house.
Her dogs followed her up onto the steps. They milled around while she opened the door. They stood there, chastened, while she told them to stay outside.
She went to bed. She slept. When she woke up, it was early afternoon. She heard rocks pop off car tires— someone
She got up, not bothering about her wrinkled clothes, her tank top and jeans. It was a truck like any other around here, a white Ford. But she didn’t know this particular one.
She opened the door and the dogs milled around.
The two little terriers, the black lab. The two mutts, one of them spotted. The coon hound.
The truck bumped along the road toward her.
Six dogs, not seven. Jaimie was missing the familiar blue-gray, white, and black—her prize.
Her consolation prize.
Adele was missing.
The guy was just a guy, looking at various pieces of land around here. He asked her if she knew of any. “Just a couple of acres, kind of like a homestead,” he said. He had an open, friendly face. Straw cowboy hat. Jeans, denim shirt. Your average middle-aged guy who maybe grew up rural and now wanted a small place of his own in God’s country. She’d met a million like him. He was way too old for her. But she wasn’t thinking about sex right now. Just get rid of him. Adele was missing. She had to be around here somewhere. But she could be hurt. Not like her not to come when she was called.
Jaimie scanned the yard as he talked, bending her ear with useless babble. On and on and on, as if he enjoyed boring her to death. When all she wanted to do was find Adele. She tuned him out, her eyes searching the grassland, hoping to see some light blue and black and white. Looking for Adele. Maybe she was in the barn. Maybe…
She wished the guy would just get in his fucking truck and go.
He didn’t seem to get the hint. She told him about a place up the road where she’d seen a FOR SALE sign. Just
Finally he did. In the truck, he honked the horn once and gave her a salute.
Jaimie barely noticed. She was too busy looking for her dog.
Tess was now certain that the lion was purchased to kill Farley. The name on the credit card was made up, but DeKoven had been too cute about it. She looked up the word “Dom” in an online dictionary. “Dominus” meant “lord.” And Derring. She knew that “derring” was part of the term “derring-do.” Her mother had used that term all the time. It meant, basically, doing something that was daring. So it could be that Michael was saying he was superior to others—a lord—and he was, at least in terms of wealth and privilege. Michael was the scion of a wealthy and important family. And he would certainly think of himself as having plenty of “derring-do.”
Old-fashioned term for a young guy.
Derring-do—maybe it was an expression he learned from his mother or father. It took a whole hell of a lot of derring-do to go around the country killing people because you thought you could get away with it.
She wondered where the animal was now. If he had been in the cage with Farley, if he had been driven out of hunger to eat Farley, then there could be evidence somewhere.
The cage was the most likely piece of evidence left.
But how to find it? Michael DeKoven had money and means to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do.
He could have killed the mountain lion and buried him. He could have destroyed the lion cage. Break it up for kindling. Burn it. Melt down the bars. Leave it in a landfill, or push it down a mountain. Plenty of places to do that. There were infinite ways he could dispose of the evidence.
Trying to find the cage, trying to find the mountain lion—that would be like looking for the needle in the haystack. There was so much open county. Forest land. Canyons and washes out in the boonies. Junkyards. Trash heaps.
The lion was gone. The cage was gone. Tess knew it.
She was convinced now that DeKoven was killing people who had previously escaped death. People who should have died, but lived instead.
If it was a game, it was a rich kid’s game. Michael was in his midthirties, but Tess thought of him as a kid. Look at his toys. Look at that car, the Fisker Karma. Look at those expensive paintings. She thought of Jaimie as a kid, too. The two of them in it together?
That left the second-youngest, the girl. Brayden.
And Chad in Laguna.
Could all four of them be involved?
What were the odds of that?
Four siblings, in it together? She grouped them by age. Michael and Jaimie were closest, at thirty-five and thirty-four. Then came Chad at thirty-two—two years’ difference between Jaimie and Chad, and three years’ difference between Michael and Chad. From Chad to Brayden, the youngest, it was three years. Which made Brayden five years younger than Jaimie and six years younger than Michael.
Six years’ difference in age might make a difference. Michael might not have included Brayden in this.
Tess hadn’t met Brayden. She hadn’t met Chad, either.
She wondered which one of the family had tagged Alec Sheppard on top of the Hilton Atlanta.
CHAPTER 32
Tess collected her bag at the Tucson International Airport carousel and walked out to her car. She saw she had a message from Alec Sheppard. She punched in his number as she walked.
“Mr. Sheppard? I thought when people sat across from each other at a picnic table and listened to a band called the Blasphemers, we could at least call each other by our first names.”
“I’m ever the professional.”
“No doubt in my mind. I haven’t heard from anybody and wanted to know if there was a—what do you call it in cop lingo? Break in the case? Anything on Steve Barkman?”
“Nothing yet.” She wasn’t about to tell him about the micro disc. “I plan to talk to Detective Tedesco later today. Are you still in town?”
“As a matter of fact I am. I’m looking at houses.”
“Houses?”
“I’m thinking of relocating.”
“Relocating?”
“You know, as in moving here. To Tucson.”
“Why?”
“I like it here, and I don’t need to live in Houston…you have a problem with that? Me being in your jurisdiction?”
“Technically, you’d be in Cheryl Tedesco’s jurisdiction. So what kind of place are you looking for?”
“When I was a college student, I thought it would be pretty cool to live in one of those neighborhoods with the old houses, like the ones in Encanto. So I’m standing in front of this pink adobe pueblo-style monstrosity and I was wondering if you’d give me advice, since you’re a local. Wait, let me send you a picture of it.”
Tess’s heart sped up. She cleared her throat. “That’s not necessary. I’m here in Tucson. I could meet you there.”
Tess drove north on Palo Verde and ended up twenty minutes later outside a very pink house surrounded by
