“Other than that his sister was dumped by James Cahill?”
“For Rebecca Travers, not Megan.”
Mendoza raised one hand and tilted it back and forth to indicate she wasn’t convinced. “Maybe it’s the samey-same. You know, get back at whatever woman he’s currently dating.”
“Thin.” He cut off another bite of steak, plopped it into his mouth.
“I can see your arteries clogging from here.” She grinned, teasing, her dark eyes flashing.
“You’re just jealous.”
She snorted and stared at his plate. “Hardly.” Then she looked up at him again. “Okay, if you don’t buy my theory, then what?”
“Not sure yet. Maybe Gus Jardine has another connection to Megan.”
“So what is it? Why would Jardine—what? Kidnap her? Force her to drive to Sinclaire’s cabin? Then . . . snowshoe out? Have another vehicle waiting? What would he do with her?”
“Maybe they were in it together,” Rivers said, thinking aloud. “She fights with Cahill, meets up with Jardine; they stash the car, and she hides out.”
“Why? Makes no sense. What would be the point? Revenge for Megan, but what’s in it for Jardine?” Her eyebrows raised inquisitively, and then she made a bleeping sound, like the buzzer on a game show when the contestant fails. “Not buying it.”
“Yeah, me neither,” he admitted and grew quiet as he finished his meal. Nothing was making sense, but he felt as if they were getting closer to piecing it all together. Jardine was involved. They just had to figure out how.
Once they were on the road again, Rivers drove toward the station, and Mendoza, as ever, was on her phone, scrolling through messages and e-mail. He’d just pulled into the lot when she said, “Uh-oh . . . what’s this?”
“What?” he asked as he nosed his Jeep into a parking slot near a department cruiser.
Her eyebrows knitted as she stared at the screen. “It’s weird.” But there was an edge of excitement to her voice. “Let’s go inside. I want to bring it up on my computer. Bigger image.” She was already unbuckling her seat belt and opening the passenger door.
Rivers followed her to her cubicle, where she peeled off her coat and slung it haphazardly onto a filing cabinet; then she slid into her roller chair and pulled it close to her computer monitor. “It’s from the lab,” she explained. “DNA on the hairs found in James Cahill’s bed.” Her fingers were flying over the keyboard and working the roller ball of her mouse. “Here . . . look.” The report came onto the screen. “Three specimens,” she pointed out, “all different. One male. James Cahill and two others. One is from Megan Travers—it matches the samples we took from a brush in her apartment, and the other one . . . look here. Female as well, undetermined, but get this—related to Cahill.”
“What?”
“A cousin, probably, not a first cousin, but someone related to him on his mother’s side.”
“His mother?”
“Right, Kylie Cahill, who was Kylie Paris, but who, it seems, is really an Amhurst.” She glanced up at Rivers, who was standing behind her, bending over to see the screen. “I’ve done some research. The Amhursts are even richer than the Cahills, or were, and the two families intermarried or got sexually involved with each other over the years, and there were several children who were born to mistresses.”
“Including Kylie Paris.”
“Right.”
“So James Cahill was sleeping with someone related to him?”
“Distantly related, but yeah,” Mendoza said, disgust pulling at the edges of her lips. “The way he goes through women, this shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“To us,” Rivers thought aloud, “but I wonder if it will be to him.” He stared at the report and the label: UNKNOWN FEMALE.
Mendoza rolled her chair back to stare up at him. “The Unknown Female is a blonde,” she pointed out.
“So Sophia Russo is his cousin,” he said, the wheels in his mind whirling.
“Imagine that.” She shook her head. “Some kind of cousin. As I said, ‘distant.’”
“I wonder if he knows?”
Mendoza shook her head. “Maybe not yet, but he will soon enough.”
Rivers’s cell phone went off, and he glanced at the screen. “At last.”
“At last?” Mendoza was still looking at the DNA results on the computer monitor.
“At last—Earl Ray Dansen,” he said and answered. Dansen and he had been playing phone tag for most of the day. “Rivers,” he said into the phone.
“It’s Earl Ray, down at the Clarion. Glad I finally caught you.”
“Me too. You know about Charity Spritz.”
“Jesus, yeah, I know. Can’t believe it.” He sounded stunned. “Horrible.”
“Can you tell me what she was working on?”
“The Cahill story. But, uh . . . look, I think it would be better if we talk face-to-face. I’ve got something I need to show you.”
Rivers checked his watch. After seven. “How about now?”
“I’m stuck here with tomorrow’s edition. I was hoping you could come to the office.”
“That works. We’re on our way.”
* * *
Heart pounding, Sophia waited for the results of the pregnancy test. Her hand was shaking, her stomach in knots as she stood in the bathroom of her apartment.
What if she was pregnant?
What if she wasn’t?
She didn’t know what to wish for.
Heart beating like a jackhammer, she was totally alone, waiting for her sister to return.
Julia had been acting strange lately, had been jumpy, and Sophia really couldn’t blame her. Everything was weird. Sophia had seen on the news that that reporter woman, the one she didn’t like, Charity Spritz, had been murdered in San Francisco.
The thought of it gave Sophia a really bad feeling when she’d seen it on television.
And that wasn’t all of it.
First off, Gus had been involved in a freaky accident with a saw at the shop. He’d torn up his hand so badly that he might never have full use of it again. But then, Gus was an idiot. He might have done it on purpose and blamed James, looking for a lawsuit and a huge settlement.
Then Phoebe Matrix—that old busybody of an apartment owner/ manager—had suffered some kind of allergic reaction
