“I’m not going in,” he said quietly. “I’m not.”
King nudged him again, harder this time.
“I’m not,” Bear repeated, and turned away from the building.
He’d taken three steps when the glass door of the sheriff’s station opened behind him.
Bear spun, heart in his throat, and there she was — Greta, walking out into the sunlight with her shoulders hunched and her face blank. For one terrible second, Bear couldn’t move. Then he was running across the parking lot, King loping at his side, and Greta was walking toward him with her eyes fixed on his face.
She made it five steps before her legs gave out.
Bear caught her, his arms going around her waist, and she collapsed against his chest with a sound that bypassed language entirely. Her body shook, tremors running through her from head to foot, and her hands came up to grip the front of his shirt.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice rough. “I’ve got you.”
She pressed her face against his chest and the tremors turned to full-body shakes. Bear tightened his arms around her, one hand coming up to cup the back of her head, and held her while she fell apart in the sheriff’s department parking lot with the afternoon sun beating down on their backs.
“I’ve got you,” he said again, his mouth against her hair. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
She shook her head, the motion jerky against his chest. “No,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m not.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. So he just held her, one hand moving in slow circles on her back, and waited for her breathing to steady. King sat at their feet, his massive head tilted up, watching Greta with worried eyes.
After a long minute, she pulled back just enough to look at his face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face blotchy with tears, but her jaw was set. She was going to get through this no matter what.
“Her name was Tasha McLaughlin. The bones we found. Her name was Tasha. She was twenty-six. She worked at a bank in Spokane.”
Bear kept one arm around her waist, supporting her weight. “He gave you the name.”
“He gave me a lot of things.” She drew in a breath. “Cody took Tasha because she looked like Alice. Same hair color. From a distance, in the right light, she could have been Alice. So he took her and kept her at the cabin for seven months. And then he...” Her voice cracked. “He says she got sick, but I don’t believe him.I think he killed her when he saw the opportunity to get the one he really wanted, and then he took my sister.”
Bear’s stomach turned. “Jesus.”
“He buried Tasha in Alice’s clothes. He needed people to stop looking for her, and he thought Tasha would be found fast, but she wasn’t.”
Bear closed his eyes. He could see the casket. He could see Greta standing on a granite shelf above the valley, screaming until her voice broke. All of that grief, and Alice had been alive and in a basement nine miles up the mountain.
“That’s not all,” Greta said.
He opened his eyes.
“The vandalism at my office. The notes. TheSTOP LOOKINGpainted on my wall.” Her jaw worked. “Cody told me. He fed Daniel the idea. Daniel did most of it on his own— Daniel was obsessed with me, the way he was obsessed with Alice. But Cody was the puppeteer. He used Daniel’s obsession as cover. Made me think the threat was the loud, drunk asshole everyone could see, when the real threat was the man I sat next to at every missing persons meeting for ten years.”
Bear’s vision went white at the edges.
He had visited Cody Simms’s hardware store just about every week since he’d come to Valor Ridge. He had let his son work for the man.
A wave of nausea passed through him so hard he had to swallow hard to keep it down.
“Hey.” Greta’s hand came up to his face, her palm cool against his skin. “Hey. Breathe.”
He breathed.
“Bear.” She waited until he was looking at her. “Don’t. He’s where he needs to be. Don’t give him any more of you than he already has.”
He nodded and took another breath. “He had my son working in his store.”
“I know.”
