Dead end. Or not. “It must have pissed you off.”
“What?”
“The way she, uh, made ends meet?”
He shrugged. “It did, it didn’t. Wasn’t like I wasn’t playing the field too.”
“You didn’t have a problem with it?”
“Not really.”
“So Ross Gunther was just one of the ways she, uh, made ends meet.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“And you didn’t care about what she did. You weren’t a jealous boyfriend.”
“You got it.”
Broome spread his hands. “So why did you get into an altercation with him?”
“Because,” Mannion said, “Gunther roughed Stacy up.”
Broome felt his pulse starting to race. He thought about what Cassie said, about Stewart Green abusing her. He thought about what Tawny said, about Carlton Flynn abusing her. And now he had Stacy Paris and Ross Gunther.
A pattern.
Except that Ross Gunther was dead. Of course, Stewart Green and Carlton Flynn could be dead, probably were. And then there were all the other men who’d gone missing. Where the hell had they gone?
“How about you, Mannion? You ever rough her up?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever hit Stacy? And if you lie to me even once, I’m gone.”
Mannion looked away, made a face. “Once in a while. No big thing.”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” Another prince, Broome thought. “After your trial, what happened to Stacy Paris?”
“How would I know?” Mannion said. “You think, what, she writes me or something?”
“Is that her real name? Stacy Paris?”
“Doubt it. Why?”
“I need to find her. Do you have any clue at all where she might be?”
“No. She was from Georgia. Not Atlanta. That other city. Begins with an S. More south, she said, but she had the sexiest accent.”
“Savannah?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Okay, thanks for your help.”
Broome started to rise. Mannion looked at him with the eyes of a dog about to be put down in the pound. Broome stopped. This man had been locked up for eighteen years for a crime he probably didn’t commit. True, Mannion had been no saint. He had a fairly long rap sheet, including domestic abuse, and chances were, if he hadn’t been caught up in this mess, he’d probably be in prison on some other charge. Mannion wouldn’t be out doing good, working for the poor or making the world a better place for his fellow man.
“Mr. Mannion?”
Mannion waited.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re innocent. I don’t have enough to prove it yet. I probably don’t have enough yet to get you a new trial. But I’m going to keep working on it, okay?”
Tears ran freely down Mannion’s face. He didn’t try to wipe them away. He didn’t make a sound.
“I’ll be back,” Broome said, heading for the door.
The walk out seemed longer than the walk in, the corridor longer and more narrow. The guard who accompanied him said, “Did he give you a hard time?”
“No, not at all. He was very cooperative.”
At the security checkpoint, Broome collected his keys and cell phone. When he turned the phone back on, the thing started buzzing like crazy. Broome could see that there were at least a dozen phone messages, including one from Erin.
Oh, this couldn’t be good.
He called Erin first. She picked up on the first ring. “Broome?”
“How bad?” he asked.
“Very.”
22
“Take the next exit,” Barbie said.
They were on their way to the home of Dave and Megan Pierce in Kasselton. When they rented the car, the girl behind the counter had been overly flirtatious with Ken, angering Barbie. Ken had pretended to be upset about it, but he loved when Barbie got possessive. To soothe her hurt feelings he let Barbie pick out the car-a white Mazda Miata.
“The first exit or the second?” Ken asked.
“The second. Then take your third right.”
Ken frowned. “I don’t understand why we can’t use a GPS.”
“I read a study,” she said.
“Oh?”
“The study stated that global positioning systems-that’s what GPS stands for-”
“I know that,” Ken said.
“Well, GPSs harm our sense of direction and thus our brains,” Barbie said.
“How?”
“This particular study found that an overreliance on such technologies will result in our using our spatial capabilities in the hippocampus-that’s a part of our brain-”
“I know that too.”
“Well, we use the hippocampus less when we rely on GPSs, and that makes it shrink. The hippocampus is needed for things like memory and navigation. Atrophy could cause dementia or early Alzheimer’s.”
“And you believe all that?” Ken asked.
“I do,” Barbie said. “When it comes to the brain, I believe in the old adage: Use it or lose it.”
“Interesting,” Ken said, “though I don’t see how your reading directions works my hippocampus any harder than looking at a GPS.”
“It does. I’ll show you the article later.”
“Okay, good. I’d like that. What direction now?”
“No direction,” Barbie said. She pointed up ahead. “That’s their house.”
Megan ’s first thought when she awoke: Pain. A jackhammer ripped through her skull. Her mouth felt dry. She had slept the sleep of the dead and now arose with what felt a lot like a hangover. It wasn’t, of course. She hadn’t woken up with a big-time hangover since, well, it had been a long time. Pressure and stress, she figured.
Last night, she and Dave had fallen asleep-collapsed was more like it-in spoon position, his arm under her waist. They slept like that a lot. At some point in the night, of course, Dave’s arm always went numb, stuck in that waist nook, and he gently extracted it. She reached now for her husband, needing on some primitive level to feel him, but he wasn’t there. She looked past where he slept to the new digital clock with the double iPod dock.
The time was 8:17 A.M.
Megan’s eyes widened. She swung her legs around, her feet hitting the floor. She wondered when the last time she’d slept in past eight on a school day was, but this already seemed to be a day full of comparisons to her distant past. She threw water on her face and a bathrobe on her body. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, her daughter, Kaylie, gave her a knowing, teenage smirk.
