always take a second look at a suicide, that’s all,” Nick said, only half a lie. “And,” he said, in a tone that was carefully neutral, “we always go to the spouse.”
Her eyes flared. “You’re looking at
me
?” She squared her shoulders. “If Jack didn’t take his own life, you know who did.”
Nick wagged his head. “She was at her motel. The night clerk verifies that she picked up a package and a custodian saw her go to the vending machines. Her computer also shows that she was hooked up to the motel’s Internet during the hours when Jack’s car went over that ledge.”
“Computers can be fixed. That’s not a good alibi, is it?”
“It’s good enough to make us look at other possibilities,” Nick said. “So think of someone else. Who was around in the past couple days giving him a hard time?”
Her pupils darted away and Nick closed in a little. He could see the tension in her spine, but she kept fingering the clay, smearing away the etching she’d just done and starting over, molding on a ridge along the outer perimeter of the mask’s left cheekbone. “I’m not trying to be hard on you, Margaret,” he said. “But you have to know something like this looks bad. You told us yourself that your marriage was lacking. We know you and Jack—”
“Look around, Nick,” she snapped. “I’m here, with this
huge house and business and my own business, too, and you’re standing there insinuating that I want to handle it all alone. That’s crazy, do you know that?”
“You two weren’t intimate,” Nick said.
“No,” she admitted. “But we were pretty good business partners.”
“Lauren McAllister wasn’t—”
“The only lover he had?” Nick’s brows went up and she laughed—a nasty sound. “So you think that after all these years, I suddenly realized he’d been unfaithful and I killed him. Is that it? Sheriff, I lived with that man for twenty years. For most of it, he got his sex elsewhere.”
Nick tried not to be superficial. But looking at Margaret, with her startling beauty, and imagining that beauty in her younger years, he couldn’t fathom any husband of hers seeking other women. “If you knew Jack was cheating on you, why did you stay with him?”
She met Nick’s eyes. “I told you I didn’t love him. But I didn’t kill him. I don’t know where the gun is. I don’t know where Jack is. I only know where his truck is because you told me.”
“Then give me something else,” Nick pressed. “Something, anything, that’s been unusual the past day or two. Any guests who were unhappy, anyone who called and harassed you, anyone who came by just to be a curious spectator.”
Her brows drew together.
“What?” Nick asked.
She shook her head, as if whatever she remembered didn’t make sense. “The Engel girl.”
Quent straightened. “What?”
“She came here, early yesterday morning.”
“Why?” Nick asked.
“I don’t know. When I called to her, she ran off. But…” Margaret dug into the pocket of her apron, came up with a scrap of paper. “She dropped this.”
Nick took it, found a scrawl of words in ballpoint pen:
Rebecca, meet me. I have something for you. 8:00. J.
Nick felt like he’d been hit with a brick. He looked at Quent and fury pulsed through his veins. “Jack was screwing Rebecca Engel?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret said, without emotion. “If he was, I didn’t know it.”
“Christ, Margaret, why didn’t you show us this yesterday?”
“Yesterday, you weren’t looking for suspects in his murder.”
“What time did she leave?”
“Around seven-thirty, I think.”
“Okay,” Nick said. Something horrible took root in his brain.
Huggins has a type… You even introduced me to one this morning. Rebecca Engel.
He caught Quentin’s eye and knew he was thinking much the same, then pushed from the work table and grasped at one last desperate thought.
“Margaret, how big of a stretch would it be for you to imagine that Jack staged his death himself? That he’s still out there?”
She thought for only a second. “Not too much of a stretch, I’m afraid.”
The Angelmaker stepped to the window, watching Nick Mann leave skid marks on the drive.
Scrambling.
Like a gerbil in a maze, hitting a new wall at every turn.
A thrill vibrated in the air and the Angelmaker nearly laughed aloud. The sheriff of Hopewell was smarter than
the average bear, but had no idea what he was looking at. He couldn’t see a thing.
Mann’s car sped down the road. Poor guy, trying to find Jack. Jack was history.
Of course, as soon as Nick learned that Rebecca Engel was missing, things would pick up. For the moment, no one even knew yet that Rebecca was gone or where she was: All trussed up with nowhere to go.
Another smile. Everything had gone like clockwork this morning. Not a single light on Rebecca’s street as the Angelmaker popped the trunk and loaded her in, then zapped her again and carried her to the workshop. Now, she lay on the work table, face up, wrapped in duct tape with her lips sealed tight.
Ready.
A shame to have left her there, but it might have seemed odd to Rosa not to come by the kitchen in the morning. No need to raise any eyebrows by doing anything out of the ordinary. Rosa hadn’t said a word about Calvin, which meant Calvin hadn’t said anything about his early morning outing, but the Angelmaker hadn’t expected that he would. Now, with Nick gone again, the only thing left was to go through the trash bag Calvin had brought and find a receipt for something, anything, that would make sense to buy so early in the morning.
Then, get to the clay. An angel was waiting.
Nick dropped Quentin off at headquarters and stopped by the Eatery to tell Leni he wanted to see Rebecca. He didn’t need Leni’s permission; Rebecca wasn’t a minor. But it was one of the concessions to courtesy he made living in a small town. Nick had a theory about big cities and crime: Anonymity mattered. In a place like L.A., you
could spend an entire day on the streets with near certainty you’d see no one you recognized. But in towns like Hopewell, no one was anonymous. You never flipped off the driver behind you because it might be your preacher, your English teacher, your father-in-law. Keeping up those relationships was key, and going behind a mother’s back to talk to her daughter—even a grown daughter—would have been an unnecessary power play.
Of course, he didn’t let on to Leni that this talk wasn’t about Ace.
“She’s not working this morning,” Leni told him, untying her apron behind her back. “I’ll come with you.”
Nick gave her a lift to the house. He frowned when he saw Luke in the driveway, leaning against his car.
Leni gave Luke a hug—they’d been in the same class at school—then Nick said, “What are you doing here?”
“Erin wanted a ride here.”
“What’s going on?” Leni asked.
“Your daughter called the sheriff’s office and tracked Erin down, wanting to talk,” Luke said.
Leni’s face lit up. “I was hoping Becca would come around and talk to Erin.”
Luke’s brow wrinkled. “Okay. But it wasn’t Becca who called. It was Katie.”
Katie?
Nick’s brain stumbled on that. He followed Leni inside, with Luke trailing behind. Katie and Erin sat at the kitchen table.
Leni said, “Katie, why aren’t you in school?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Geez, Mom. You never cared when
Becca
used to skip school.”
“Where is she?” Nick asked.
“I don’t know,” Katie snapped, and Nick wondered if
he’d ever heard her snap before. She was usually peaches and cream. “In bed, probably.”
Nick spoke to Leni, low. “Go check.”
She blinked, and the color poured from her face. She raced up the stairs.
The air stood still and a moment later she came back and grasped the stairwell. “She isn’t there,” she said, her voice shaking. “Oh, God, Becca isn’t there.”
Dread slammed into Nick. He pulled out his cell phone and found Wart Hogue. “Get in touch with Crawford County,” he said. “Find out where Ace Holmes is.”
Leni nearly wailed. “I told you this would happen. Why couldn’t you have kept him locked up? He’s a monst—”
“Leni,” Erin said. “Come sit down.”
Nick turned to Katie. “Honey, do you know if your sister went over to the Calloways’ yesterday morning? Early, between seven and eight.”
Katie swallowed. “No,” she said. “But I did.”
N
ICK’S FACE TURNED
thunderous. Erin put a hand on his arm.
“I was just getting ready to call you, Nick. Katie has something to tell you.” She glanced at Leni. “It’s pretty bad.”
“What is it? Where’s Becca?”
Luke leaned in to Nick. “I’m gonna to get going.”
“Wait,” Nick said. Luke stopped, and Nick seemed to be struggling with something. “You got some free time?”
“What do you need?”
“I wanna know where Ace Holmes is.
Un
officially.”
Luke flashed a cold smile. “I’ll call you,” he said, and left.
Erin waited while Leni and Nick each took a seat at the kitchen table. The silence was thick, except for a steady buzz from the fluorescent lights overhead. Katie manhandled a mug of hot chocolate.
“Sweetie.” Nick touched Katie’s hand and Erin’s skin tightened. He was big and he was rough, and he was more often a seething storm trooper than comforting caretaker, but when he did that teddy bear thing, it messed with Erin’s heart. “Do you have something to tell me?”
Katie took a breath. “I went to Hilltop House yesterday.”
Nick didn’t react—just waited, studying her, his long, square-tipped fingers laced together on the table. “Why?”
Katie studied her hot chocolate and Erin said, “Would it be easier if I told them?”
A nod.
Erin looked at Nick. He wasn’t going to like this. “Katie believes that Jack Calloway and Rebecca…” She let silence finish it.