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“As far as you’re concerned, no one.” She checked the key he’d given her, seemed satisfied with it. “Forget whatever you saw, like I said, and stay away from that freezer. Do you hear? Never breathe a word of this again!”
Searching for some sense in what he heard, Dean sifted through his fractured thoughts. “You know what happened to her?”
“Of course I know. I helped hide her body. You don’t want me to go to prison, do you?”
“No! Of course not.” But how could she go along with this? She’d always liked Julia, tried to give her a chance in life….
“Then we have to keep it in the family. If what happened to Julia gets out, we’ll all be in trouble.”
He couldn’t imagine losing his mother to prison or anything else. She was the only person in the world who understood him, who truly loved him. Paris had always viewed him as a cross to bear, and his father tolerated him for his mother’s sake. “But…” Was it because he hadn’t taken his medication that this all seemed surreal? Butch appeared to be fine with it, almost…smug. “What about the panties? What about the women they belonged to?”
“Forget them, too.” Snatching the underwear from his hands, she threw them at Butch. “Get rid of those once and for all.”
CHAPTER 24
“This is Butch?”
Francesca turned from hanging up the clothes she hadn’t worn, left from what Heather had packed in her overnight case, to find Adriana going through the file she’d created on Butch.
“Yep, that’s him.”
Adriana, who’d been lounging on the bed, sat up to examine the personal information he’d submitted to the dating service. “Is he really six foot six?”
“And two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Wow.”
“He works outside, and it shows. You definitely wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.”
Adriana continued to stare at his picture. “He looks like he’d be hell in a boxing ring, but he doesn’t look like a murderer.”
Even though she’d already memorized every aspect of the photograph, including the laughter in Butch’s eyes, Francesca crossed the floor to get another glimpse of it. She’d never seen him that happy in real life. But their dealings hadn’t been positive. “They rarely look the part. Anyway, it’s not his physical strength that scares me.” She bit her lip, trying to identify what made her so uneasy about Butch—other than her suspicion of what he’d done. “He has no humanity.” Aside from lending Hunsacker the money he needed to save his house, anyway. But Francesca didn’t mention that incident to Adriana. She couldn’t reconcile such generosity with the man she believed Butch Vaughn to be, so she preferred to classify it as an anomaly. For all she knew, it was Paris who’d asked him to help the Hunsackers, and he’d acquiesced to keep peace in the family.
“What’s his wife like?” Adriana asked.
Francesca didn’t know nearly enough about Paris. Or anyone else close to Butch. But filling in the blanks was no longer her job. She had to leave it in the hands of the task force the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office was in the process of creating. “Her name’s Paris.”
“What does she look like?”
Her overnight case empty, Francesca slid it under the bed. “She’s thin, almost bony, with long, stringy blond hair. Not outrageously attractive, but not bad, either.” Francesca shrugged. “She’s just a young mother living on a junkyard at the edge of Prescott.”
“How’d she get involved with Butch?” Adriana asked.
Francesca removed her earrings and dropped them in her jewelry box before climbing onto the bed. “No idea. But she married young, probably too young to know any better. She has a five-year-old child but she can’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four.”
Shoving a pillow behind her back, Adriana leaned against the headboard. “How old is Butch?”
Francesca motioned toward the file. “Isn’t it in there?”
“Let’s see…” She perused the document. “Thirty-one? That’s correct?”
“That’s got to be about right. Except for the bogus name he used when he created ‘Harry Statham,’ it seems he was mostly honest about himself.”
Adriana looked skeptical as she scanned his profile. “If you were a serial killer, wouldn’t you be more…clan-destine than to post a profile?”
“It’s the appearance of innocence that makes it effective.”
“So he’s trolling for women on the Internet.”
