Page 62 of You Know Why

“Excellent question. He never explained it, at least not to my liking. He also claimed not to know Chloe was pregnant but told me several times he wanted to come home and have a family. So they were trying, or at least not preventing things. The birth control pills found in the house were unused and out of date.”

“Could she have been pregnant by someone else?”

“DNA said no. It was his.”

“Okay. Where are we going here?”

“Getting out of the military is hard, right? Especially before your time’s up?”

“Depends. If he was discharged for wrongdoing, say, or had a mental illness. Did you look at his records, see what the separation papers said?”

“I tried. They were classified.”

Drake sets down his fork.

“And?”

“What if Chloe’s murder had something to do with Andrew’s classified separation from the Air Force, and we’ve been looking at it all wrong this whole time?”

“You thinking maybe she was killed to send a message?”

She smiles. “Your mind is a terrifying place, Agent Sheehan.”

“You’re the one leading me there.”

“You know how sometimes you hear hooves and you think horses? I was pretty focused on Andrew as the prime suspect. Well, I maybe needed to be hearing zebras instead.”

“Occam’s razor. First thing they teach us in the Academy.”

“Right. So I’ve been looking at the old cases from a decade ago. The night Chloe was killed, there was a report of a break-in, the next town over. A farmer called in that someone had slept in his barn overnight, taken off in the morning with a few shotguns and a hunting jacket. Nothing that raised too much of an alarm, there’s plenty of drugs in these small towns, plenty of people looking for a safe, warm spot to shoot up. Guns get stolen all the time.”

“But now you’re wondering if it was something more?”

“Well, in the absence of any real evidence against Andrew, and the fact that his alibi was ironclad, yeah, I’ve been wondering if there was more. The farmer had cameras on his gates, and there was a man driving down the road, captured for a heartbeat, in a single frame—a man who was definitely not Andrew Locke. A man with curly blond hair.”

He plays with his last fry. “Pretty vague. No one in the general area matches that description?”

“No. Small town, right? No one matching that description lived in Malogen. So I did some looking at strangers who were in the area around the time Chloe Locke was murdered. Malogen’s a small town, hard to reach, and everybody’s nosy, in each other’s business. But we’re not that far from Atlanta, which means millions of people pass through the general area weekly.”

“In other words, it was a needle in a haystack, trying to find a shadow on a cloudy day.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t tie any threads together at all. Except for the phone call I got two weeks after the murder. It came to the station—the number was untraceable. Male, unidentifiable accent, but if pressed, I’d say eastern European. Wanted to know if there was any movement on the Andrew Locke case. I asked for an ID, and he hung up.”

She takes a long sip of tea.

“The next day, Andrew jumped bail and took off.”

“And hasn’t been seen since, until now.”

“Right. We know he went to Mexico after Chloe’s murder because he met Brooklyn there. He reinvented himself as Trey Locke, told her a story about a falling-out with his folks, got her pregnant, and they’ve been nestled up here in Nashville ever since, where he’s had a long-term money-laundering-slash-funneling operation going on at ‘uncle’ Bob Gussin’s company. Are they in on it, or is he acting alone? Then he gets spooked by something—”

“Or someone.”

“Or someone. Tries to run, and it all goes to shit. He bumps into Eden Barrow, freaks out, and takes off, without his new family. And a man with curly blond hair follows him from the airport. He might have been trying to retrieve them from Barrow’s house but ended up hitting Brook with the car instead. Bad, bad luck. Then somehow, his passport ends up at his parents’ house, and of course, they’re very dead. And there’s this.” She waves the bandaged hand. “The stranger was looking for Andrew.”

“Did he have curly blond hair?”

“I think so, but it was dark. I’m just saying, there’s a bigger plot afoot here. Add in Gussin telling the FBI Andrew’s been stealing millions from TGG . . .”