The Girl Who Survived(115)

“Yeah. So?” She was squinting and pointed a finger at the woman in the long coat and colored glasses. “There’s our girl again.”

“Yes, and over here—I think that’s Kara.” He indicated a group in the opposite corner where several people were exiting the hospital, and in the group was a woman with a bandage peeking out from beneath her dark hair. Her head was turned slightly, her features not caught in the camera’s lens, her body hidden by other people, but in Thomas’s estimation, the woman with the bandage was Kara McIntyre.

“Wow.” Johnson saw it, too. “They were that close to each other.”

“And over here—what do you see?” He pointed to a large man partially hidden by the trunk of a tree. All that was visible of his face was the brim of a baseball hat and the trip of his nose.

“Some dude.”

“Yeah, some dude, and what is he looking at?”

Johnson leaned forward for a closer view and her lips flattened. She drew an imaginary line across the screen with her finger. Starting with the man and the tip of his nose and through the crowd to land on Marlie—or someone who sure as hell looked like her. Most everyone else’s attention was turned toward the hospital doors, but this man was staring straight at the woman in the tinted glasses and long black coat.

“Recognize him?”

She shook her head. “The tree hides most of his face, as does the bill of his cap.” She straightened. “But maybe there’s another camera shot, from a different angle, or tape from a security camera or something from the TV stations.”

“Or selfies? Pictures posted online from people who were there.”

She was nodding. “I’ll get right on it.”

“And I’ll track down Alex Rousseau. Whether she likes it or not, she’s going to tell us where she’s stashed her killer of a client.”

“Alleged killer,” Johnson said sarcastically as she was walking out of his office. “Remember that: alleged. Innocent until proven guilty.”

“Again,” Thomas muttered under his breath, and wondered how the hell he was going to get around jeopardy and charge the bastard again. There had to be a way.

*

Trudging thought the snow, Jonas ignored some of the lingering pain from the accident. He’d lived through worse. Beatings in the prison yard had been infrequent but had occurred, a shiv had once been thrust into his thigh, barely missing his femoral artery. He’d lived through it all, toughened up with exercise until his body was all lean muscle. Physical pain wasn’t something he couldn’t get through. Emotional pain, though? That was tougher, no matter how devout he tried to be. He wasn’t big on the whole concept of turning the other cheek. He preferred the Old Testament ideology: “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand . . .”

“Exodus 21:24,” he said aloud.

And how many eyes would you lose if anyone tested that theory on you?

He decided not to go there.

He just kept moving through the evergreens with their icy needles that brushed against his face; he thought about Lacey and how she’d lied to him, cheated on him.

He thought about his own stepbrother fucking his girl.

He thought about his parents, how they’d all abandoned him, how they’d punished him.

Samuel Tate had never stood up for him, not like he did for Sam Junior, his firstborn and namesake, the perfect son who never got into any serious trouble. And Natalie? His own mother? That woman had run from him. Had herself a new family, a perfect family, one without a troubled, scandal-riddled teenager. So she’d discarded her firstborn as easy as if he were rotting trash, rarely visiting, barely acknowledging, never so much as helping him get out of that hellhole that was Banhoff Prison.

What kind of a mother was that?

Then there was Sam Junior himself, his half brother. Sam, apple of their father’s eye, had never once had Jonas’s back. Never once. “Fucker,” Jonas growled under his breath, the night air fogging around him.

And finally, of course, there was Kara.

The basket case.

Her excuse for abandoning him had been her youth.

And she’d let their entire fortune be frittered away by Merritt Margrove and her aunt, that vitriolic sister of Zelda’s. “Auntie Fai,” they’d all called her, but she was a stone-cold bitch who was living in his house with her do-nothing musician of a boyfriend. Driving fancy cars. Going on fabulous vacations. Wearing expensive clothes and jewelry. Jonas had learned it all from Margrove, that weasel of a lawyer who was just trying to save his own skin because he, too, had been dipping his greedy fingers into the estate. All that talk about expenses—taxes, fees, maintenance, schooling . . . all horse shit.

He slipped through the gap in the fence around the old house, just as he had as a kid, then he went to the back stoop, reached under the doorframe to that small niche where he’d hidden a key all those years before. Not a key to the front door or even the back door, but a key to the lock that secured the outside door to the woodbin set into a cabinet near the fireplace. It had been his hidden escape route when he’d sneaked out as a teen. The stacked wood had always been an issue, but he’d always been able to sneak out and back in, arranging the kindling and chunks of fir back into the bin so that no one ever noticed, and he’d never been caught.

Rounding the corner of the house, he stopped before stepping onto the porch. Straining to listen, he double-checked that no one was about. The wind was picking up, rattling branches, whispering through the trees, but he heard nothing and saw nothing indicating that anyone was nearby. And who would be?