All He Has Left(53)

“Where’s my daughter?” Jake yelled at her.

Beth was sobbing and barely able to respond. “I . . . don’t . . . know.”

Letting go of Beth, Jake raced over to each of the barn stalls, but there was no sign of Piper in any of them. He then rushed over to what looked like storage rooms. He yanked the first door open. It was filled with stacks of old bags of horse feed. A second room had a workbench and metal shelves lined with junk. No Piper. Jake went for the last door. He noticed a lock and chain lying in the dirt right in front of the door. Jake grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. God, please. But Piper was not inside. The room was empty except for one wooden chair and an old camping cot. There was a blanket and pillow on top of the cot. And there were a couple of fast-food bags wadded up on the dirty floor next to the chair. Piper had to have been kept inside this room. But where was she now? Who had killed Eddie and the other woman? Had they also taken Piper?

He returned to Beth, who was still hunched over her dead brother. She looked up at him. Beth was still crying hard but had caught her breath a little.

“Do you know who I am?” Jake said, kneeling in front of her.

She nodded. “I’m . . . so . . . sorry.”

“Who did this?”

“I don’t know. I was supposed to meet my brother and my mother here to leave the city together. But I don’t know who could’ve done this to them.”

“They had my daughter here?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Jake wanted to unload all his anger on this woman, but he knew that wouldn’t do him any good right now. Beth probably would crumble on him. He needed to stay calm to get information out of her. “Beth, I need you to tell me the truth about everything. Right now.”

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I swear. It just . . . it kept escalating until everything spiraled out of control.”

“You’ve been having an affair with Steve Kingston?”

She seemed reluctant to answer.

“Answer me!” Jake screamed at her.

“Yes! For about eighteen months. He was supposed to leave his wife. He promised we would get married this next year.”

“Was it your brother who killed my wife in the car wreck last year?”

She bit her lip. More tears hit her eyes. Then she nodded.

“Why?”

She visibly swallowed. “Steve had taken a lot of money from the firm. Sarah discovered it and confronted him with it. She said she was going to tell their father. Steve thought he was going to lose everything. He thought his father might turn him in to the police and send him to prison—that’s how much Steve believed his father hated him. Steve had been supporting me financially. The house, the car—all of it. I told my mom and my brother what was happening. If Steve lost everything, that meant me and my family would also lose everything. That’s when Eddie decided to take matters into his own hands.”

Jake tried to process that. “Steve wasn’t behind what happened to Sarah?”

She shook her head, wiped the tears from her face. “It was Eddie. I should’ve stopped him, but I didn’t. I’m so very sorry.”

“What happened last night at Caitlin Kingston’s house?”

“Eddie was working the birthday party yesterday at the Kingstons’ place. I guess your daughter somehow recognized him from the night of the car wreck. Steve told me she took a picture of him on her phone and told Caitlin, who shared with her father and Steve what was going on—that your daughter thought Eddie might be the same man who was involved in the hit-and-run accident. I panicked and told my mother. Eddie didn’t mean to shoot Caitlin. He was just trying to scare them. The gun accidentally went off. Then my brother freaked out and grabbed your daughter because she saw the whole thing.”

Jake’s head was spinning. “Did Steve know Eddie took my daughter?”

“No. Steve didn’t know about any of this until a few hours ago, when I finally told him the truth.”

“What did Steve do?”

“He was devastated and so angry. He said he had to go talk to his father. To make it right. Then he told me to get out of town.”

“Have you talked to Steve again?”

She shook her head. “He won’t return my phone calls.”

It dawned on Jake that Beth had no idea her own brother had executed her lover. It must’ve been his one last desperate attempt to salvage the dire situation. But it hadn’t worked. And now their own dead bodies were piled on top of the others because of it. If Steve had gone to Lars and told him the truth, could Lars have sent someone here to this barn? Jake thought about the man who had tried to shoot him in the park and had killed Brent Grisham instead. Dani had mentioned that a hit man had been hired to kill him. Could that hit man have been hired by his father-in-law?

When Jake had threatened to expose Lars’s affair during the custody battle earlier this year, the first words out of his father-in-law’s mouth were, “You’re a dead man, Jake. I’ll have you killed.” Jake had dismissed it at the time as an overly emotional response to their heated situation. But could Lars have chosen this moment to follow through with it? Did Lars see it as an opportunity to finally get rid of Jake altogether?

Jake suddenly stood. “I have to go.”

Beth looked up at him with the saddest eyes. “What do I do?”