He unlocked the cabin and carried Ava inside, first. It smelled musty, unaired, but it would do for the time being. He returned to the car and lifted Olivia into his arms.
She knew. His eldest daughter knew what he had done. He’d seen it in the eyes so like her mother’s. Paul suspected she’d watched from the backseat of the car where he’d told her and Ava to wait for him. As he’d dealt with Debbie.
Debbie always had gotten under Paul’s skin. She never had liked him. Always getting in the way between him and Rachel. Trying to separate him from the one woman who meant the world to him. Debbie had had no right to do that.
No one should separate family like that.
He hadn’t intended to kill her, though. Had she not shown up with the girls in tow while he was arguing with Rachel, she would have been fine. Rachel’s death would have been attributed to a random break-in. No one would have known he’d driven home to get the files from Lytel that he’d printed out and left behind.
Paul would have been notified in Indianapolis and would have been allowed to grieve properly.
Instead of chasing Debbie through the countryside to get his daughters back.
They were his children. And no one else’s. No matter what anyone said.
The girls were his. He would not ever be separated from a child of his again.
Rachel…he ached for her. And he grieved, because of the memory of what he had done to her. He hadn’t meant to.
She had found those files, and she had found the messages in his email, too. Messages that very clearly laid out instructions for finding out everything he could about the list of agents in question.
A list that had names on it that Rachel had recognized.
She had confronted him, demanded to know what he was doing. She’d been in the checking account. She’d see the deposits, too. Questioned where the money had come from.
Rachel had demanded to know what was happening, what he was doing.
It had just escalated from there. He could still see her blood on his hands. Debbie—Debbie and Edith were both incidental. Forgettable.
They hadn’t truly mattered. No one cared if they lived or died.
He had regrets for what he had done. They were both old, lonely women, who were better off gone than taking up space.
But Rachel…she had had so much potential. She could have found someone else. Had another child or two of her own. Built herself a new family. That was never easy, but it was doable.
He would have given her generous visitation with Ava and Olivia, too. Or…he could have taken Ava with him and left Olivia with her mother.
They could have worked something out between them that was best for everyone.
Paul tossed a blanket over his sleeping daughters and stepped back. He had things he still had to do. He was only a few hours away from St. Louis.
He had plenty of time to do it before the girls woke.
He wrote a note for Olivia and sat it where she would see it, giving her very clear instructions of how she was to care for her younger sister, and then Paul got started.
Lytel owed him money. That was going to be his first step.
There were a few places left in the States where a smart man could go to disappear. Even with two young daughters in tow.
Paul just had to find them.
71
It took them hours to dig through every possible property Paul Sturvin would be associated with. Max’s team was dropping, but no one complained.
The setback of finding Debbie Miller had stung them all. A big part of Max was hoping to have found her alive, with the girls.
Finding Debbie the way they had…the biggest part of him was certain they were not going to get to the girls in time. He knew how family annihilators operated. Each type was different.
Each type was motivated in different ways.
If they were after Paul Sturvin, and he was ninety-nine percent that they were, he suspected Paul’s motivation was financial.
He was an anomic family annihilator.
Perhaps he had returned to the house he shared with Rachel to kill them all, but Debbie interrupted. Debbie had the girls and ran.
Thwarting his plans.
Perhaps Paul had followed Debbie in order to get his daughters back to finish what he had started. Family annihilators had done so before.
John List had driven to the school to pick up his son at a soccer game after having already killed the rest of his family, back in 1971, before taking that boy home and killing him, too.
Paul most likely believed his family would be better off dead than without him to provide materially for them. It was what the evidence—even though it was circumstantial and hearsay at this point—was telling him.
Which meant that if things went even more south for Paul, there was a likelihood he’d kill his daughters before killing himself.
They needed to find the girls and get them away from Paul before that could happen.
To do that, he needed his people at the top of their game.
They needed to eat. It was almost midnight now, he and Jac had been on the case since seven thirty the previous morning.
Hopefully, wherever the Sturvin girls were, they were safe for the moment.
Sturvin had to sleep sometime.
He had to tell himself that.
He looked at Jac and Whit. “Break. Half an hour. Get some caffeine, something to eat. Take showers in the locker rooms. Whatever. We are going to keep pushing through on this. We need to find Paul.”
Jac blinked at him for a moment. “You, too. You need to eat. Is Em ok?”
“She’s staying with the Brockmans. I asked Malachi to pick her up after basketball practice. He was getting his nephew anyway.”
Jac gave a tired smile. “Bet that thrilled her to be with Simon.”
Max’s daughter was deep in the midst of her first crush, on a much older “man” of about thirteen. Simon Brockman was kind enough to tolerate
