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Ginny smoothed her hands over the file again and dragged them to her lap. “I was hoping one of you would know about the property.”
“No.” Lila could pass a lie detector on that answer.
Tobias watched Jared for a few extra seconds before turning back to Ginny. “Can you track the ownership?”
“We will.” Ginny glanced into the open room behind her before continuing. “The information is pretty fluid. All of this is unfolding as we speak.”
“Stabbed.” Lila blurted the word out again. It rumbled around in her head, begging to get out, as the others talked.
Ginny let out a small sigh. “Yeah, it looks like the weapon came from the knife block in the cabin’s kitchen.”
“So someone who lives in or rents the cabin attacked Aaron?” That made less sense to Lila than Brent or another accomplice. “This is insane. Why would that happen?”
“When?” Jared delivered the word in a louder voice, as if his brain cells had jump-started and he’d come out swinging.
Ginny frowned at the question. “Excuse me?”
“Aaron disappeared nine days ago. Has he been in the SUV all this time?” Jared’s voice rose with each word. By the timehe got to the end, he sat up straight, demanding answers. Then his body fell. It looked like all the air rushed out of him, and he doubled over in his chair. “Shit. I can’t take this.”
Ginny stood up and reached for the door handle and called for help.
On instinct, Lila rushed to Jared. She dropped into the chair beside him and rubbed his back. Seeing him broken and struggling hit her as if she’d slammed full speed into a brick wall.
“Okay, breathe.” She whispered the plea directly into his ear. After a few minutes, his breathing seemed to settle. “You okay?”
A harsh laugh without any amusement erupted from deep inside of Jared. “No.”
Lila glanced up in time to see Ginny and Tobias exchange a look of concern.
“I’m fine.” Jared waved off the concern. “No need to call an ambulance.”
Ginny waited until Jared sat up again to answer. “There’s a possibility his body was moved to the SUV recently.”
Just when Lila thought her thoughts couldn’t be any more scrambled, her brain proved her wrong. She couldn’t decipher Ginny’s cryptic response. “He was alive and hanging out at some random cabin while we were all looking for him?”
Tobias shrugged. “Maybe the person who stabbed him held him captive there.”
“We’re not sure.” The more Ginny talked, the more drained she sounded.
“This is... I don’t know what this is.” Lila’s mind took off on another race.
Who other than her would want him dead? An accomplice. A victim? A parent who knew what he’d done? All sounded reasonable, but she couldn’t make the jump from there to the notes left at her house and office. Those were personal. Threatening. They suggested surveillance and a specific knowledge of her plans.
And they’d stopped.
It had been days since she’d gotten one, which might mean Aaron had been alive and leaving them and then something had happened to him. She couldn’t exactly ask, since no one knew about the notes. Just her and the person who’d left them.
“There’s something else you both need to know, and I’d prefer if you heard it from me.” Ginny shifted to serious investigator mode. Some of the haze cleared from her eyes as she stood there, ready to drop the next piece of information that would blow their lives apart.
Lila had run out of tolerance for surprises. “What is it?”
“There was another body on the property.”
Tobias’s eyes narrowed. “When you say ‘body,’ you mean—”
“Aaron wasn’t alone.”
Not possible. Not possible. Not possible.“In the car?”
