very special and he can leave his body.”
She swallowed hard. “I know. I’ve known for a long time. And he’s very strong. And fast.”
“Exactly. And when he leaves his body, he’s even stronger and much faster.”
With a gentle nod, she let me know she was following.
“For that reason,” I told her, hoping I wasn’t about to break her heart, “he has decided to let his corporeal body pass away.”
Her red-rimmed eyes blinked in stunned silence before my meaning sank in. When it did, a hand shot up to cover her mouth and she stared at me in disbelief. “He can’t do that,” she said, her voice airy with grief.
I squeezed the hand still nestled within mine. “I agree. I need to find him, but he won’t tell me where his body is. He’s … injured,” I said, sidestepping the truth. She didn’t need to know how dire the situation was. How much time he didn’t have.
“What? How?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied. “But I have to find him before it’s too late. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
“No,” she said, her voice breaking as tears ran freely down her face. “But the U.S. marshal said he’s in a lot of trouble.”
My blood turned cold in my veins. Nobody, not even the state, knew Kim was Reyes’s pseudo-sister. She was completely off the grid. No contact. Reyes had insisted. And there were absolutely no records whatsoever that would connect the two. None that I knew of, anyway.
“And now this,” she continued, unaware of my distress. “Why? Why would he just leave me like this?”
Either that marshal was very good at his job, or he had inside information. I was going with the inside information because nobody was that good.
I wrapped her hand into both of mine. “Kim, I promise I will do everything possible to find him.”
She pulled me into a hug. I squeezed gently, afraid she would break in my arms.
I zigzagged through traffic on I-40, wondering how the bloody hell a U.S. marshal found out about Kim. The thought left me boggled. She was not easy to track down, and I had known about her beforehand. There just weren’t many people on Earth who did.
My phone sang out in the ringtone version of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” I opened it, knowing Cook was on the other end. “Charley’s House of Ill Repute.”
“You need to pick me up,” she said.
“Are you trying to sell your body on the street again? Haven’t we talked about this?”
“A few weeks before Mimi moved to Albuquerque, a girl from her class disappeared.”
I downshifted and eased Misery into the right-hand lane to exit. “What happened?” I asked above the honking and shrill screams. “Need therapy much?” I yelled back.
“Nobody knows. They never found her body.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yeah. It’s really sad. According to a five-year-old news article, her parents still live in Ruiz. They’ve lived in the same house for twenty years, hoping their daughter would find her way home.”
That was quite common, actually. When parents had no closure, they were often afraid to move for fear of their child returning to find them gone. “Closure, good or bad, is not overrated.”
“And guess what her name was.”
“Um—”
“Hana Insinga.”
Ah. The
“Here’s the address,” Cookie said, climbing into Misery.
“Who’s going to man the phones?” I didn’t really care, but somebody had to give Cook a hard time, damn it. It may as well be me.
“I’m forwarding all the calls to my cell.” She had a stack of papers, file folders, and her laptop with her as well.
“It’s a good thing. I’m not paying you to tour the country like a rock star.”
“Do you pay me? I feel more like a slave.”
“Please, you’re way cheaper than a slave. You provide your own shelter, pay your own bills.”
Ever the multitasker, she stuck her tongue out and clicked her seat belt at the same time. Show-off. I saw an opening and floored it onto Central. Timing was everything. The files flew off Cookie’s lap. She grabbed for them then yelped. “Paper cut!”
“That’s what you get for sticking your tongue out at me.”
Sucking on the side of her finger, she cast a vicious scowl before pulling her hand back to get a good look at her injury. “Does workman’s comp cover paper cuts?”
“Do chickens lay snowballs?”
Just over two hours later, we were sitting in a charming living room in Ruiz with a lovely woman named Hy who served us Kool-Aid in teacups. Hy looked part Asian, most likely Korean, but her husband had been a blond- haired, blue-eyed pilot in the navy, and they’d met when he was on leave in Corpus Christi, Hy’s hometown set in the deep south of Texas. And she had the twang to prove it. She was tiny with a round face and graying black hair cut in a bob along her jaw. The white blouse and khaki pants she wore helped her seem younger than her years, though she looked as delicate as the teacups she handed us.
“Thank you,” I said when she offered me a napkin.
“You want cookies?” she asked, her Texas accent at odds with her Asian features.
“No, thank you,” Cookie said.
“I’ll be back.” She rushed off to the kitchen, her flip-flops padding along the carpet as she walked.
“Can I just take her home with me?” Cookie asked. “She’s adorable.”
“You can, but that’s called kidnapping and is actually frowned upon by many law enforcement agencies.” I chuckled into my teacup when she offered me a scowl. Apparently, paper cuts made her grumpy.
Hy trod back with a plate of cookies in her hands. I smiled as she handed it to me. “Thank you so much.”
“Those are good cookies,” she said, sitting in a recliner opposite us.
After placing one on my napkin, I handed the plate to Cook. “Mrs. Insinga, can you tell us what happened?”
We’d told her we were here to ask her about her daughter when we introduced ourselves on her doorstep. She was kind enough to let us in.
“That was so long ago,” she said, withdrawing inside herself. “I can still smell her hair.”
I put my cup down. “Do you have any idea what happened?”
“Nobody knows,” she said, her voice faltering. “We asked everybody. The sheriff interviewed all the kids. Nobody knew anything. She just never came home. Like she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
“Did she go out with a friend that night?” The pain of her daughter’s disappearance resurfaced, emanated out of Hy. It was disorienting. It made my heart pound, my palms sweat.
“She wasn’t supposed to leave. She snuck out her window, so I have no idea if she was with anyone.”
Hy was struggling to control her emotions, and my heart went out to her.
“Can you tell me who her closest friends were?” I asked. Hopefully we would at least leave with a few contacts.
But Hy shook her head in disappointment. “We’d lived here only a few weeks. I hadn’t met any of her friends yet, though she did talk about a couple of girls from school. I’m not positive they were close — Hana was painfully shy — but she said one girl was very nice to her. After Hana disappeared, the girl moved to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother.”
“Mimi Marshal,” I said sadly.
She nodded. “Yes. I told the sheriff they were friends. He said he questioned all the high school children.
