Page 31 of Honest Neglect

“What do you mean?” asked Frank.

“They sent someone after the investigator, and he came back to me and said he wanted nothing more to do with the case,” Paul replied. “I thought he had more nerve than that, but they must have done something to scare him off. The way he reacted, I could tell he was really terrified. I think they’ve been watching me ever since they figured out that I was on to them.”

“You think they followed you here?”

“Maybe,” Paul replied. “They’ve been on my tail for a while. I noticed a car following me a few towns over, but I managed to shake it off. I think, anyway.”

Warren reached over to put his arm around me, sensing how tense I was right now. I hated how far all of this had spread, how far the influence of Tony and his father seemed to go. Was there nobody who was safe against any of this?

“But Mark tried to...pay me off,” he explained. “That was his first move when he found out I had an investigator on them. He reached out to me and offered me a million dollars to try and get me to drop it. I refused, of course, but it just made me sick to think he thought he could make me stop caring about my daughter like that. What kind of man is he?”

I got the feeling Paul didn’t want the answer to that question. But as we sat there, I could sense something in the room shifting. Frank lifted a hand as though something had just occurred to him.

“He tried to pay you off?” he asked as though making certain he had heard that right.

Paul nodded. “Yes, but I—”

“You won’t be the first,” Frank cut him off, thinking out loud. “If this is his go-to, that means it must have worked before. We need to find out who he’s been doing this to, who he’s been sending money to. We can take it to the feds that way. They’ll be interested in what he’s doing with his cash, and it could be a paper trail that ties him and his bastard son to everything they’ve done.”

My heart bounced in my chest. I hadn’t even thought of it that way. There was a murmur of excitement around the room, but Paul was still sitting there, clutching his coffee and shaking his head.

“Don’t get me wrong, I want to help you with your case against Tony,” he said finally, cutting through the noise of the room. “But I came to you because I know my daughter is still out there, and I’m not going to be able to rest until she’s safe again.”

“I know that, Paul,” I assured him. “We’re going to do everything we can to find Marcy. Do you have any ideas where she might be? Any leads at all we might be able to go on?”

“Not much,” Paul sighed. “I wish I had more to give you, but I barely remember anything about the last night I saw her. I was so scared for her I didn’t take any of it in.”

“That’s okay,” I promised him. “We’ve got some really great people helping us out. Isn’t that right, guys?”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“I think she went into hiding,” Paul offered. “I don’t think she would have gone back to him like that. I have to hope not, anyway. Maybe she was protecting me, putting as much distance between herself and her family in the hopes she could keep Tony away from us.”

“That sounds very possible,” Leroy remarked. “I have some of the best men I’ve ever worked with installed in a lodge outside Oakville. I can reach out to them and get them to start looking into any reports of women who look like your daughter across the country. They can start scouring social media—she might have a few pictures up there, even if she doesn’t know she’s in them. Work photos, things like that.”

Paul nodded, and, for the first time since he had arrived, he was actually starting to look glad he’d come here. I prayed he would be able to find his daughter, but it raised the question as to who the other woman was—who the body actually belonged to. Another one of Tony’s victims, gone too soon? I guessed we were going to find out.

I got to my feet and headed to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. From what Warren had told me about what had happened when I was taken, Tony had used the same tricks on me—taking my phone and sending messages to the people I cared about to try and placate them into staying away from me. I shivered when I realized how close I had come to the same fate of that poor woman, whoever she was. Mark and Tony had clearly done this before, and it made me feel sick to imagine all the other girls they had hurt over the years.

But whatever they had been up to, it ended now. It had to. I had to believe I could bring it all to a close, because if I didn’t...

I would start believing that I’d be the next body turning up in the middle of nowhere. And I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I made my way back to the living room, gripping the cold glass tightly. We had work to do.

Chapter Eighteen

Lily

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I TOSSED AND TURNED in bed, staring at the wall opposite me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep until Warren was there next to me, but he wasn’t going to come to bed anytime soon.

Everyone else was settled for the night. My mom and Silver were asleep next door, Frank and Barry had gone home—after a very lingering hug at the door between him and my mom—and Leroy had relayed the information to his men and then headed out to where they were staying to find out if they had discovered anything. Warren was waiting up until he got back.

He had come to bed with me initially, but I had felt the tension coming off him in waves, and I knew he wasn’t going to be able to relax until Leroy got back and told them what was going on. I had been straining my ears to hear an engine coming up the driveway, but there had been nothing at all to go on, and it was starting to drive me a little crazy. How long was Leroy going to keep us waiting? What if something had happened to him?

I had to consider that anyone could get hurt now. Everyone was at risk. I hoped we weren’t going to have to deal with another attack, but every time I closed my eyes, my memory was filled with everything that had already happened. The smoke from Warren’s burned-out house, Silver being forced into that van and dragged away from me, running through the woods away from Mark. All of it was so heavy on my mind, and I couldn’t sleep without Warren’s comforting presence next to me, soothing me slowly to sleep.