All He Has Left(33)

“Please don’t freak out,” he begged her. “I need to talk to you.”

Her eyes remained wide. “Jake, the news. What is going on? The police are searching for you. Piper is missing. It was all over TV this morning.”

“I know. But I swear I’m innocent. Someone else shot and killed my niece last night. And they took Piper. I’m trying to find her, Jill.”

“What? Who took her?”

“I’m trying to figure that out. I need help.”

“But why are the police saying you did this?”

“It’s complicated. I think all of this has something to do with Sarah’s death last year.”

Her eyes went even bigger. “What?”

He nodded, stepped closer so he could lower his voice. “The hit-and-run last year wasn’t an accident. I believe it was intentional.”

“Oh my gosh. Are you serious?”

“Yes. At first, I thought I was the target. But now I believe it was Sarah. Someone was out to get her for some reason.”

“Oh my . . . Sarah?”

A red Mustang pulled into the pump station across from them. A teenager got out and started working the pump. Jake stepped even closer to Jill.

“Did Sarah say anything to you in the days before she died? Something you can think of now that might be connected to all of this?”

“I . . . I don’t . . . know.” Jill stared off a second, thinking. “She was definitely distraught about something, Jake. She didn’t tell me what it was about, but I could tell it was troubling her a lot.”

“What did she say exactly?”

Jill rocked on her heels a bit. “Honestly, Jake, I think it had to do with some other guy. I hate to say it, but at the time, I wondered if she was having an affair—but I promise you I don’t know anything for sure. Again, she wouldn’t tell me. But the fact that she wouldn’t talk about it made me suspicious. Sarah and I would talk about everything. We never kept secrets from each other.”

Jake’s head started spinning. An affair? It had never crossed his mind.

Jill added, “You guys were sort of struggling, you know.”

“We were,” Jake admitted. But he still couldn’t process the word affair. Even with their struggles, he had never considered finding solace in another woman. They had built too good a life together to destroy it that way. Sarah felt the same. She’d heard and hated the rumors about her father over the years. She knew what even the rumors did to her mother. So Sarah potentially having an affair felt impossible to grasp.

“Obviously, I wasn’t going to say anything to you about it after she died. What was the point? It was just speculation on my part. So I let it go. But do you think it could somehow be connected to her death?”

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

“Oh my gosh, Jake, this is crazy. What’re you going to do?”

“Figure it out. Because I think it will lead me to Piper.”

“How can I help you?”

“You’ve already done enough. I don’t want you to get more involved.”

A police car pulled up to the gas station and parked across the way. An officer got out, began walking toward the store. Jake shifted awkwardly.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Please be careful.”

“I will. Thank you.”





TWENTY-THREE


“What the hell, Dani? You know this guy?”

Dani stood inside her boss’s office at FBI headquarters in Austin. Simon Crosby was sitting behind his desk with an exasperated look on his face. Wearing a black polo and gray slacks, he was a tall, lean man in his midforties with a close-cropped haircut that made him still look like the military man he once was. Dani and Simon had been around each other several times when she’d lived in DC, and he was there visiting for various FBI-related functions. Groups of them would always hit the bars. Simon had flirted with her from the beginning. She had sometimes flirted back. It seemed harmless at the time. They lived a thousand miles apart, so nothing serious could ever develop between them. Dani wasn’t sure she ever wanted something serious again after the crushing blow of her marriage collapsing compounded her heartbreak with Jake.

But Simon had put on the full-court press as soon as she’d moved back to Austin. She was super resistant at first. After all, he was now her direct boss. And while these interoffice relationships were not completely off-limits, they were of course heavily frowned upon. But Simon was relentless, so she finally gave it a shot. It was a disaster from the beginning. To say it made her life more complicated would be an understatement. The line between boss and the guy she was dating was constantly blurred—mostly by Simon. When Dani started to feel like she was getting unfair little favors here and there, she ended it. There was no way she was going to jeopardize the respect of her peers. Simon wasn’t happy about her decision and was still looking for ways to make it work between them. So she had been living in this constant tango between boss and ex-boyfriend.

“Yes,” she said. “But it was a really long time ago.”

Dani had felt compelled to admit her prior relationship to Jake after what had just happened to Judd McGee. She couldn’t afford to play coy any longer—especially after having shared the information with Mitchell. She didn’t want to put the young agent in a position of having to keep secrets. The fact that Mitchell was loyal and would do it didn’t change her mind.