If he’d let me finish a freaking sentence, we’d get through this much faster. “Wait,” I said, walking to the window. “Is my Jeep safe out there?”
“Honey, I could put a cup of gold out there and it’d be safe. They know not to mess with what’s mine.”
“You seemed pretty worried about me,” I countered.
He smiled, showing his disastrous collection of teeth. “You ain’t mine, unfortunately. But you’re in my house. They’ll leave your Jeep be as long as you’re out of here before dark.”
With several hours left in the day, I had every intention of being just that.
“So, you ain’t selling anything?”
“No, I’m a private investigator looking for someone you know.”
“Really?” His interest piqued, but in an amused way. “You don’t look like no dick.”
“Well, I am. And I’m looking for—” I paused and flipped through my notepad to give him a minute to let his emotions level out. I needed a clean read. “—a Mr. Earl Walker.”
He balked, both mentally and physically. “You about ten years too late, missy. You weren’t exactly his type anyway.”
I knew that. I knew Earl’s type, and it was neither female nor grown. And he wasn’t lying. He truly believed Earl Walker was dead. Hell, maybe he was.
With two scratched off the list, it looked like I was going to Corona.
“Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Gibbs.”
“Ain’t no problem. If you find him, tell him Virgil says hey.” He laughed into the bottle as he took another swig.
“I’ll do that.”
I climbed into Misery with several sets of eyes watching, including Virgil’s. He wasn’t a monster like his friend Earl, but I doubted I’d hang with him anytime soon.
I called Cook to let her know where I was headed.
“Hey, boss.”
“I struck out.”
“Oh, was he good looking?”
“No. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, if you asked him out and he said no.”
“Not that kind of struck out. With the guy from Reyes’s list.”
“Oh, bummer. What now?”
“I was going to head out to Corona, but I think I’ll go talk to Kim Millar first.”
“Reyes’s sister?”
“That’s the one.”
Reyes had a pseudo-sister, a girl he’d grown up with, and he cared for her deeply. While Reyes had been kidnapped from his birth parents as a small child and sold to Earl Walker, Kim had been given to the man. When she was two, her drug-addicted mother dumped her on Earl Walker’s doorstep, the man she suspected was Kim’s father, then died days later. Had Kim’s mother known what kind of monster Earl Walker was, I could only hope she would never have left her daughter with him. Walker didn’t sexually abuse her, as I’d feared. He did the next best thing. He used her to control Reyes, literally starved her to get what he wanted out of him. And while we never discussed exactly what it was he wanted from Reyes, the implications of sexual abuse were all there.
“I’ll head to Corona after I talk to her,” I said.
“It’s getting late, and it’ll take you a couple of hours to get there.”
“Yeah, but I need to get this done, and since I can’t do anything about the doctor without more info, I’ll do this.” I could hear her pressing buttons on the fax machine, then rustling a paper or two.
After a moment, she said, “Holy cow, he was there.”
“What? Who was where? The doctor?”
“Yep, just got it. A receipt from the Sand and Sun Hotel in the Cayman Islands. One Mr. Keith Jacoby checked in on the very day Ingrid Yost was found dead. Paid for one night with cash and never visited again.”
“Oh, my god, Cook. We got him.”
“You need to call your FBI agent.”
“Okay, I’ll try her in a bit. Keep digging.”
“You got it. Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.
“I resent that remark.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Well, I might. You don’t know.”
“Do, too.”
“I’ll call you when I get out to Corona.”
“’Kay. And tell me what Agent Carson says. And tell me how Reyes’s sister is. And how much coffee have you had?”
“Seventeen thousand cups.”
“Don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”
I glanced in the rearview to make sure my handy-dandy tail was doing his job. Yep. Right on my freaking ass. I hated being tailed. What if I wanted to run naked through a wheat field? Or pick up a male prostitute?
“This guy ain’t moving.”
Startled, I turned to Angel, who’d popped into the passenger’s seat. “Angel, you little shit. What guy?”
He shrugged. “That doctor you sent me to watch. He’s all boo-hooing over his wife. Are you sure he did it? I mean, he seems really upset.”
Geez, the guy was good. “Of course he did it. He was drowning in guilt when he came in.”
“Maybe he was guilty of something else, like cheating on his taxes.”
“Dude, I’m not wrong. Tax guilt is completely different. And unless I’m gravely mistaken, he killed his first wife, too.”
“Okay, but I’d rather hang with you.”
“Fine, but just for a few minutes. He didn’t give you any leads? Make a suspicious phone call? Go out to the shed? Down to the basement? Meet a woman in the alley and have hot animal sex? Maybe he’s having an affair.”
He tossed me an irritated glare. “I would have noticed.”
“Just checking.” I threw out a
“Besides, there are feds all over that place. He could have hot animal sex if he wanted to, but he’d have an audience.”
“Did you check his property? Maybe there’s some freshly turned dirt. Or a new garden. That’s always popular with serial killers.”
“Nothing. The man’s clean. Who’s that guy following you?”
“Uncle Bob put a tail on me.”
Angel smiled. “I like Uncle Bob. He reminds me of my dad.”
“Really? That’s so sweet.”
“Yeah, not really, but if I knew who my dad was, I think he’d be like Uncle Bob.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “I bet you’re right.”
We drove in silence a few miles before Angel tossed me a “See ya,” and popped out again.
I stopped for coffee at a twenty-four-hour convenience store, then booked it over to Kim Millar’s apartment complex, flashed my ID to the guard at the gate — then offered him a ten-spot if he refused entrance to the black pickup following me — and parked close to her door. I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. Admittedly, this was more curiosity than honest-to-goodness investigative work. Did she also believe Earl Walker was still alive? Did she know something Reyes didn’t? According to Kim, she and Reyes were in a zero-contact agreement. For her own safety, Kim’s existence was never brought up in any of the court documents. Because she had a different last name, it was easy for her to fade into the background, at Reyes’s insistence.
From what I could tell, Kim worked from home as a medical transcriptionist. No idea what that entailed, but it sounded really important. However, I’d been to see her twice, and after getting a glimpse of her life, her pristine
