“Possible or probable?”
“Possible,” she said as her phone beeped. She pulled it from her jacket pocket.
“Pretty damned convenient, if you ask me.” He reversed out of the parking space, then wheeled through the lot. Snow was still falling steadily, and he flipped on his wipers as he reached the first intersection. “I’m not buying it.”
“Head trauma. Concussion.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They were passing by the storefronts at the center of town, hundred-year-old buildings tucked tightly together, most with Western façades and awnings, pedestrians bundled in thick jackets with hoods or warm stocking caps as they hurried from one shop to the other. Mendoza was buried in her cell phone, answering a text, but said, “It happens.”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t. The doc does.” A pause. Then, “You really want to do this?” She looked up from the small screen.
“Uh-huh.” He felt as if he was spinning his wheels. Already stuck, with no new answers, and even though he’d been to the hospital twice, he hadn’t had a chance to interview Cahill. Each time, he’d been asleep, and the doc in charge didn’t want the patient disturbed.
Fuck that.
“It’s your show.”
“Case,” he reminded her. “My case.”
“Whatever.” She sounded bored, but she slid him a quick sideways glance, and he knew she was needling him. A little nervy for a newbie. But it helped lighten things up.
Besides, he wasn’t exactly a senior with the department himself, he thought as the town stretched out, tightly packed storefronts morphing into strip malls, gas stations, and parking lots. He’d spent years with the San Francisco PD before a change in leadership coincided with his divorce, and he’d decided to chuck it all, move anywhere out of state, far from the bustle of the city and a clog of humanity.
He’d envisioned this middle-of-nowhere county in western Washington as just the spot to land, far from Astrid and her new husband, away from the noise, headaches, and crowds of an overpopulated city.
He thought he’d left serious crime behind him.
But, hey, guess what? People are people, and now he was staring at a missing person, possible kidnapping, and potential homicide all rolled into one case.
Centering around James Cahill. Mr. No Memory.
Forever sleeping and probably in a haze of drugs anyway.
Rivers glowered through the icy windshield of his Jeep as the remnants of town gave way to a few houses bordering the river whose snowy banks lay white against the dark, fast-moving water, the bridge spanning its chasm icy with the cold. On the far side, all evidence of the town disappeared, the landscape a white blanket over acres of farmland rimmed by stands of evergreens and broken into sections by fences. A few farmhouses were visible, long lanes plowed, lights in windows against the gray day, eaves mustachioed with ice and snow.
He barely noticed as he drove, his wipers scraping snowflakes from the windshield, Mendoza again into whatever was so fascinating on her cell. The engine hummed, the interior warming, and Rivers’s thoughts were centered, as they had been for a couple of days, on James Cahill.
When Rivers had been a cop in San Francisco, he’d heard about the Cahill family. The Cahills’ wealth, philanthropy, and scandals had been legendary, always cropping up in the news and forever a headache for the department. There had been a little—no, make that a lot—of crazy running through the Cahill generations, and James, even living up here in Bumblefuck, Washington, was heir to a fortune that had existed for a century, or perhaps longer.
Old San Francisco money.
And now, lo and behold, the golden boy was up to his eyeballs in trouble.
Go figure.
Rivers’s fingers tightened over the steering wheel.
“Pretty out here.” Mendoza had glanced up, her gaze straying to the passenger window, where she was watching a couple of horses running through the drifts, manes flying, tails streaming like banners as they kicked up sprays of snow.
He didn’t argue. “Sure.”
She threw him a glance. “Come on, Rivers, even you can stop long enough to smell the roses.”
“Horses. You mean smell the horses.”
“Lighten up.”
He didn’t. His thoughts were dark as the encroaching night as he drove through the ever-rising hills to the Cahill estate, a massive piece of property of nearly four hundred acres that included a working ranch, a Christmas-tree farm complete with inn and restaurant, and a grouping of newer, linked, barn-like structures where Cahill designed and assembled some of those ridiculous, high-end tiny houses. Homes on wheels you could barely turn around in, the kind that made a New York apartment seem spacious. But as small and unique as those little mobile houses were, they were constructed on a vast parcel of land in the Cascade foothills, much of it forest.
Finding a body in that area would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And the all-points bulletin for Megan Travers’s car had turned up nothing. Then again, the police might not even be looking for her except for the missing person’s report from Travers’s sister, Rebecca, and her statement that Megan had been upset and called her, told her she’d had a fight with James Cahill and was driving through a near-blizzard to reach Rebecca’s condo in Seattle.
But she hadn’t arrived.
That had been two days ago, with Megan Travers already missing nearly twenty-four hours at that time.
Coincidentally, James Cahill had been discovered unconscious and wounded, a struggle evident in his home, a note from someone, presumably the missing Megan, declaring she was leaving him on the very night she had called her sister to say she was on her way.
“We’ve already got Knowlton’s statement,” Mendoza reminded him as she fiddled with a knob on the dash, adjusting the vehicle’s temperature.
Robert “Bobby” Knowlton was the person who had found Cahill and called 9-1-1.
“He might have forgotten something.”
“Okay.” She wasn’t buying it, but she quit messing with
