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Another sigh, a pause. Then, “You don’t have to do things alone.”
“I’ll invite West for dinner next week.” Henry hoped that this was concession enough. “If there’s anything important we’ll discuss it together, okay?”
He heard Luke fussing. He was her little mini-me. If she was upset, Luke always reflected that.
“Hey, little man,” he said.
“Da! Da!”
“Okay,” Piper said, resigned and turning her attention to Luke. “Do what you have to do.”
“I’ll tell Dawn you said hi.”
“Loser.”
Now he waited in the dark. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge towered, its twin sails lit yellow and white against the night riven with stars. A sliver of moon hung in the sky.
He’d parked on the south fishing pier, the site of the original bridge torn down after a 1980 disaster where a freighter crashed into the support structure. The bridge collapsed, plunging cars into the bay, an area tragedy that people still talked about.
The sun had set and a few fishermen still stood at the pier edges, but mainly he was alone, the water glittering around him.
“Maybe she won’t show,” said West, his voice tinny over the car speaker.
Cat was almost an hour late.
Henry had turned off the tracking on his phone. Piper would check his location sooner or later and he didn’t want to have to explain why he was at the fishing pier instead of Frenchy’s where he’d told her he was meeting West. At some point, she’d notice that his location services were off, but those kind of glitches were more explainable.
“I’ll give her a few more minutes,” said Henry.
“You care about her,” said West. He was parked in the dark behind Henry. He couldn’t see the older man’s vehicle.
“I understand her, I guess,” said Henry. “She seems lost to me. Looking for things in the wrong places, in the wrong way.”
“What if she’s a killer?”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re right behind me.”
“You’re not afraid of her.”
“No,” he said. “We have a chemistry.”
“Hmm,” said West skeptically. “How are you doing with that other piece?”
The forensic detectives West had told him about hadin factmade a connection.
Using the DNA stored from Alice’s crime scene, they were able to make a match with some of Tom Watson’s cousins through one of the at-home DNA testing services. These found cousins had been forthcoming that Tom was a bad guy, in trouble on and off most of his life, a petty thief, and often violent against women—though he was never arrested or charged for any crimes.
It seemed more likely than ever that he was Alice’s killer.
“I’m still processing,” said Henry. He still needed to talk everything through with Piper. Everything.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Technology, right? It’s all still like sci-fi to me, some of this stuff.”
Yeah, but it was ancient, too. DNA was the language God used to program human beings. It was a source code—a list of commands to be compiled into an executable program. There was the hand you were dealt and what you did with it that defined your life.
A pair of headlights approached and a black BMW drifted into the space in front of him. It sat a moment idling, then went dark.
Cat climbed out. She was tall and slim in dark jeans, and tight T-shirt, light leather jacket as she approached Henry’s car. He keyed down the volume on the phone.
