“What do you suggest I do?”
“I take it she doesn’t know you found the ring?” his father asked.
He shook his head.
“Show her that you painstakingly took the time to find it and keep it so that she knows you wanted her to come back to you. Just because you still love each other and are compatible in bed, that doesn’t equal forever.” His father reached across the table and tapped his finger against Jag’s chest. “Letting her see and feel what you’ve been hoping for all this time will let her know that your life has stalled without her in it, and maybe she’ll be able to see that she came back for one reason only.”
Jag waited for a long minute for his father to tell him what that reason was, but his father just sat there and stared at him. Jag let out a long breath. “Are you going to clue me in to why she really came back to Seattle?”
“You really need someone to fill in the blank, son?”
Jag sipped his coffee. His pulse pounded in his head. “I hope you’re right, Dad, because I’m going to lay my heart out on the table for her to destroy.”
“I think she might surprise you.”
“I hope you’re right, because I don’t think I could get over her again.”
“Son, you never got over her the first time.”
Callie tossed her purse on the kitchen table in Jag’s house. If she’d gotten three hours of sleep last night, it would have been a miracle.
“Are you going to be okay?” Jag asked, smoothing her hair from her face.
She sighed. “I’ll be pacing until I get the yearbooks from Carol Armstrong’s college.” Callie rested her head on Jag’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around his strong frame. “I feel sick to my stomach about digging into Kara’s background, but I’m shocked about how little I know about her.”
“We looked at their relationship, how they interacted with their friends, which was hard since they’d just moved to Seattle from Colorado. Once Kara was cleared, there was no reason to dig any deeper.”
She lifted her head. “Jag, I should know more. She worked with me on this book. Hell, she worked with me on the side during the investigation of the Trinket Killer. I trusted her.”
“So did I,” Jag said.
Callie shook her head. “I told her things I shouldn’t have. Things you told me about the investigation that I swore I’d keep to myself. She helped me form the theory about Adam Wanton. She all but talked me into going after him in the press, which made you look like an idiot.”
Jag pressed his warm, tender lips on her forehead. “Let’s first find out if Kara is indeed Carol. That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”
“God, if she is, I’ve been such a fool, and so many people died because of me.” She squeezed her eyes so tight, pushing out a few tears.
“Babe, look at me.”
“What?” She tilted her head, blinking wildly.
“I’m the king of self-blame for all these deaths, especially Stephanie’s. If what you and I are thinking, and the Trinket Killer has been right under our noses for the last few years, then I’m going to have to brace for impact because we both know people like Bailey are going to make me look like an incompetent idiot. And maybe I was. But this killer is smart, smarter than us; you even said so in your book. And if Kara is the killer, she had her mother’s help. Think about that for a second.”
“Trust me, I’ve been thinking about it. But there are still a few things that don’t add up.” Her mind splintered off into a million directions, firing thousands of questions and scenarios, but none totally made sense. There were too many unknown factors.
And she still didn’t want to believe that Kara could have been lying to her for a good three years.
“Will you go through a couple things with me before you head to the office?”
He glanced at his watch. “I have twenty minutes.”
“You were a beat cop when Renee was murdered,” Callie said.
“I took the call. My partner and I were the first on the scene.” Jag took a step back and fiddled with the Keurig, shoving his travel mug under the spout. “The lead detective retired three months later, but it had already gone cold. It wasn’t until we had a fourth murder, which was my first case, that we put it together.”
“And that’s when I gave the killer a name, and shortly after I did that, I got an email from Kara.”
“Okay,” Jag said, taking a second mug and pressing the start button on the coffee machine. “Do you have all that correspondence?”
“I do.”
“Will you email it to me?”
“Of course,” she said. “For about a year, I kept her at arm’s length in the sense that I interviewed her and took as much information as I thought was useful, but I was more interested in finding the killer and getting ratings.”
“But you did a personal story about her and Renee.”
“I did. It was a filler piece, but it was what started our friendship. Kara seemed generally interested in the investigation. She started picking up patterns…fuck, she was planting those things at the crime scene and in my head.”
“We don’t know that.”
Callie snagged the cup of coffee he handed her. “Don’t coddle me or try to make me feel better. We need to be realistic and keep our heads in the game.”
“I am. We don’t know anything for sure. We first need to find out who and where Carol is. We do that, we make a plan.”
“Wow. You really have changed,” she said. “I like this new, calm, levelheaded man.”
“Like? What about love? I prefer that word.”
“Jag. Why do you have to do that? You know how I feel, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m still leaving.”
“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to give us a second chance. A real opportunity
