Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4) by Nick Pirog (best ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📗

brushed a tear off her cheek, then she turned her head, her soft eyes gazing into mine. I leaned down and brushed my lips against hers. We are only allowed a few perfect moments in our lifetime.

This was one of mine.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“I’ll be back on Thursday,” I said.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was too busy blowing raspberries on May’s belly.

“Bree!” I shouted. “Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she said, glancing up. “You’re gonna be back on Tuesday.”

“Thursday. Today is Tuesday.” For having a near-genius IQ, Bree was the consummate scatterbrain.

“Right,” she said, then bent her head down and blew on May’s belly. May squirmed with delight.

“Come over here.”

She sighed, then walked over.

I pointed to the piece of paper I taped to the fridge. I went over the piglets feeding schedule with her, plus a few other notes. “If you give them baths, you need to use the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo on Harold, he’s sensitive to anything else.”

“Thomas,” Bree said, grabbing my shoulder. “They’re gonna be fine. They’re pigs. Now say goodbye and go wherever you are going.”

“Ohio.”

“Yeah, go to Ohio. We’re gonna be fine.” She turned and ran toward the piglets—her blue hair flopping up and down—chasing them into the living room.

I followed the three. Bree was on her back on the floor and Harold was standing on her chest licking her face.

“Piglet kisses!” Bree screeched. “Yay!”

I said goodbye to May first. I gave her a kiss on the head and said, “You be good.” Then I softly grabbed Harold’s face and said, “You’re the man of the house now. You watch over your sister.”

He oinked.

“Here,” Bree said, handing me my backpack from off the couch. “Leave.”

“Okay, I’m going.”

Ten minutes later, I pulled up to Wheeler’s house. She was standing in the driveway. She was wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and her trusty red St. Louis Cardinals hat.

I rolled down the window and said, “You know, we’re only staying two nights.” For some reason, I assumed Wheeler was the type of girl who would travel light.

I was wrong.

She had a huge overnight bag and then one of those enormous plastic suitcases.

I grabbed her suitcase, which would not have flown for free on Southwest, and said, “What did you pack? Gold bullion?”

“Just the necessities.”

I pulled on the zipper of her suitcase and she screamed, “Don’t you dare.”

I laughed and re-zipped it, then I jumped back in the driver seat and said, “You ready for this?”

“Columbus or bust.” She gave my knee a light slap.

She was in a jovial mood and she had packed for a three-week Caribbean cruise, but this wasn’t a personal trip. This was all business. There was one more thread we needed to pull. That thread was in Columbus, Ohio.

And it had once been married to Lowry Barnes.

Eight hours in a car with someone you don’t know all that well is a big gamble. It’s Russian roulette. You could easily have your brains splattered all over the inside of the car. Luckily, with Wheeler, each time the trigger was pulled, it was a blank.

The conversation was easy and light. We chatted about past relationships, our families, sports achievements, anything and everything. As we entered Ohio, though still a few hours from Columbus, I steered the conversation toward the reason for the trip.

“Did you know Kim?”

I’d burned a lot of bridges over the years, at the Seattle Police Department, at the FBI, but I still had a few contacts that hadn’t deleted my number from their phones. One of these was Kevin Bolger, whom I’d met while working in Philly. He’d retired from the force a few years back and now did contract investigation for a law firm, but he still had access to a number of different law enforcement databases.

He’d found Kim Barnes, now Kim Harrison, living in Columbus, Ohio. He’d run a background check on her, digging up everything he could find, which proved rather anticlimactic. She worked at a nail salon, had a few grand in credit card debt, rented a small house, and owned a seven-year-old Ford Focus.

But her past was a different story.

Kim grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Tarrin. Her parents weren’t just poor, they were shit poor, or as Bolger put it, “They didn’t have a pot to piss in.” This is where she met Lowry Barnes, whose parents also lived in the trailer park. At seventeen, she found herself pregnant with Lowry’s child. Two years later, a second child would come. The couple married a few years after that, moving into a trailer of their own. Soon thereafter, Lowry’s troubles with the law began and it wasn’t long before Kim found herself raising her two children by herself and working two jobs to keep the lights on.

“I knew of her,” Wheeler replied. “But I didn’t know her personally. She got in a fight with one of my friend’s little sisters once.”

“Over what?”

“I’m not sure. Probably a guy. What else do girls fight over?” She gave my knee a squeeze.

I grinned, then asked, “What about after the murders?”

“It was such a whirlwind with my dad, getting everything in order for his funeral, that I don’t really remember much.” She paused then said, “But I do remember when I heard she moved out of town. It was three or four weeks after my dad’s funeral and I was going over my dad’s appointment book with his receptionist. She told me how she had seen Kim loading up a moving van the day before.”

“I’m surprised it took her that long to leave. She probably couldn’t go into town without being shunned.”

She nodded, though I didn’t detect a whole lot of sympathy.

An hour later, we reached Columbus. It was closing in on 8:00 p.m. We grabbed a quick dinner, then made our way to a Holiday Inn across the street from the restaurant. We were both tired from the drive, and after a quick kiss goodnight, we retired to our respective rooms.

My phone chimed and