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Shot? In the neck? Remmi nearly gasped, was able to stifle it, but she felt her face drain of color. She swallowed as she remembered hearing a motorcycle revving in the desert while Didi drove away from the exchange. Pop, pop, pop—the sharp report of a rifle. Aimed at Noah? What was he doing out there? Her mind had raced, her hands clenching into fists and her fingernails biting into her palms. Someone had tried to kill him? Who? Why? But, more importantly, he was alive. That’s what they said, he’d survived. He wasn’t “okay,” but he’d made it.
“—so, I guess his injuries weren’t as severe as the docs thought, because for whatever reason, before he came out of his coma and would talk to us, he decided to take a hike and release himself,” Kendrick was saying. “Just walked out of Elizabeth Park Hospital in the middle of the damned night and took off.”
She’d felt a drip of relief, forced herself to uncurl her fingers.
“There are security cameras, though, you know, and one of them caught him taking off, but”—he flipped a hand toward the ceiling—“then he disappeared.”
Davis sent him another sharp look.
“What?” Kendrick asked her. “I’m not telling anything that isn’t gonna be out there. His picture’ll be in the paper tomorrow and on the news tonight. We’ll be asking for the public’s help. So I thought I’d start with her.”
The corners of her lips had tightened, but Davis had turned her attention to Remmi and said softly, “Are you sure you don’t know him?”
“Positive.”
From that point, Remmi had never ever changed her story. She couldn’t imagine what Noah had been doing in the desert that night, how he’d ended up in the hospital, or who would want to kill him.
Ike Baxter.
The name had cut through her. But if he’d shot his stepson, he wouldn’t be making threats to unknown girls who called, would he? Wouldn’t he have acted more concerned, pretended like he was worried?
The police had kept Remmi, prodding her and asking her questions until a willowy woman with dishwater-blond blond hair and a slight overbite, Miss Evelyn Connors from Social Services, had shown up wearing a prim navy suit, what Didi had called “sensible shoes,” a crisp white blouse, and a small silver cross swinging from a thin chain circling her long neck. Miss Evelyn, as she’d insisted upon being called, came with a broad smile and “Praise the Lord,” because of the happy news that they’d located Remmi’s aunt. Not only that, but Aunt Vera and her husband, Milo, were willing to take in Vera’s sister’s abandoned daughter and become Remmi’s official foster parents.
“It’s perfect,” Miss Evelyn exclaimed, her long-boned fingers clasped together almost as if she were praying.
As it turned out, not so “perfect,” Remmi thought now, as she walked from the wet street into the parking garage, which was near a small boutique hotel and located her ten-year-old Subaru Outback. But she wasn’t going to think about the intervening years now, that particularly bleak part of her life she’d endured under Aunt Vera’s overly religious thumb, Uncle Milo’s cold disinterest, and her two randy cousins’ off-color jokes and leering eyes.
She shuddered at the thought as she slipped behind the wheel (long legal now as she’d gotten her license while under her aunt and uncle’s care) and reminded herself to forget about them all. If she could. Because now, it seemed, she might have to deal with them again, and the thought gave her a severe case of heartburn.
“No, thank you,” she muttered under her breath as she drove onto the hilly, rain-slickened street. No wonder Didi had never spoken to them. She threaded her car through the heavy traffic and headed for the Thomas J. Cahill Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, where investigations of suicide and murder took place.
CHAPTER 12
“Didi Storm?” Detective Jorge Martinez asked when he slid into the passenger side of the Ford Crown Victoria, one of the sedans in the city’s fleet. “Who the hell is Didi Storm?”
Dani Settler, Martinez’s partner, was already behind the steering wheel and twisting on the ignition. She waited as a uniformed officer removed the barrier so they could pull out of the spot they’d secured at the base of Montmort Tower three hours earlier, just before the Jane Doe had taken a swan dive off the nineteenth-floor ledge.
Settler shivered inwardly at the memory as she’d seen the woman step into the thick San Franciscan twilight, then plummet to her death.
“The victim looked like her.”
With a glance up at the tower Martinez prodded, “Again, who is she?”
“Seriously?” Dani snapped back to the present and stared at her partner as if he’d grown horns. “Where the hell have you been?”
“On vacation,” he reminded her. At five-seven, he wasn’t quite as tall as Dani, but he had her by about forty pounds of muscle and had been with the department for twenty of his forty-six years. A family man, Jorge had a wife and three kids, all of whom were currently giving him the silver visible in his clipped black hair.
“Well, still . . . you must’ve been hiding under a damned rock.”
He pulled the Crown Vic’s door shut. “I was in Cabo. You know that.”
She did.
“Wish I was still there,” he grumbled. “I hated to come back to this crap.”
“C’mon, Martinez, you know you love it.”
“If you
