AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I can get you help. Just keep me updated. Call me with anything you find.”
Their plans approved, Kit and Baz went back to their desks, where Kit checked her phone for the directions to Jaelyn Watts’s house. “I’m ready to go whenever you are.”
Baz closed his eyes, looking abruptly old. “I hate meeting with the families.” He’d gotten much better at it since delivering the news of Wren’s death sixteen years before. He’d probably swung too far in the other direction, growing more emotional about each victim than was probably wise.
Kit sighed. “Me too.”
San Diego, California
Friday, April 8, 1:45 p.m.
Dr.Sam Reeves paced back and forth across his boss’s office, glancing at his phone.
“Has it changed?” Vivian asked.
Sam stopped pacing, turning to glare at the stylish woman behind the desk. He’d done the math to estimate her age when he’d first met her. Dr.Vivian Carlisle looked to be in her midfifties, but if she’d earned her bachelor’s degree at twenty-one, she was now sixty-five. Or at least he thought so.
Sam had never asked her age. His mother had raised him right. And he was not stupid.
Normally.
Today, he felt stupid. Today, he felt powerless.
“No. Still no news.”
“Sam,” she said warmly, “sit down. Talk to me.”
It was her therapist voice. Sam was quite familiar with the therapist voice since he was a goddamn therapist, too.
A goddamn therapist stuck between his personal and professional ethics. Classic rock and a hard place.
“I haven’t slept in days,” he confessed, scrubbing his palms over his face. “I keep wondering if I’ve done the right thing.”
“We agreed together that what you did was the right thing. That it was the only thing you really could do.”
Sam nodded, then slid down in his chair, letting his head fall back to rest against the cushion. Vivian’s chairs were more comfortable than his were. He needed to request an upgrade.
If he still had a job after this was over.
The alternative turned his stomach. He’d dedicated the past seventeen years of his life to becoming a respected clinical psychologist. He’d wanted to help people, help his clients.
He still did. He just wasn’t sure who to help in this case.
“Did you go back to the park to see if the police had done any digging?” she asked.
“No. I haven’t been back since I checked the place out four days ago.” It had been four agonizingly long days since he’d made his anonymous call to SDPD. “If they’re digging, I certainly don’t want them to ask me what I’m doing there. I don’t want to lie.”
Ironic, of course, since it was a compulsive liar who’d gotten him into this mess.
“Understandable. So, what did you say when you made the call?”
Sam tapped his phone screen, opening the Notes app. “ ‘Hi. This message is for homicide detective Kit McKittrick,’ ” he read. “ ‘I have reason to believe you’ll find the victim of a murder in Longview Park at the following coordinates.’ I gave the coordinates, then I hung up.”
Her dark brows lifted. “You prepared a script?”
“I did. I get flustered sometimes and I didn’t want to ramble or say too much.”
“Like ‘Hi, I’m Dr.Sam Reeves and one of my clients—who is a pathological liar, by the way—may have killed a young woman and buried her in Longview Park. Please dig her up and let me know if he’s telling the truth.’ ”
