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Swallowing hard, she gripped the phone more tightly. “Good. Because the forensic evidence you provided will come in handy when the investigation moves into the prosecution phase.”
She hadn’t said if; she’d said when. And she’d been bluffing. She couldn’t say for sure that the police or the M.E. had been able to glean any forensic evidence. They’d taken samples. Now they had to wait for the lab results. But she wasn’t all that hopeful. It wouldn’t be easy to get foreign DNA from a body that’d been buried, disinterred and dumped elsewhere, especially a body that was in such an advanced stage of decomposition.
Still, she’d succeeded in turning the tables on him. Tension came across the line as palpably as if he’d started swearing at her.
“You don’t scare me,” he ground out.
“You don’t scare me, either,” she lied. “See you in the morning.”
As soon as she disconnected, Francesca dropped her phone on the table and laid her head on her arms. As much as she wanted the whole situation to go away, it was far from over.
* * *
Francesca felt Jonah glance in her direction every few seconds while he drove. When she’d called to tell him about the conversation with Dean and Butch, he’d already left Chandler, but he’d insisted on coming back to get her. He said she’d be safer with him than staying anywhere Butch might look. But as far as Francesca was concerned, safe was a relative term. Being around Jonah risked things besides physical injury or death.
They needed to get to Prescott with plenty of time to prepare for tomorrow, however. She had no idea how long it would take the police to get her set up with a wire and put the proper surveillance in place.
Besides, despite an abundance of restless energy, she didn’t feel like driving two hours on her own. They’d taken her car because they hadn’t wanted a change to alert Butch that the police might be involved, but Jonah had the wheel. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been quite so exhausted or upset, and couldn’t say whether she’d been right to stand up to Butch or not. But after talking to Dean, she wasn’t as worried about herself as much as her friends. Her iPhone contained everyone’s address, everyone who was remotely important to her. That meant Butch and Dean knew where Adriana lived with her husband and two kids, where Josephine lived—alone since her husband had died three years ago—and where Heather and Sean resided in that subsistence-level apartment. He even had her parents’ phone number and address, here in Arizona and where they were staying in Montana, should he care to take advantage of it.
Would he try to hurt someone she loved? Should she warn everyone immediately? Or wait and see if a threat really materialized?
She didn’t want to throw her entire circle of family and friends into a panic. But by the time she knew whether the threat was real, it could be too late….
Jonah broke into her thoughts. “How’s April’s sister holding up?”
“Not well.” Francesca would never forget the quiet sobs that’d come across the line. What had happened to April made no sense. She’d been such an unlikely victim. She hadn’t been living on the fringes of society as a hooker or a crack addict. She’d been a straight-A student who’d become a third-grade teacher—Teacher of the Year, two years prior. She volunteered at the library and was kind and helpful to children at school who didn’t have a nurturing family. “Jill feels guilty on top of her grief, which makes it worse,” she explained.
He slung an arm over the steering wheel. He was wearing a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt and had showered and shaved since she’d last seen him, but even with his cheeks smooth and his hair combed, he wasn’t the polished type. He was a “take me as I am” kind of guy who didn’t bother with tattoos, earrings, cologne. Fortunately for him, he had more than enough assets to pull off his minimalist approach.
“Why would she feel guilty?” he asked.
She pretended she hadn’t been admiring him. She knew better than to get caught up in that, didn’t she? She was just too tired to fight her natural inclination. It’d been so long since she’d been with Jonah. She couldn’t help wondering if he kissed the same, touched the same…
Clearing her throat, she told herself it didn’t matter and answered his question. “She’s the one who encouraged April to try an online dating service. That’s how she met her own husband, so she was high on the idea and thought it might work for her sister.”
He made a clicking sound with his tongue. “That’s too bad.”
It was worse than “too bad,” but no words were adequate and she understood that.
Suddenly, Jonah looked over and saw her studying him again. She’d been searching for subtle changes in his body. His thighs were slightly thicker. His hands had a few more nicks and scars—or maybe they had a lot more. Hard to tell in the dim glow of the instrument panel. His biceps seemed more pronounced beneath the soft cotton sleeves of his Cabo San Lucas T-shirt.
She thought maybe he’d ask her what she was looking at, but he didn’t. Their eyes met and held, then his eyebrows jerked together as he returned his attention to the road. “Any chance you could get some sleep?” he asked.
Had he spoken merely to break a silence that had become too intense? She got that impression. There was no real expectation in the question. He knew how wound up she was, that it would be impossible to relax so soon. “No. First I need to decide whether or not to contact the people Dean mentioned.”
“You were staying with Heather. You didn’t tell her before you left?”
“She was already asleep when he called, and I wasn’t sure waking her was a good idea. She has no family in this part of the country and her boyfriend is in jail. Where would she go in the middle of the night with a three-year-old?” Refusing to let her gaze linger on him, she frowned and watched the pavement rush beneath their tires. “I wrote her a note, telling her not to divulge any information to Butch Vaughn, Paris Vaughn or Dean Wheeler, should they call, and to contact me in the morning so I could explain why I had to leave, but…maybe I should’ve done more.”
“What about Adriana?” he asked.
She’d planned on calling Adriana, but by the time she’d finished her conversation with Jill, Jonah had arrived to take her to Prescott. “I definitely need to call her.”
“What are you waiting for?”
Some privacy. She feared Adriana would pump her for information about Jonah, and she didn’t want him overhearing the whole thing. But it’d be after midnight by the time they got to Prescott. If she was going to warn Adriana, she’d better do it now. Adriana’s name had been in that stack of messages she’d received from Heather, too. As soon as she’d hung up with Jonah, Francesca had flipped through the rest of them, but she hadn’t yet tackled her voice mail. She’d started to, then heard that it was full and hung up. Twenty messages? Too many. She couldn’t deal with her regular clients in the midst of all this. Besides, quite a few of those messages were probably from Adriana. She was nothing if not persistent.
The phone rang twice before Adriana picked up.
