Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

don’t mean it; lots of men dodge their duties as parents but try to make up for it by leaving shit behind they don’t want or need. I can see Tommy Jarrett thinking that would absolve him, and I imagine the bank account could have had some withdrawals prior to his disappearance. Maybe Tommy had saved up for his dash for freedom.

I’ll pull the file. Odds are good that Prester was the detective, unless it was the last days of the other white detective I barely knew, the third one in rotation who barely came to work at all. He’s now retired and off to Florida, and he never gave me the time of day. Not looking much forward to questioning his judgment if that’s the case.

“When’s the last time you saw Tommy, sir?” I ask, and take out my notebook. He takes a gulp of his coffee and gets out his cell phone.

“About fourteen months ago. Here,” he says, and puts the phone down and slides it across to me. There’s a photo on the screen: Abraham in a plaid work shirt and jeans with his arm around his son, both grinning at the selfie camera. Sweet. I look hard at Tommy, trying to see past the easy grin, the shape of his face. Does he look like a man who would abandon his pregnant wife? I have no idea. One thing being a cop will teach you: nobody looks like it, and everybody looks like it. We contain multitudes, and at least half of that multitude is made up of assholes.

“Nice-looking young man,” I say, which is true. “Mind if I get a copy of this picture? I can send it to my phone.” That’ll give me the date and time it was taken, as well as the location.

“Please yourself,” he says, and I see a little flash of unease in his face. I make sure he sees I’m not snooping as I forward the picture, and I hand his device back. He immediately pockets it. I doubt it has anything to do with his son; everybody’s got something to hide, and I’m not interested in his secrets. “So, you actually intend to look for him this time? Not just file some piece of paper about how my son’s a cowardly piece of dog shit?”

He sounds aggressive, but I see the glint of tears in his eyes. Hope’s a hard thing in cases like this. He’s fronting to try to hold in that fear, that desperation, and I get it. I’m very respectful when I say, “Mr. Jarrett, I’d be very glad to look into it. It’d speed matters along if you’d give me permission to take a look around where he was living, give me permission to access his phone and bank records as his next of kin—”

“I will,” he says before I’m even finished. “Whatever it takes. Tommy lived in the house he bought with his own money with that woman—I ain’t even calling her his wife. When he disappeared, he was still living right there. He never moved.”

“You know that for a fact?” I ask him, and I’m gentle about it. “That he didn’t throw some stuff in a bag and get a friend to pick him up?”

He doesn’t answer that, and I didn’t really expect him to. He doesn’t want to believe it, but men can do strange things when their women get pregnant. Some bolt for the hills. Some get mean. Some get possessive and strange.

Some kill their kids.

It hits me with a small, significant chill that one person Sheryl Lansdowne would have stopped her car for out there in the dark was her missing husband.

I keep a bland expression, but now I’m alert for any signs that Abraham is trying to cover up for Tommy. A prickle on the nape of my neck says I should check the house for any sign he’s been here, but I need to be careful; if he is here, I could be in a fatal situation, fast. Best I come back prepared, with backup.

But even as I decide that, Abraham gets up and says, “Come on with me. I’ll show you his room. Nothing in there but what he left when he got married, but maybe it’ll help y’all.”

There’s no clue in his body language that things could pop off, but I follow at a distance, hand close to the gun I’ve got concealed beneath my jacket. I’m fast and accurate, which is never a guarantee of surviving a gunfight, but it helps. My heart ticks up to a faster rhythm, and I breathe deep to slow it down. I’m hyperaware as we move through the small kitchen, down a dark, narrow hall, past a bathroom. There’s a single closed door at the end. Abraham swings it open and goes inside.

In or out, girl—decide.

I go in.

There’s no ambush. And no Tommy Jarrett waiting with a child-killing grin to finish me off. Abraham jams his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe and stands back after turning on the overhead light, and I’m looking at a teenage boy’s room. It even smells like one—that lingering scent of old socks, testosterone sweat, dirty sheets. The bed’s made, with a cheap Wal-Mart comforter over the sagging mattress. Posters of white country artists I barely recognize, and muscle cars. A miniature basketball hoop in the corner that’s probably seen a lot of use; the net looks ragged. I make a slow circuit of the room, then glance at his father. “Mind if I open the drawers?”

“Do as you please,” he says. “Ain’t got nothing to hide.”

He’s right. There’s not much in the small dresser except some extra sheets, a pair of old running shoes that stink of years of service, a pile of papers that, when I look through them, mostly seem like schoolwork. Tommy was a solid B student. Not exceptional, but he paid attention. “Your son do anything in school special? Like football, or—”

“Basketball,” he says, which I could