The only true reason Rebecca was following her was because of Megan, who was still missing. Sophia had been the source of the breakup between Megan and James, the cause of their violent fight that had sent James to the hospital and Megan driving over the mountains . . .
And then she’d disappeared.
No sign of her.
Until her car had been found in Harold Sinclaire’s cabin.
Rebecca had hoped that the police would get a hit, some information from Megan’s computer and phone, both found in her car—evidence, a fingerprint or whatever on the Toyota itself that would lead them to her sister.
So far that hadn’t been the case.
She started her rental, intent on leaving for the night, but she took one last look at the Cascadia apartments and stopped.
She saw the door of Sophia’s darkened apartment open. In a second, the blonde locked her door, hurried to her parked car, and backed out.
“So where are you going now?” Rebecca wondered aloud and then, heart pounding, started to follow.
* * *
“Hey, man, I fucked up,” Rowdy said from the other end of the wireless connection.
“How?” James, after working long into the night, was just walking out of the shop, Ralph shooting past him to sniff around the fence in the fresh dusting of snow. He’d been too wired to sleep, so after driving into town and making sure Rebecca’s Subaru was parked behind the hotel, he’d come back to the shop when it was quiet, no saws screaming, no nail guns tattooing, no workers milling, and no music pulsing through the building, to catch up on paperwork. The end of the month—make that end of the year—was fast approaching, and he was way behind.
Crocker was rarely wrong, at least the way he told it, and if he did mess up, he wasn’t going to readily admit it. Mistakes, he’d once said, ruined his “cred.”
He opened the door to his Explorer. Ralph bounded into the cab.
“It’s about your unknown cousin,” Crocker explained. “The kid given up for adoption by your nutcase of a relative?”
“Yeah?” James climbed behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. “So there wasn’t a cousin?” That would be good news.
“Oh, no. Just the opposite. She didn’t give up one baby for adoption. She had twins. Girls.”
James’s stomach dropped. This was bad news. Otherwise, Crocker wouldn’t be calling. “Okay.” He started the engine, turned on the wipers to swipe away two inches of fresh snow on the windshield.
“It’s kind of the whole separated-at-birth thing; that’s why I screwed up. I found one certificate of live birth and figured that was it. But on further digging, not only did I find another birth certificate, but two sets of adoption papers.”
James still didn’t see how it connected to him. “So I have two unknown cousins.”
Oh. Shit.
“That’s right, but here’s the kicker. One is named Julia Harper, and she’s a dead ringer for her twin.”
“What?” James said, but his mind was spinning . . . “You’re saying that . . . wait a sec . . . a twin of whom?”
“Sophia Russo.”
“No.” Bile rose up in his throat. No, no, no!
“Hell, yeah.”
“You have to be wrong,” he said, more emphatically. Oh, God, NO! “Distant relative” or not, he could not be related to Sophia, not in the least.
“I’m sorry, man, but you’re being played. I think that Sophia chick might really be Julia Harper. The car she drives is registered to Julia.”
What? This wasn’t making any sense!
Crocker said, “I’m still checking, and I’ll keep you posted, but I wanted to give you a heads-up ASAP.”
The cop’s question came back to haunt him as he stared out the window, his thoughts muddled. “Is she related to you?” they’d asked him. Because they knew. Damn it, the cops had known.
His throat closed as all the little questions that had been haunting him came to the fore. Hadn’t he wondered about Sophia’s rapid-fire changes in personality? How she could be almost saccharine-sweet one day and sarcastic, to the point of being brittle, the next? And there were the other discrepancies that he’d tried to ignore.
As the snow fell around his Explorer, he remembered her coming out of the shower, her hair pinned away from her face, freckles visible on her shoulder; yet another time, now that he thought about it, in a similar situation, when her hair had been swept up in a messy bun that same shoulder was flawless—no makeup. He knew. He’d kissed her bare skin. And then there were her toes. One had been broken and wouldn’t fit easily into a boot, and yet another time when she was wearing those same knee-highs, he’d watched her dress and the foot had slipped easily inside.
His stomach roiled.
He hadn’t been sleeping with one woman who was possibly related to him, but two. And one—God, he hoped only one—now claimed to be pregnant!
Saliva collected in his mouth, and he rolled down the window and spat.
Were Sophia and Julia somehow involved in the murders that had gone down? Did they have something to do with Megan going missing? Every muscle in his back and neck was tight, his fingers surrounding the steering wheel in a death grip.
“Look, I’m going to do some more checking, find out where Julia Harper is, and I’ll get back to you.” He disconnected before James could tell him that he already knew where Julia was.
Right here.
In Riggs Crossing.
Sophia had mentioned that James had caught a glimpse of her sister a couple of times when she’d dropped Sophia off at work. Always at a distance. Even so, he thought now that something was off. She was a heavy-set girl with dark hair and glasses.
No twin. At least not an identical twin. Or . . . a woman in a disguise.
His jaw clenched.
Crocker was right: He’d been played.
James tossed his phone onto the passenger seat. This was wrong. So very wrong. His thoughts spinning madly, his stomach turning over
