Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
I rest my hand on her knee. She doesn’t flinch, but she doesn’t lay her hand on top of mine. I know I deserve all the icy winds she wants to blow my way. I should have told her the full truth.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry. If they’re looking for McKenzie, too, that means there’s a very good chance she got away—”
“How do they die?”
I wince. “You don’t need to hear about all that.”
“Tell me, Cal,” she says firmly. “No more secrets. No more withholding. Or I jump out of this truck at the next red light and you never see me again.”
She’s dead serious. She’s likely spent her whole life being hurt and betrayed by people who were supposed to take care of her. And now I’ve gone and added myself to that list.
“It ain’t a pretty tale, sweetheart.”
“I can take it,” she says. “I can take a lot more than you think.”
I’m starting to see that now. Holly and I slid so easily into our Daddy and baby girl roles that I immediately shifted into protect-her-at-all-costs mode. I’ve wanted to shelter her from the ugliness of this case, forgetting that she’s been a captive audience to bad and ugly since she was born.
“The pattern seems to be that he roughs up his victims while they’re alive,” I say, glancing over to gauge her reaction. Her face is a brick wall, so I clear my throat and go on. “He binds their hands, beats them everywhere but the face, cuts off a lock of their hair, and then… The cause of death is always strangulation.”
Holly’s eyes shine with unshed tears. I know she’s picturing McKenzie on the receiving end of all that violence. She can’t help it.
“Oh, God...” She covers her face with her hands.
I veer into the parking lot of a strip mall so I can stop driving and wrap both my arms around her. Tears soak into my shirt as she cries silently, slumped against me.
“I’ve heard stories,” she says. “Girls we knew of getting hurt, disappearing. She can’t be dead, Cal. She can’t be.”
I kiss Holly’s brow. I want to tell her that everything’s gonna work out. But I’ve been hunting this slippery devil for over two years, and I don’t like making promises I can’t keep. I won’t lie to her anymore. All I can tell her is, “I’ll do everything I can to find her.”
She wipes the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“Maybe we should go to the station,” she says. “I mean, wouldn’t it be better to have more people out there looking for her?”
“I’ve thought about that. It’s a tough call. If McKenzie managed to get away from this guy once, it was the luckiest break of her life. Putting out an APB puts her on a lot of people’s radar, but it runs the risk of the wrong people learning her location and getting there first.”
She makes an exasperated sound between a sigh and a growl. “I know you’re right. I just hate feeling helpless.”
“One thing we can do is go back to that house and ask Russell King some questions.”
“You really think he’ll talk to us?”
“Not without some heavy persuasion.” I smooth the hair back from her gorgeous face. “But you let me worry about that after we get some lunch into you.”
She smiles sadly. “Okay...”
After a long stretch of quiet, Holly finally poses the question I’d been dreading since my partner went and opened her big mouth.
“What happened to Vicki? Abby said finding Kenzie wasn’t going to bring your sister back. Did Vicki go missing, too?”
A sense of dread creeps up my body like blood slowly soaking a towel. I’m sure Holly can feel my muscles tensing, my breathing gone shallow. I force my lungs to expand. This isn’t a story I want to tell, but she’s gonna have to hear it sometime, and if hearing it helps her understand why I held back about the case, then it’s worth putting myself through the discomfort.
“There’s a reason I’ve been so obsessed with solving this case,” I tell her. “When I was eleven, I discovered my older sister’s body in the woods behind our house.”
Holly’s hand flies to her mouth. “Oh, Cal, no...”
I swallow to loosen my throat muscles. “She’d been murdered. Her clothes had been shredded. She’d been stabbed over a dozen times. Raped, but we didn’t find that out till later.”
The image of Vicki’s vacant stare flashes like lightning across my memory. I wince as the pain and disbelief I felt at that moment plays out across the stage of my body.
Holly tries to scoot closer, but the center console gets in her way. I slide my seat back so she can climb into my lap, wrapping her arms around me.