“Perfect,” I said under my breath.

As I pulled into the drive, I noticed that Kate’s car was empty. She wasn’t sitting in it waiting for me. I’d never given her a key to the house. Maybe she was sitting around back in one of the lawn chairs, waiting for me to come home and let her in.

I turned off the Beetle. Instead of walking in through the front door, I walked down the side of the house to the backyard.

I spotted the brown bag of Chinese food first. It lay on the grass, on its side, the top ripped open. It looked as though someone had reached in and helped themselves to a couple of things and left the rest.

The sliding glass door that leads from the living room to the backyard patio had been broken. There was glass on the carpet inside the house. Someone had smashed the glass so they could reach in and unlock the door.

I slid the door open and stepped in.

I called out, “Kate?”

There was no reply.

Broken glass crunched under my shoes. I moved through the living room and into the kitchen.

She was on the floor, on her back, her arms stretched out above her head, her legs twisted awkwardly. Blood was pooled around her.

I was guessing it must have come from the hole in the middle of her forehead.

THIRTY-FIVE

SUDDENLY OVERWHELMED, I BOLTED FROM THE HOUSE through the open back door. I put a hand up against the siding to support myself and threw up. Seeing Kate that way had done more than fuck with my head. My stomach was doing somersaults. When I was sure I was done, I stepped away from the house. But wooziness swept in, and I had to put my hands on my knees and hold my head down for the better part of half a minute.

This was not happening.

Except, of course, it was. There was a dead woman in my kitchen. A woman I had, at least at one point, cared about, been intimate with, shared some small part of my life with.

And now she’d been shot through the head.

I was stunned, horrified. I felt strangely cold, almost shivery, and noticed a tremor in my hands. I was so shaken, it took a few moments before I was able to focus enough to figure out what had happened. Not that it took a rocket scientist to put it together. They-or, more likely, the man known as Eric or Gary-had been here, waiting for me, but Kate had shown up instead.

Maybe the noise of the shot made him panic, think the police might turn up, so he took off, decided he could always try again later.

I stood outside, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t go back in there. I was-and there’s no sense soft-pedaling this-too goddamn scared to enter my home. I couldn’t look at Kate Wood again, see her that way.

When my cell rang, it might as well have been wired directly to my heart, it gave me such a start.

I fished the phone out of my pocket, but my hand was shaking so badly it landed on the grass. I retrieved it, flipped it open, and put it to my ear without looking to see who it was.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice so quiet I could barely hear it myself.

“Mr. Blake?”

Kip Jennings.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m returning your call,” she said. “You have some new information for me or something?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So, what is it?”

I’d been in shock only seconds before, but now my mind was suddenly focused. Think this through very carefully.

There had been several developments in the past few hours:

Syd had been at the hotel, and it now seemed likely everyone who worked there had been lying to me. And to the police, too. Veronica Harp and everyone else had been covering up from the beginning.

Randall Tripe was involved in some kind of human-trafficking scheme, and the fact that his blood-and Syd’s-was on her car connected them.

Andy Hertz was beating the bushes trying to get a lead on this Gary character, who’d not only tried to kill me, but might be the one who’d given Syd the lead on the hotel job.

I’d felt, up until the moment I’d discovered Kate, I was getting close, that I was getting somewhere. It was why I felt the need to finally talk, face-to-face, with Patty’s mother, Carol Swain. Maybe she’d know some small detail about her daughter, or mine, that could end up tipping things in my favor.

What I couldn’t afford was losing time answering questions from the police about how Kate Wood ended up dead in my kitchen.

“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said. “Are you there?”

I had a pretty good idea how Jennings and Marjorie would put this together.

Kate Wood is found dead in my house a very short time after I learn she’s tipped police to what she thinks is suspicious behavior on my part. I’ve told the police she’s a nut. I’m angry, can’t believe she’d point the police in my direction. Kate drops by my house, wanting to patch things up. I’m not interested in an apology. I flip out. After all, look how I reacted when Detective Marjorie suggested I’d killed my own daughter.

They wouldn’t be bringing me in for questioning. They’d be arresting me.

And no one would be looking for Syd. They’d be more than happy to find a way to conclude I’d killed her.

“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said again.

“I’ll have to get back to you,” I said, and flipped the phone shut.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG AGAIN A FEW MINUTES LATER, I checked the ID before answering.

“Yeah,” I said, starting up the Beetle and driving away from my house as quickly as that shitbox would take me.

“Hey, Tim. It’s Andy.”

“Yeah, Andy.”

“You okay? You sound weird.”

“What’s going on?”

“Okay, so, I’m at that place? And I don’t see Gary around. I asked a couple of people who might know him, but they haven’t seen him lately.”

“They know how to find him?” I hung a right, then a left, putting my neighborhood behind me.

“No. But what I thought I’d do is, I’ll hang in long enough to have a couple beers and eat some wings. What I was wondering is, would you pay me back for that?”

Paying Andy’s bill was the least of my concerns. “Sure, whatever.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll check in with you later.”

I flipped the phone shut. And then I lost it.

MY EYES STARTED BRIMMING OVER WITH TEARS to the point that I couldn’t see where I was driving. I managed to veer the Beetle over to the shoulder, put it in neutral, and yanked up on the emergency brake. Then I put both hands back on the steering wheel, squeezed as hard as I could, and made my arms go rigid, as though I could channel all the tension from my body into the car. My breathing, fast and shallow, seemed to be accelerating, like it was trying to keep pace with my heart.

“Oh God,” I was saying under my breath. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” It was turning into a mantra.

Was this what a heart attack felt like? Or was that what this actually was?

All the pressure of the last few weeks had come to a boil. A missing daughter, attempts on my life, and now, a woman murdered in my own home. There was only so much one person could endure.

I was a goddamn car salesman, for fuck’s sake. Nothing in my life had even remotely prepared me for dealing with the things that were going on around me now.

Pull it together.

I pried my fingers from the steering wheel, wiped the tears out of my eyes. The trouble was, the tears were still coming.

It’s about Syd. You have to get it together for Syd. Have your little meltdown, then suck it up and move on. Because if you’re not out there trying to find her, who the hell else do you think’s going to do it?

I wiped my eyes some more, dried my hands on my shirt. My breathing was still rapid, so I concentrated on slowing it down. I took deeper breaths, tried to hold them a second, let them out slowly.

“You can do this,” I said under my breath. “You can do this.”

Gradually, my breathing started to return to, if not normal, something approaching that. The pounding in my chest eased off.