Rebekah stared at the name of the sender, at the email address of the person who’d contacted Karl Stelzik with an empty message.
Willard Hodges.
That was the name Gareth had been using on the cellphone she’d found in the car. The same email he’d been using to book hotel rooms on wine estates and buy clothes for another woman in high-end stores.
His alias. His secret identity.
The name he’d used for his affair.
She stared at the email, unable to process what it meant, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Are you really doing this to me?’ she said quietly.
First Johnny. Now this.
‘Are you really all doing this to me?’
She moaned the question into the silence of the gas station, then put a hand over her eyes, burying herself in the darkness.
But all she could see now was Gareth.
It was that day in the brownstone, when she’d got home and found him alone at the kitchen table with a bottle of bourbon. I’m sorry, Bek, he’d said to her. And then he’d told her Willard Hodges was just a name he’d made up.
Random.
Unimportant.
She opened her eyes again and looked at the screen.
Except it wasn’t unimportant at all. Gareth had contacted Karl Stelzik. But why? How would he have known Stelzik in the first place?
She calmed herself, tried to get her thoughts into some sort of order.
It had to be through Johnny, surely, although she was uncertain of how. He and Gareth had never been close, even during the best times Rebekah had had during their relationship, and that had been exacerbated after Gareth had turned up late to their father’s funeral. They definitely hadn’t been in touch since the split.
That you know about.
She tried to shake her head free of interference. Could Johnny and Gareth really be working together? Why would either of them want to see harm come to Rebekah?
And what about the message?
It was empty.
There was no message.
So what was it? A test to see if Stelzik’s email worked? What did that mean – that Stelzik was involved too? The day Lima had tried to kill her and Johnny, he’d told Rebekah that Stelzik was just a ‘loose end’. That suggested Stelzik was ancillary to all of this, not central to it.
Or maybe it didn’t.
She stared at the email again, then snapped the laptop shut. She didn’t know what was going on.
But she was going to find out.