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“That’s it. Until I hear more.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Will do.”
Nikki clicked off, her mind swirling with ideas and questions. If the body was that of little Rose, why wasn’t she in the crypt with her sisters? Had she escaped? Was she murdered, or had it been an accident? Why at the lake? How far was that from the Beaumont mansion? Why was she up there?
“You’re getting ahead of yourself.” But she couldn’t tamp down the sense of excitement she felt, a mixture of fear that Rose Duval was truly dead and a feeling that finally the case might be going somewhere.
Pushing the speed limit, driving by rote, she barely noticed the herons and egrets skimming the water. Instead she let her thoughts spin ahead. Someway, somehow, she had to find a way to get more into the story, to get the green light from her editor so that not only would Fink have her back, but she would have the legitimacy to keep investigating for her job, something Reed couldn’t very well argue against. So, Metzger or no Metzger, she had to get Fink’s approval.
She dictated a quick text to Reed again through her hands-free device. She asked him for confirmation even though she knew he’d be pissed that she was working. Well, too bad. This was her job, damn it.
So into her own thoughts she didn’t notice the gray pickup with the darkened windows that was lying back, ever on her tail, keeping at least two cars between them for cover as she drove into the city.
CHAPTER 19
“Fuck!”
Turning onto the street where he rented a studio apartment in an older home, Owen saw the news vans?
??two of them, both white but emblazoned with competing call signs, their satellites angled toward the hazy sky. One reporter was already on the front porch, speaking through the screen door to someone on the other side. His landlady, no doubt, probably glibly chatting about her quiet tenant with the horrible reputation. Helen Davis, a devout Christian, would talk to the devil himself if it meant a chance to share a little gossip. He’d figured that out only after he’d signed a year-long lease and moved into one of the only places he could afford in the area.
No way was he going to deal with the press.
He did a quick turn into a neighbor’s driveway, surprising a woman walking to her mailbox, then backed up and, throwing the truck into drive again, headed back the way he’d come. At the end of the street, he turned onto the main drag and drove three miles to the parking lot of a convenience store and, with the engine idling, pulled his Atlanta Falcons cap down low and slipped on a pair of sunglasses to cover his eyes. Then he called Austin Wells’s private cell phone.
His attorney answered on the third ring. “Owen?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. Can’t you do something? The goddamned press is hounding me, the police are following me—I’m sure of it—and I get calls at work! This is harassment.”
“Refuse to take the phone calls.”
“I do, but there are reporters at my place right now. Two fuckin’ news vans. One reporter is talking to my landlady right now!”
“Calm down, Owen—”
“No! I’m not calming down. I can’t go any damned where without being dogged. I feel like I’m goin’ out of my fuckin’ mind!”
“Whoa—slow down. It’ll be all right.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you didn’t do it. Right?”
“Right!”
“So just get through this. It’ll all be worth it.”
“I don’t know, man, I’m . . .” His throat clogged and he looked through the bug-spattered windshield to spy a cruiser for the county drive slowly past. “Oh, Jesus, there’s nowhere I can go.” He closed his eyes for a second, tried not to give in to the paranoia, the worries that plagued him every damn night. He wanted to remember his sisters as they were, remembering how sweet and innocent they’d been and then . . . then the unthinkable. And when he did finally go to sleep, the nightmares would come and he’d see them, all three as skeletons with rotting flesh, blond tufts of hair and jaws that opened and closed jaggedly as they forever repeated:
It’s your fault, Owen. All your fault.
Over and over again.
“I just don’t know how much of this I can take,” he said to the lawyer. “They found another body, you know. They think it could be Rose.”
“No one knows that for sure. If you need to, go to a hotel.”
