“Throw me his bag,” she insisted, leaning through the driver’s side. “He had it with him at the nursing home. I gotta see what was so important for him to carry.”
Harper’s bag got tossed onto the driver’s seat, and Jess tore into it, searching for any clue where Seth had been taken. The canvas knapsack was damp from the rain, and the main compartment held something heavy, covered in white plastic to protect it. She unrolled the outer covering to see what he had inside, but Alexa’s voice distracted her.
“Seth left his cell phone. Why would he do that?” she questioned. “If he’d left an open line, we might have had another way to track him…unless he didn’t want a crowd.”
Engrossed in her own find, Jess barely heard what Alexa said, but from the corner of her eye, she saw that Harper’s cell had been left open and illuminated a small spot on the floorboard. Alexa had picked it up and punched buttons until something caught her eye.
“Jessie, you better see this. Maybe this is why he didn’t want a crowd.” With a grave look on her face, Alexa held Seth’s phone toward her. A text message came up on his display, the letters all in caps.
I CAN’T LIVE WITH WHAT I DID. I’M SORRY, FOR MY FATHER MOST OF ALL.
“What the hell is that?” Jess hadn’t realized that she’d spoken, her outrage finding voice.
“He sent it to you and others.” Alexa hesitated. “You think he’s suicidal?”
“No way in hell,” she insisted. “You didn’t see his face. At the nursing home, he was scared shitless about Max. And he didn’t kill Mandy or Jade. You don’t know him like I do.”
“Relax. I believe you.” Alexa narrowed her eyes. “That means someone is covering their ass…to make it look as if he’d take his own life and confess in the process. A nice tidy package for the cops.”
Jess returned to rummaging through Harper’s bag. Plastic crinkled under her touch as a flurry of drizzling rain pelted her neck and damp hair. Everything was conspiring against her, even Mother Nature.
She pulled out the contents of the plastic bag and laid it on the driver’s seat. But when she got a good look at it, shock gripped her, and she gasped. Air sucked into her lungs with a harsh sting.
“Oh, God. No.”
“What is it?” Alexa raised her voice. “What did you find?”
Jess couldn’t make herself speak. Repulsed by what she found, she pulled back her hands as if she’d touched a hot stove. Her skin tingled with heat. And time stopped. Everything around her faded to nothing. A face that had haunted her past came back from the depths of her shame. And the overwhelming feeling of being powerless rushed from her memory, too easily reborn. The sensation had swallowed her, suffocating her in its vacuum.
She had opened Max Jenkins’s case file, the one Seth had told her about.
“No…this can’t be…happening.” Her own voice sounded as if it came from a long, empty tunnel—the voice of a stranger.
And staring down at the old booking photo of Danny Ray Millstone triggered a surge of images from her past, shadowy memories that were just as threatening as if they’d happened only yesterday. His dead eyes stared back with the same menace.
She felt hands on her and jumped.
“Don’t…touch me,” she pleaded, cowering against a hard surface. Her body shook, and the nausea returned.
“Are you…” a woman’s distant voice.
But she couldn’t shake her deeply rooted fog until strong hands gripped her shoulders and shook her. That’s when the voice returned.
“Jessie, are you okay? What’s wrong with you?”
She blinked, and the blurred face of a blond woman emerged from the dark. It took a moment for her to recognize Alexa Marlowe.
“Oh, God.” She winced. “What happened?”
“You zoned on me, Jessie. What’s going on?” Alexa asked, standing next to her. “And what’s with this? It looks like a cop’s casebook?”
Jess looked down where the woman pointed.
“Yeah, it is. Max Jenkins’s case file. Seth’s father.” Jess shut her eyes tight and took a deep breath as she said, “But we don’t have time for a trip down memory lane. We gotta find Harper.”
Seth had told her about his father’s casebook, but actually seeing it had an impact she never could have imagined. She couldn’t afford to let that happen again, yet she knew that would be impossible. It would be no different than telling her body to stop breathing.
Slowly, her brain started to function again as Alexa said, “We should canvass the neighborhood. See if anyone saw anything.”
“Not sure we have the time for that either,” she muttered. “Besides—in the ’hood—everyone is visually impaired when it comes to being a witness. But maybe Sam can help. I’ll give her a call.”
She punched the speed dial on her cell, and while it rang, she turned toward Alexa, and asked, “You have the nearest street address or intersection on your laptop? I’ll need that.”
She followed the woman to her rental car and looked over her shoulder as Alexa worked the keys on her laptop. A map of the area enlarged on the computer monitor as Sam’s recorded voice came over the line.
“Damn it. It’s rolling into voice mail.” Jess left a message, giving the location of the van and what she could share over the phone. She tried Sam’s home and work numbers, but had no better luck, so she left similar messages.
“I noticed you left out the suicide text message,” Alexa said. When Jess glared at her, she shrugged. “Hey, I just wanted you to know I’m keeping up.”
“This isn’t about suicide,” she explained. “I don’t want the cops to think they have a confession and get the wrong idea.”
“Sister, we blew past wrong a long time ago. What now?”
Good question. The thought of hitting a dead end left a hole in her heart. Whoever had done this had played it real cagey. Someone had Harper drop the van at a different location and taken him where they would have more privacy…and no trail to follow. Frustration wedged a lump in her throat.
But as she stood in the middle of the street, she stared at the houses down the block, and deja vu hit her hard. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She rushed to Alexa’s laptop to confirm what she suspected while Seth’s words at the nursing home replayed in her head.
At the time, she thought the past he’d been talking about had been his own, but maybe he had given her a clue without her realizing it. She knew that she was grasping at straws, but that was all she had. Jess clicked and scrolled through Alexa’s laptop until she got her answer, staring down at the street map on the screen—the tracking beacon dead center.
“Unbelievable.” Jess took a jagged breath. “I think I know where Seth is.”
She stared into the deep shadows on the east side of the street, a narrow gap between two buildings. The moment she did, her heart hammered a staccato beat—an undeniable reaction she couldn’t stop. She didn’t know if she was ready to do this. But it wasn’t about her now—at least it helped her to believe that.
Seth needed her and that’s what mattered. And trusting her instincts was the only way to go. She didn’t have a choice. With eyes fixed, and without a word, she headed into the darkness and didn’t look back. If she explained things to Alexa—and heard the words herself—she might not have the courage to do what must be done.
So she followed a path she’d never been—with dead certainty—that she’d taken her first steps toward a waking nightmare.
“Jessie?” Alexa called. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
Jessie hadn’t said a word. She only walked away and got swallowed by the dark. Drizzle sent a shiver crawling over Alexa’s skin, but Jessie had more to do with that. The bounty hunter had looked dazed and shaken, channeling demons Alexa knew all too well herself. She locked the vehicles and took off after her, gun in hand.
A nasty feeling nudged her gut, instinct telling her she was going into this blind. More was at play, and she didn’t have a clue how to help, but sticking close and keeping her mouth shut felt like the right thing to do.
The darkness and the dying rain made it tough for her to follow, but she kept the bounty hunter in sight, staying a few steps behind. They squeezed through cyclone fences, trespassed over stone walls, and crept down alleys with Jessie making a beeline toward something only she could see. Many houses and converted apartments
