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Well, fuck.The message read: Why are u there?!? My mole sees u. Are u insane?!?
He glanced around the restaurant, wondering who here was Jackass’s mole. Quickly, under the shield of the tablecloth, he replied: Later.
And later, he’d give Jackass a piece of his mind. That piece would be the only evidence of a brain in the fool’s head. “I’m so sorry,” he told his tablemates, who’d stopped their chatter while he’d checked his phone. He shot them a conciliatory smile. “I’m not trying to be rude, I promise. My answering service got a call for me, but it’s not an emergency. I’m putting my phone on Do Not Disturb right now.”
Which he wasn’t going to do, of course. He was expecting a text from Stockman confirming that Xavier Morrow was no more.
Metairie, Louisiana
MONDAY, JULY 25, 9:45 P.M.
“How is the dog?” Burke asked when Molly and Gabe met him in Rocky Hebert’s front yard. They’d parked at the curb because there was only room for one car in the driveway and an old Ford truck already occupied the space. It had been Rocky’s vehicle.
She’d been planning to check Rocky’s house the next morning, when there was daylight, but given the attempted attack on Gabe via his dog, she didn’t want to waste any more time. Burke was there as backup, in case someone else tried getting to Gabe while she was searching.
“He’s okay,” Molly answered, because Gabe was staring up at the house with a look of dread. “The vet didn’t think he’d ingested any of the poison on the meat but wanted to keep him overnight for observation.” She touched Gabe’s arm lightly. “You okay?” she murmured.
He nodded jerkily. “Yeah. It’s just... I haven’t been back here. Not for a while.”
“I get it.” And she did. She hesitated, then took his hand, giving it a squeeze. “You don’t have to go in. You’ve already had one helluva day. Nobody’ll think badly of you if you don’t want to go inside. You can wait outside with Burke.”
Gabe squeezed back, so hard that she had to work to hide her wince. “I need to do this.”
He’d said the same while they’d sat in the waiting room at the emergency vet’s office, hoping that Shoe was all right. Molly did get it. She’d done the same after her father’s murder, needing answers. Needing to prove she was strong enough to look. She’d been rewarded with the discovery of the camera that her father had hidden in Harper’s closet, rewarded with confirmation of what she’d already known in her heart—that her father had not touched Harper, that the girl’s own father had been the guilty one. Guilty of raping his own child and guilty of killing her dad.
“Then let’s go in.” Still holding his hand, she walked with him to his father’s front door, Burke trailing behind them.
Whoever had tossed that steak over the fence had wanted to silence the dog. Which made her wonder how they’d planned to silence the alarm system when they came back to silence Gabe. She’d mulled it over while Gabe had paced across the emergency vet’s waiting room and concluded that they’d planned to shoot Gabe and make their escape so quickly that they’d be gone before the alarm brought the police.
Or that they already knew how to disarm the alarm, the code for which was Gabe’s mother’s birthday. Molly had wanted to roll her eyes when Gabe had admitted this. Civilians.
So when Gabe entered the exact same code into the keypad inside his father’s front door, she gaped. “You both used your mother’s birthday for the alarm code?”
Gabe shook his head. “Not exactly. That was just the code Dad set up for me. I use it for everything, so I don’t forget. Dad had the master code. It was the date they met and—”
He flipped on the overhead light and gasped. Behind them, Burke cursed.
“Well, shit,” Molly muttered.
The living room was in shambles—sofa cushions slashed, the foam filling all over the floor. Photos and paintings had been tossed to the floor, several holes punched into the walls and the ceiling. Several of the paintings had been slashed.
“Stop,” she said, grabbing Gabe’s arm when he started toward the mess.
“Don’t touch anything,” Burke added.
Gabe froze, a muscle twitching in his cheek, his jaw clenched hard. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “What...?” He turned to her, his expression full of pain. “Why?”
Molly’s heart hurt for him, but she had to focus on this new violation. “Someone was looking for something. I’m betting that they came back when they didn’t find what they were looking for on your dad’s phone.”
“Safe bet,” Burke growled. He gently pushed ahead, searching room to room while Molly stood with Gabe. She took his hand again, but this time he didn’t squeeze. He just stared around him, shell-shocked.
She got that, too.
“I want them to pay,” Gabe whispered.
“They will.”
He swallowed audibly, his voice still raspy and faint. “It wasn’t enough that they killed him. They came back... and did this.”
