Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(21)

He’s a numbers guy, she thinks, and I am his most expensive project. That’s what I’m seeing on his face right now. Concern for an investment.

“How’d you get me to California so fast?” she asks.

“I didn’t.”

“So I’m not in California?”

“Nope.”

“Sometimes I have trouble wrapping my head around how rich you are.”

“My company, you mean.”

“You do all right. I’ve seen your spread in La Jolla.”

“When?”

“Some magazine. I can’t remember which one. Architectural Digest?”

“Don’t believe everything you read in magazines.”

“I don’t. But pictures don’t lie.”

“Sure they do. If you pass them through the right hands first.” Cole smiles. “What happened, Charley? Did he tell you he had someone in the tannery?”

Maybe. Or maybe I ran because my grandmother’s ghost is right—I was about to break his neck.

“If you’d worn the earpiece, we could have told you he was lying. We weren’t picking up any heat signatures.”

“It’s not like you picked up on the trap, either.”

“The bear traps?”

“No. The one that blew up.”

“There was some disagreement about how deeply we should risk penetrating his property before . . .”

“Before I was on it?”

Cole nods, but he’s looking at the floor.

“Because you thought there was a chance he wasn’t really a killer, and you didn’t want to invade his privacy?”

“We’d already invaded his privacy and then some. And I never thought he wasn’t a killer. Next time, we’ll do more groundwork first.”

“I’m confused, though.”

“Call it a draw. You made a bad call by running into the tannery. I made a bad call by not having it inspected more closely by a ground team.”

“That’s not what confuses me.”

“What, then?”

“Who has the power to disagree with you? Aren’t you running the show?”

He studies her for a few seconds, but she figures he’s not seeing her, only the words he’s going to say next. Or not say next. “I was swayed by a strident voice. I won’t make that mistake again. I’m sorry.”

Because it’s the first time she’s ever heard him say the last two words, it takes her a minute to swallow them.

“I’m sorry, too,” she whispers, “for running. It was . . . thoughtless.”

Cole nods, looks to the floor. He’s not going to rub her nose in it. That’s good.

So this is what a draw feels like.

“Next time you wear the earpiece,” he says.

“So there’s going to be a next time?”

He’s clearly startled. Does he think she’s threatening to quit?

“It was our first time doing this. Together. I didn’t expect things to go perfectly.”

She nods, but she’s wondering how he’d react if she tried to back out now.

Five months ago, he’d made her an offer—she could walk away from this forever, ensuring the total destruction of Project Bluebird once and for all, but on one condition: Dylan Cody a.k.a. Noah Turlington would have to die. Occasionally she lies awake at night wondering if she only chose option B to spare Noah’s life. But it’s just a nagging fear that usually passes after a moment or two of self-reflection.

Shayla Brown. Deborah Clover. Maryanne Breck. Patrice LaVon. Janelle Cropper.

That’s why she’s doing this.

And don’t forget Joyce Pierce.

Thinking these names brings another to her lips. “Richard Davies?” she asks.

“Dead. We were a little too concerned with you. He bled out.”

“From what I did to him, or did the explosion—”

“You stopped him, Charley. That’s all that matters. I’m not going to indulge any sort of misguided guilt around any of this.”

Because you got the vials of paradrenaline you expected, and whatever else you took from my body while I was sleeping.

“So you just scrubbed the whole place and nobody’s going to know what he did?”

“If anyone does try looking for him, which given the way he lived, I doubt they will, he will have gone missing and his farm will have burned to the ground. That’s correct.”

“So the families don’t get . . . anything.”

“Most of those girls’ families were hotbeds of abuse. What do you think they deserve exactly?”

“Someone cared. Someone always cares. Just because they couldn’t work miracles doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to know what happened to those women. My grandmother went over a decade without knowing what happened to me and my mom. It almost killed her.”

“If that’s how you want to describe getting sober and becoming one of the pillars of her community, then fine.”

“Someone deserves to know what happened to those women. Someone deserves to know that maybe they would have gotten off the streets one day, but Richard Davies took that chance from them.”

“Well, next time let’s do a better job of wrapping things up, then. My plan was to send him to a nuthouse or prison, just like Pemberton. But you had other ideas.”