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It wasn’t likely that Neilie boy would have kept that from them. Far from it. Even though he was early in his career with the TSP, Neil Lockwood knew his stuff. He’d been in the army doing things he refused to talk about for ten years before joining the TSP.
Now he wasrelaxingby keeping the peace in Garrity. But he was a rather dangerous beast at heart. They both knew that.
“Maybe whoever it is registered to didn’t know it was taken?”
“That could be it. Who owned the exterminating company you found?”
“Tom Dwayne.” She was silent for a moment. “I don’t recognize that name. He must have been before our time.”
“He might have been one of the Dwaynes out on Old Coleson Road.”
“There, huh? The one place in the region I do not like to go at night.”
Coleson itself was just a little forgotten blip on the Texas map, now. It hadn’t come up much in conversation in the two years he’d been in the Garrity region.
But now? It was the buzzword of the day, apparently. The week.
Murdoch didn’t believe in those kinds of coincidences.
The once booming ranch houses out there had been torn down and a handful of homes from the seventies and eighties were all that remained—in the shadows of that creepy old mansion and the carriage house. Just ghosts to haunt.
The people that lived out there didn’t take too kindly to outsiders—or the TSP.
Or questions.
There was no way in hell he was taking Zoey out to old Coleson Road this late at night with no backup. Or an armed SWAT team. “Change of plans. Let’s grab dinner out by the interstate. We’ll go over what we have—and what we can find about Tom Dwayne. And who might have had access.”
“Why would a van from Garrity be taken to use in an abduction attempt in Value? There are two hours between the two towns. And with Garrity printed on the side—that was an easy thing to trace. Especially as small as Garrity is. It almost seems deliberately stupid.”
“Unless someone was trying to send a message involving Garrity?”
“What kind of message and to whom?”
“Have you pissed anyone off lately, Zo? We got to face the fact that someone might have just been trying to send a message—to you. This might have had nothing to do with Big Brother Moneybags at all.”
“That doesn’t make sense, though. The only thing I’ve been doing other than fetching for Marc lately has been searching for my mother’s family. But I seriously doubt this has anything to do with that.”
“Unless the ones who screwed your family around all those years ago came after Pen now?” Murdoch ran over the possibilities in his head. Connections. “And that just doesn’t seem likely at all. If they’d wanted Pen, they’d have taken her by now. Long before. Like when she’d been a kid out there practically alone before you got to her.”
“No. Whatever today was about—it had to be something else.”
But did it? Some things were just not adding up here. Not at all. Murdoch was feeling a bit itchy. And that was never good. Not even for a moment. “I’m going to start digging into Coleson Hollow. As soon as I can.”
50
She haddinner at the only restaurant in Garrity—with Murdoch Lake. He paid for Naylor and Miller to grab something to eat themselves, then sent them on their way. The two were squabbling, just like Zoey and Murdoch used to do.
After they were finished eating and Murdoch was telling Naylor to wear his seatbelt and go the speed limit and to text his mother and father when he got home and telling Miller that she was far better than Naylor at everything and deserved so much better for a partner than that goober, Zoey’s focus turned to what was going to happen next.
They weren’t going to find that van tonight. The Garrity region was just too big and there were just too few resources to find it. But she and Murdoch knew what they were doing.
They just needed a place to do it.
As if the man read her mind, the instant Miller and Naylor were out the doors, Murdoch turned to her. “So, your old place? Or mine? I have one chair left in the entire house, so…”
“I have a few chairs and a table.” The man had moved fast. Literally. Murdoch Lake was getting out of Garrity. Exactly what he’d always wanted. “We can work there.”
“Great. I…will then go…crash on your living room floor when we are finished.”
