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A strange woman? Or women?
For an instant, Sam thought he might lean over and puke into the trash can. Whatever Joshua/David’s intentions had been toward Teresa Mackay, he’d caused her death, and he’d done at least part of it in front of his little girl.
Jessica’s words whispered menacingly in his head: They were disturbed…their own little world…fed off each other.
“So the person who tried to kill Mila Saturday is most likely her mother,” he said, unable to leave it unsaid any longer.
Ben nodded, but Daniel frowned. “Mila said it was a man. And don’t you think she would have recognized her own mother?”
Ben pulled out two more photos, a copy of a driver’s license identified as Traci Brumley and a photo of a woman in a hospital bed. The one was a bright-eyed, attractive black-haired woman, easy to believe as anyone’s mother. The other…
She hadn’t just jumped out of a speeding car. She’d landed close enough to the vehicle to suffer the agony of the flames, her body too broken to scoot, crawl or claw away from them. The doctors were amazed she’d survived. In this photo, she looked as if she hadn’t.
God help her. Even knowing what he did, Sam couldn’t squelch his sympathetic wince as he passed it on to Daniel.
“Damn.” After studying it a moment, Daniel thumbed through his own file folder for a picture. “This was taken off a surveillance camera at the feed store two blocks down from where the driver put Poppy out of the car. Seems the owner’s got a problem with kids tipping over that giant cow out front, so he put in a camera. The license tag was stolen in Arizona, the car in Texas, and the driver…”
Very easily could be Mary Jackson, aka Traci Brumley, aka Lindy whatever the hell her name was. Sam was pretty sure right now neither Jessica nor Mila had come by their names by marriage or birth. Upon escaping her parents, they’d probably thought changing their own names was necessary for their survival.
“So Mila’s mother survived this horrific crash. After a long recuperation, she tracked down her mother and her daughter. She killed Mila’s two clients to send her a message, then went after her personally. Does that sound reasonable to you guys?”
“The day murder starts to sound reasonable to me is the day I change jobs,” Daniel said, leaning to the side to remove his buzzing cell from his pocket. He stared at the screen, alarm darkening his face. “Damn, Chief, make it three clients. Ruben Carrasco just called in. He found another dead customer, this time out in the county. The sheriff wanted you to know.”
Well, hell. Sam had joked about putting Mila in jail to keep her safe, but it was looking more appealing by the moment. “Go. Tell Jan I appreciate her letting you look over their shoulders.” Jan Latimer was a good sheriff, and part of that was her willingness to accept help. She would be open to input from Daniel.
Daniel had barely made it out the door before Lois came in. Her graying hair wasn’t yet smashed under her ball cap, but it was standing on end as if she’d been pulling at it, a dead giveaway that she was upset. She neither knocked nor waited for an invitation, circling to Sam’s side of the desk and dropping an open book in front of him.
“I knew that note bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out why until this morning. This is the book I was telling you about, the one that creeped me out so much I had to quit reading. Listen to this.” She cleared her throat, but it was still shaky, still heavy with emotion. After a few words, she pushed the book to Sam and stabbed at the place where she wanted him to start.
He read aloud, haltingly, sickened, the muscles in his body winding tighter with fury. “‘I knew the result would be the same… The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, certain that this time he’d broken my jaw, my cheekbone, a tooth or two. “It’s always your damned fault. But you’d better learn good because…”’”
He stopped for a long, heavy moment before finishing. “‘Next time I won’t go so easy on you.’”
Lois’s gaze locked with his. “The girl in that book, Sam, that’s Mila.” She flipped the book shut and read from the cover, “The girl who survived the ‘harrowing ordeal of being raised by serial killers’ is Mila.”
