Reed was pacing the length of the hotel suite, alternately checking his phone and the windows, when at last the door clicked open and Ellery slid inside. “Where were you?” he demanded as she slunk toward her bedroom. “I’ve been calling you for over an hour! Two more minutes of no contact and I’d have been ringing up Sheriff Ramsey to go look for you.”
“Sorry, my phone was off.”
“Are you okay? Did something happen?” He’d checked with hotel security in her absence, and as he’d expected, there was nothing usable on the black-and-white digital recording from the parking garage. Their SUV was barely visible in the upper right-hand corner, and the video didn’t show any other cars loitering near it, nor anyone on foot approaching the vehicle. Whoever had slashed their tires had attacked from the rear, staying low to the ground.
“Nothing happened,” Ellery said, but Reed didn’t quite believe her. She looked unharmed on the surface, but her pale face appeared clammy and drawn, not invigorated from a run in the brisk morning air. She marched to her room and shut the door with an authoritative jolt that did not invite further inquiry. Reed stared blankly at the white slab of wood for a few moments and then lowered himself onto the nearest sofa, his eyes drifting shut in fatigue. He’d been trying to reach her for the past hour with no success, and now that she was back, their communication level hadn’t improved one iota. Like her phone, Ellery was in “off” mode.
Reed patted his pant pockets until he found a crumpled packet of ibuprofens, and he swallowed one dry. His head felt like it was up against a board. Normally he might go knock on her door and try to cajole her into telling him … whatever it was she wasn’t telling him. But right then, he simply lacked the wherewithal to engage. Ellery possessed an instinctual reticence, a silent wall behind which she secreted details both large and small, from her favorite foods to her childhood memories to, on occasion, the fact that maybe someone was trying to kill her. Reed understood this as a natural reaction to that nightmarish time when Coben had indeed tried to kill her. Coben took her body and then the hungry press had clamored for everything else. Give them nothing had been Ellery’s survival strategy, and she’d practiced it without fail ever since.
Reed had traversed the thorny darkness with her enough times that he’d glimpsed the garden behind the wall, seen the flashes of beauty that she kept there, as well as the topiary monsters that swayed and rattled in memory’s breeze. The raw power he felt in those rare moments of connection with Ellery always kept him coming back, eager to find his way in, but the path to reach her seemed to change with each approach. Touch me, but stop. Look, but not too much. On his best days, Reed found the quicksilver challenge exciting. Times like this, when he looked upon her locked door and felt her forceful silence radiating from behind it, he asked himself: Is this what you really want?
When her door opened, he sat up again and saw she was ready to go, with fresh clothes, her hair knotted, and her roller bag all packed. She looked past him to the empty suite, which she surveyed with a small frown, as if seeing it for the first time. “Where are your parents?”
“I asked them to leave,” he said, forcing himself to his feet.
She looked surprised. “And they just … did that?”
“I used the word ‘please,’” he replied, deadpan. He went to the kitchen and retrieved a large paper cup, intent on taking some coffee to go. In reality, he’d had another protracted argument with his parents before they had agreed to depart the premises. Only when he’d insisted that the only way he might one day trust them again was if they stopped trying to interfere with his search for the truth did Angus and Marianne reluctantly leave him alone.
His mother had lingered at the door, cupped his chin in her hand. “You’ve been gone from this place your whole life,” she’d said. “Whatever truth is here, it isn’t yours.”
Reed had said nothing.
She stretched up and kissed his cheek fiercely, her lipstick on him like a wound. “Come home soon,” she’d counseled as she left at last. “Your family needs you.”
Instead, Reed planned to travel yet farther away. Meeting Angie, he felt, would be the closest he would get to finding his mother’s side of the family. Camilla had no living relatives other than himself. Even if Angie had no clues into Cammie’s murder, Reed hoped she would be able to bring the woman back to life for him in a way that no one else could.
Ellery stood at the door, zipping something into her bag, avoiding eye contact with him. She looked slumped and miserable, and he regretted dragging her out here on this fruitless excavation of his past. He grudingly gave her an out. “If you like,” Reed said, clearing his throat, “I can drop you at the airport and you can catch a flight back to Boston. You’ve already given up a bunch of your time, more than I deserve. Of course, if you’re willing to come to L.A., I would value an outsider perspective.”
“An outsider? That’s what I am?” She straightened in a hurry, her mouth a thin line. He’d misstepped again.
“An impartial observer,” he clarified. She made an annoyed chuffing sound and pointedly looked away, toward the couch they’d rolled around on the night before. Reed felt his ears warm. “I just thought,” he finished lamely, “that maybe you wanted to go home.”
“On the contrary.” She regarded him with a cool gaze. “I’d prefer to keep moving.”
Reed stared back at her. Eventually, the case would end, one way or another. He’d have to go back to his home and she would go to hers. Whatever future was coming at them, they wouldn’t be able to outrun it forever. “Okay then,” he said, grabbing his coffee. “Let’s go.”
The drive out I-15 quickly put civilization in the rearview mirror as the barren landscape of the Mojave Desert took over the scenery. Patches of scrub grass broke up endless stretches of brown dirt, while the mountains carved an uneven profile against the stark blue sky. Miles and miles of asphalt cut an almost straight line through the wind-worn desert. The periodic ditches, nondescript dips in the ground, had been given odd names to break up the monotony: Bird Ditch, Opah Ditch, Midway Ditch. Midway, Reed had to wonder, to what? They passed a defunct water park, with its fossil-like metal skeleton and desiccated pools. It looked like something from an old Western ghost town or the beginnings of a horror movie. Occasional crooked Joshua trees, with their tufted ends, flashed by as Reed kept pace with the rest of the desert traffic, going 85 mph to get out of nowhere, fast.
Ellery didn’t say much during the four-hour journey, just kept her face turned toward the window, her knees drawn up and her gaze focused somewhere far beyond the horizon. Her interest perked up when his cell phone rang over the car’s speakers, a number too familiar to Reed, but he hit the button to accept the call. “Kimmy,” he said, trying to smile as he said his youngest sister’s name. “How are you?”
Her voice, sounding uncertain and tinny, came through the speakers. “Reed? I got an email this morning from the DNA testing service—you know the one we did at Christmas? It wanted to alert me to a new connection.”
Reed saw immediately where this was heading and bit back a curse. He’d been so worried about what the DNA results told him that he hadn’t stopped to consider his sisters might see the same results. “Yes,” he said carefully. “I know.”
“It says you’re either my uncle or my half brother,” Kimmy continued. “Reed, what on earth?”
“I’m your brother,” he replied, skimming the wheel with his fingers. “Just—just like always. But yes. It seems that Dad is my biological father.”
Ellery slouched farther in her seat, as if trying to disappear from the conversation. On the other end of the line, Kimberly said nothing. After a mile of silence, Reed tried again. “Kimmy? Are you still there?”
“I don’t understand. You were born after all of us.”
“Yes.” The math alone painted Angus as a sinner. He’d slept with Cammie when he had a wife and three daughters waiting for him back home.
“Your mother … I thought she was murdered in Las Vegas.”
“Yes,” he said, taking the freeway exit that would cut them toward L.A. “That’s still true. Mama and Dad adopted me after her death.”
“So Daddy slept with a hooker? And then knocked her up? My God, what will Mama say when she finds out about this?”
“She wasn’t a hooker,” Reed said tersely, dodging the increasingly heavier traffic. “She was a waitress. Look, I know it’s a shock. I was shocked, too, when I saw the results.” He hesitated with the next part of his news. “You don’t have to worry about Mama. She knows. Apparently, she always has.”
“What!?” Kimmy’s shout was so loud that Reed nearly slammed on the brakes in response. Ellery winced and covered her face with her hands. “They both knew this entire time and they never said anything?”
Finally, someone who shared his outrage. Reed allowed himself a mirthless grin. “Look at it this way,” he told her. “We would’ve all gone to our graves none the wiser, if you hadn’t asked us to take that DNA test.”
“I can’t believe this! I can’t believe they’d lie like that, every day, straight to our faces. For forty years! Remember the pictures they took of all of us at the courthouse steps, the day your adoption went through? I was scared the judge was going to say no, that he’d take you away. I made Mama get out those papers every damn day for a month. I wanted to make sure they were real, that no one could ever take you away again. What the hell was the point of that charade, anyway?”
“I think you know.”
“Daddy’s job,” she said bitterly. “Always first, never last.”
“Mama and Daddy were right about how it would’ve looked, especially back then. The story would have ruined him. A baby from the wrong side of the sheets—with a brown-skinned teenager from Las Vegas, no less.”
“Don’t talk like that. That’s not who you are.”
“It is. It always has been. I just know more of the details now.”
“I still can’t believe Mama and Daddy did this to us. I can’t believe they hid a secret this big, right in the middle of our family.”
Reed faltered, feeling the shame of his beginnings. “They believed it didn’t matter precisely how the family was forged,” he said cautiously. “We’re related just the same.”
“Of course it matters! It matters because we all have to wonder what else they haven’t told us. What else aren’t they saying?”
Reed gripped the wheel. He couldn’t take any more secrets. “I—I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them.”
“Yeah?” Kimmy’s voice was low and threatening. “You can bet I will.”
When Reed reached for the button to hang up with Kimmy, he saw his hand was shaking. Ellery must have noticed, too, because she spoke to him for the first time in more than two hundred miles. “You’re wrong, you know. You’re not just some bastard baby they tried to cover up.”
Reed appreciated her efforts to try to make him bigger than he actually was, but he couldn’t fight biology. “The DNA doesn’t lie,” he said finally.
Their SUV rushed across the Los Angeles city limits, hurtling him closer to his past. “No,” Ellery said. “But it doesn’t tell the whole truth, either.”
A1 Dance Studio was located in the Silver Lake region of L.A., a northeast neighborhood anchored around an old city reservoir. The buildings that lined Hyperion Avenue were a mix of residential and commercial real estate, many of them painted raucous colors like peacock blue or sunny yellow. Squat homes stacked up in layers into the surrounding hills, all with wide windows to take advantage of the view. Tall, skinny palm trees framed the street against the hazy blue sky. Winter, and home back on the East Coast, felt a million miles away. Reed spotted the studio—a nondescript horizontal structure made of brown stucco and glass—and pulled the car to the side of the road. Glad for the cover of relentless sunshine, he put on his dark glasses.
“Well?” Ellery asked when he didn’t immediately head for the door. “What are we waiting for?”
Reed had visited Los Angeles numerous times, always for work, focused on the goal of catching whatever predator was in front of him at that moment. His real life awaited him three thousand miles away, and he was always eager to return. He’d never looked at L.A. as anything more than a temporary stopover, not any place he might have belonged. It appeared foreign even now, like something from a hipster movie, but the painted Spanish-lettered signs, blooming vines, and little outside eateries with a decidedly mixed ethnic clientele stirred something in him, a longing he could not name.
Ellery tilted her head impatiently. “Are we going to go talk to her or not?”
Reed squared his jaw and gave a short nod. “Let’s do it.”
The glass front door gave a merry tinkle as they opened it, although the bell was entirely unnecessary in the small entry area, which boasted an empty coatrack, a water cooler, six blue plastic chairs, and a front desk. The woman behind the desk was clearly not Angie Rivera. She was both younger and Caucasian, freckled, with wide blue eyes and big hoop earrings. “Welcome,” she said warmly as they entered. “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Angela Rivera,” Reed said, reluctantly removing his glasses.
Her smile, if possible, grew even brighter. “You’ve come to the right place! Miss Angie is just finishing up the two o’clock class, if you’d care to wait a few minutes.”
Reed and Ellery spent the next six minutes idling in the waiting area, taking turns studying the black-and-white pictures of young ballerinas and tap dancers on the walls. Slow, muffled piano music sounded from the back, and Reed had to smile at the pianist’s efforts to emphasize the beat. One, two, three, four … one, two, three, four. Eventually, the music stopped and was replaced by happy shouts and thundering little feet as miniature ballerinas in leotards streamed into the room. The adults followed more slowly, parents chatting with one another while their daughters alternately shoved one another or took up complicated clapping games. Reed felt a pang of longing for his own small daughter, whom he missed dearly amid the chaos. Ellery meanwhile stood plastered against the wall, looking faintly terrified at the noisy herd of children.
Reed meant to reassure her with some wise parental wisdom, but at that moment Angie Rivera appeared across the room. She looked older than her picture, but no less beautiful, with her long dark hair, tawny skin softened by age, and a trim, dancer’s waistline. She stopped stock-still when she saw Reed. The children and parents continued to flow out of the studio between them as they stared at each other. Finally, Reed found his voice. “Ms. Rivera,” he said, taking a step forward. “My name is Reed Markham. I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
They stared some more, until the last student closed the tinkling door and silence filled the room. The woman at the desk cracked first. “Miss Angie? I had a woman call about private lessons for her twelve-year-old daughter. They just moved to town and—”
“I’ll call her back later,” Angie said, still looking at Reed. “Thank you, Michaela.” She clasped her hands together and shook her head, bemused. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s you. Please, come back to my office where we can talk.”
On the way back to the private area of the studio, Reed introduced Ellery as a friend of his, but Angie seemed to pay her no mind. She hurried to clear off two chairs and dragged the third one from around the back of her desk. They all sat so close their knees nearly touched. The walls of Angie’s office were crammed end-to-end with dance pictures of a more personal sort—candid shots of her and her students, sometimes concentrating but mostly smiling—as well as ribbons, certificates, newspaper clippings, and cartoons related to dance.
Angie scooted her chair closer to Reed. She reached out impulsively to grab his hand and then stopped herself. “You were so small the last time I saw you. Look at you now, so tall, so handsome.” She beamed and looked to Ellery for confirmation. “Don’t you think he’s handsome?”
Ellery smiled and ducked her head. Reed felt that pull inside of him again, this longing to know where he began. “Ms. Rivera,” he said, but she interrupted.
“Angie. Please call me Angie.” Her Spanish accent had not vanished completely with the passing years. Reed wondered if Cammie might have sounded the same, if she would look this good, if she would have been as pleased to see him.
“Angie, I’m here because the Las Vegas police are officially ceasing investigation into Camilla’s murder. It will no longer be assigned to active detectives. They agreed to let me take a look at it in my capacity as an FBI investigator.”
“A profiler,” Angie said, swelling with pride. “I know. See?” She pointed to the wall, and Reed turned around in his seat to follow her gaze. CALLIE ALLENS FOUND ALIVE, the headline read. It was one of Reed’s old cases, from around ten years ago, when he’d led the team to an abducted eight-year-old girl. Angie was still smiling at him. “I read your book, too.” Her smile faded as she looked uncertainly to Ellery. “I’m sorry for that horrible mess. He was a monster.”
“Yes,” Ellery agreed simply. “He was.”
Reed scanned the wall, noting other bits of his biography here and there, and marveled at the irony: here he’d been trying to figure out how to find Angela Rivera when she’d known exactly where he was the whole time. “You’ve kept tabs on me awhile,” he observed.
She bit her lip, looking contrite. “I’m sorry. I hope it’s okay. I worried for you a long time. You were just a baby when it happened.”
“How did you find me?” The adoption papers had been sealed. Reed had a guess as to how Angie had discovered the information, but he wanted to hear her say it. Angie didn’t seem eager to part with the information, however. She fidgeted with her beaded necklace and looked at the ceiling. Reed sighed and let her off the hook. “You knew my father,” he supplied for her. “Didn’t you?”
She nodded slowly. “Cammie told me who he was.” She smoothed her hands repeatedly over her long, black skirt. “When I first got here, I had no way to know what happened to you. I—I wanted to bring you with me. I went to the hospital where they took you. They had put you in with the sick kids even though you were the picture of health. You got a crib to yourself in the corner, and all the nurses were busy with the other babies who needed them more. No one saw me slip inside.” She paused to reach for the tissues on her desk, dragging the box into her lap. She plucked one out to dab at her eyes before continuing. “My heart was beating so fast that someone might catch me. I looked in your crib, and you knew me right away. You started smiling and kicking your legs. I picked you up and you grabbed my hair like you always did.” She made the gesture on herself, smiling faintly. “I was thinking, maybe I could take you with me and no one would even notice. What did they care? One less problem for them to deal with.”
“Why didn’t you?” Reed asked softly. Another alternate reality he would never know.
Angie picked at the edge of her skirt, her eyes lowered beneath dark lashes. “I was afraid. I didn’t know if I could keep myself alive, and what if something happened to you? The social worker said a nice family would adopt you.” Her eyes welled up again. “She said you wouldn’t remember any of it.”
“You left town right after the murder,” Reed said. “Why?”
“Camilla was my family. Without her, there was nothing left in Las Vegas for me. I saw what was happening. After a day went by and no one arrested Billy Thorndike, I knew they weren’t going to. He could do whatever he wanted—to Cammie, to me, to the whole neighborhood. It wasn’t safe to stay there.”
“You believe Billy Thorndike killed Camilla.”
Her dark eyes widened. “Yes. Don’t you?”
“Never mind about me right now,” Reed said, leaning forward. “I want to know what you saw. I want to know what happened in the days leading up to her murder.”
Fear etched into the wrinkles on Angie’s face, showing the hard years she’d endured. “I would’ve stayed if I thought I could help,” she whispered. “I left because I didn’t know anything. Don’t you see? I’m worthless to you. I didn’t see the killer. I only saw what he did.”
“It must have been awful for you,” Reed said solemnly. “Walking in on that.”
Angie looked at her lap. “I’d been out shopping for some new clothes, having a little fun in the stores, trying on this and that. Cammie was working the late shift at the restaurant and I was going to watch Joey, so I had to be back in time for her to get changed. I got to the apartment a little after four, and nothing seemed strange until I passed the door to Cammie’s apartment—hers came right before mine. The door was standing partway open, and none of us would ever do that, not in that neighborhood. So right away, I knew something was wrong.”
She stopped suddenly and clenched her hands in her lap. Reed hated to press her, but he had to know more. “What happened next?” he asked gently.
Angie took a shaky breath. “I—I pushed the door all the way open and called her name. As soon as I stepped inside, I saw the place was a mess. Papers on the floor. Chair upside down, and the couch was crooked. That’s why I didn’t see her right away. I smelled it, though. The blood.” She clutched at her throat with one hand. “I called her again and went further in the apartment, and that’s when I saw her lying there with the knife still in. I knew she was dead. I—I grabbed the baby from the bedroom and ran next door to call the police.”
“Did you happen to notice if the door had been tampered with?” Ellery asked.
“I don’t remember. I wasn’t looking too close.”
“The police said it hadn’t been,” Reed said. “Nor the windows.”
“The windows were always broken, anyways,” Angie said with disgust. “The cops wouldn’t know the difference.”
“I’m interested in the part of your story about shopping,” Reed replied. “Do you mind if I show you a picture?” He pulled out a manila envelope that contained some crime scene photos.
Angie looked wary. “Pictures of what?”
“From the apartment. But don’t worry, it doesn’t show Camilla.”
Angie drew a shaky breath. “I don’t need pictures for that. I can still see it. I see it sometimes when I don’t want to—I close my eyes and I can see her lying there on the inside of my eyelids, like it’s burned in forever. Other times, I’ve seen someone walking down the street, a woman who moves like her, or who has hair like she did, and I have to stop myself from calling out her name.” She looked from Reed to Ellery, her eyes sad. “It’s always a young woman, you know, that I see. Then I think: ‘Stupid, she’s not nineteen anymore! It can’t be her.’ She’d be old, like me. It’s been so long since she’s been gone now. I just don’t see what difference it makes anymore.”
Silence fell between them, and Reed held the envelope awkwardly in his hands, wondering whether to bring forth the pictures. Ellery shifted in her seat and spoke directly to Angie. “If you read Reed’s book, then you must know what happened. There were hundreds of law enforcement officers working on the Coben case, some of them for years, but Reed was the one who caught him.”
“Yes.” Angie’s reply was full of tears, but still she smiled. “I know he was a hero.”
“It doesn’t matter how many years have gone by or how many other officers looked at the case before,” Ellery continued. “It’s Reed’s investigation now, and he doesn’t plan to stop until he finds Camilla’s killer.”
Angie looked Reed over in wonder, and he tried not to shrink under the weight of the mantle Ellery had placed upon him. “Let me see the pictures,” Angie said decisively, holding out her hands.
Reed gave her the picture he had in mind. “In police narrative, Camilla had also been out shopping that day. The detectives say she might have come home and surprised a burglar in the apartment. They point to these bags near the door as evidence of their theory. The clothes inside matched Camilla’s size.”
Angie looked at the picture and shook her head. “No, those are my bags. I dropped them when I saw what had happened to Cammie. We wore the same size, her and me. People used to think we were sisters. Cammie wasn’t shopping that day. I was.”
“So she didn’t surprise the killer,” Reed said as he took back the picture. “Maybe then she let him inside.”
“No way. No way Cammie opens the door for Billy Thorndike. He’d vandalized her car, spat at her on the streets, cussing and hollering. He even threatened to kill her, but did the cops care about that? ‘Nothing we can do to him,’ they told us. ‘Sorry. Call us if he makes a move.’ Well, he made his move, and did they get him? No. They couldn’t even touch him then, not when she was lying there with a knife in her. Same old sad song: ‘Nothing we can do. So sorry.’”
“Cammie was dating a cop,” Ellery said. “That didn’t help with police attention?”
“David,” Angie recalled. “He tried to help us when Billy made his threats, but we weren’t on David’s beat. He was just a patrol cop working across town. He did what he could to keep Cammie safe, staying at her apartment sometimes. Maybe an extra patrol car went down our street here and there. It didn’t make a difference.”
“Tell me about David,” Reed suggested.
“Oh, he was okay, I guess. Cammie met him at the restaurant, and they hit it off. She was already pregnant, just starting to show, and that might’ve scared off most guys. Not David. He seemed to want the same things she did—marriage, kids. To David, Cammie was the whole package. Instant family.”
“We heard he might have had a wandering eye,” Ellery said.
Angie gave a delicate snort. “Wandering, all right. Wandering to Wanda, you mean?”
“Since you brought it up…”
“Yeah, David had a … what do you call it … a fling with Wanda on the side. I saw it happening before Cammie did, the poor girl. With the baby coming, she had a lot of other things on her mind. She didn’t want to believe David would do that to her, not when they were just starting to make plans. Then she saw Wanda kissing on him out in the parking lot behind the restaurant one night, and she had to admit the truth. Well, a kind of truth. She blamed Wanda, one hundred percent. David had been lured into it, according to Cammie. He was plenty happy to go along with that version of the story.”
“He wanted to stay with Cammie then?” Reed said. “He wanted to make it work?”
Angie frowned. “Sure, maybe. He said he loved her, and she loved him, and there was the baby to think of.”
“And twenty-five thousand dollars,” Ellery added.
Angie looked surprised, then concerned, her delicately arched eyebrows drawing together. “You know about that?”
“We know,” Reed answered firmly. “What we need now is a list of everyone else who knew about that money.”
“You have to understand—Cammie didn’t like threatening Angus’s family. She just wanted to provide for her son. That money would’ve meant she could move out of the neighborhood, far away from Billy Thorndike. She could get daycare, good schools.”
“We’re not here to condemn Cammie for her actions,” Reed replied. “We just want to find out about the money.”
Angie blinked rapidly, tears in her eyes again. “I spent a lot of years hating Angus Markham. I thought he was a user, one of those people who roll into town, shit all over the place, and then let someone else clean it up. I told Cammie to take him for as much money as she could. ‘It’s all he cares about,’ I told her. ‘Hit him where he can feel it.’ Then about twenty years ago, I was at the library and the clerk told me they just got internet services. You can look up anything now, she said. So I sat down and tried it out. I typed in ‘Angus Markham,’ and there he was, with his wife, the three daughters I hadn’t cared about, and you.” She stopped and gave Reed a wobbly smile. “The picture was bad, but I knew it was you. The article said he’d adopted you, and I had to admit to myself that maybe I’d been wrong about him. Maybe he did care.”
She looked hopefully to Reed for confirmation, but Reed pressed onward. “But back then, he made the payment. You saw the money?”
Angie’s face showed a guilty flash. “I saw it.”
“The shopping spree you went on that afternoon,” he said. “Was it financed by Cammie?”
Angie replied with a slow nod. “We hadn’t bought new clothes in so long. She said we should treat ourselves, and she gave me some cash—kind of as a thank-you for all the babysitting I was doing.”
“Who else saw the money?”
“David.” She stopped to think. “Me and Cammie. That’s it, unless you count Angus and the man who dropped it off.”
“Rufus Guthrie,” Reed said.
“Yes, him.” Her lips thinned with disapproval. “I didn’t like that man. He acted like Cammie got pregnant on purpose, like she’d wanted the money all along. Do you know what he did when he came to drop off the payment? He put his hands on her and said with the high price she ought to toss him a freebie. She gave him a knee between the legs and shoved him out the door, yes, she did.”
“Did she see him again after that?” Reed asked.
“I don’t think so. There wasn’t a lot of time. Three days later, she was dead.” Even after all this time, she sounded bewildered at the prospect, at how it came to pass that Camilla Flores had existed and then suddenly did not.
“The money wasn’t recovered after Camilla’s death,” Reed said.
“It wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “What do you think happened to it?”
She glanced around the room, as if the money might materialize there. “The apartment was a mess, torn apart. I guess … I guess the killer must have found the cash and taken it.”
“Or he knew it would be there all along.”
Angie looked horrified. “You don’t think David did this? If he wanted the money that badly, he could’ve just taken it. He had a key and he knew her schedule. He wouldn’t have had to—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “He wouldn’t have hurt her.”
Someone knocked at the door before Reed could ask another question. The young woman from earlier, Michaela, stuck her head in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the kids are arriving for the next class. What would you like me to do?”
“I’ll be along in a moment, thank you,” Angie replied briskly, setting aside the tissue box. “I told you I wouldn’t be much help,” she said to Reed.
“On the contrary, you’ve been very helpful.”
“You’re just flattering an old lady.” She took out a pad of paper from her desk and wrote out an address. “I would like to invite you both for dinner at my house tonight. If you have any remaining questions, we can talk about them then.”
“I’d like that,” Reed said as he accepted the slip of paper. “Thank you.”
“No,” she replied with feeling. “Thank you. All these years, I’ve wondered—” She broke off with a small shake of her head. “I’ll see you tonight, hmm? Around seven.”
“We’ll be there.” He tucked the paper into his breast pocket. Outside on the street, he suggested to Ellery that they bide their time at a nearby bar. “We can get a drink and a bite to eat.” They hadn’t stopped in their race across the desert, except for gas and coffee, leaving him feeling jittery and empty.
“Whatever,” Ellery answered, which marked the first time she’d ever shown less than complete enthusiasm for food. The trend continued fifteen minutes later, when they sat under an orange umbrella with two beers and hot, crispy tortilla chips in front of them. Reed devoured the spicy salsa and homemade guacamole while Ellery halfheartedly chewed through a single chip.
“Do you mind if I give Tula a ring to say good night?” he asked.
“Suit yourself.”
Reed spent the next ten minutes chatting with his six-year-old, telling her about the tiny ballerinas he had seen earlier.
“I don’t want to take dance,” Tula insisted. “I want to take trapeze.”
“I don’t think the YMCA offers classes in trapeze, sweetheart. Besides, you’re too young for anything that dangerous. What about gymnastics as a start?”
“I want the trapeze. The girl in the circus we saw was only a little older than me, and she could do it.”
“Yes, well, she had her parents to teach her. Your mother and I are not acrobats, I’m afraid.”
“Mom has the most boringest job in the world,” Tula complained. “All she does is type on her computer all day. At least you get to go places.”
“Your mother’s job isn’t as dull as it looks.” Sarit worked as a metro reporter for the Washington Post. “You might find you quite enjoy it when you’re older.”
“Daddy … is it true that you can grow up to be anything you want to be?”
Reed hesitated, wondering if six was old enough to handle the ugly truth. He decided not to risk it. “Yes,” he declared emphatically. “If you work hard and try your best, you can do anything you put your mind to.”
“Mommm!” Reed heard the phone clatter to the floor and then his daughter’s whooping in the distance. “Daddy says I should take trapeze lessons!”’
Crap. He’d walked right into that one. Reed quickly clicked off the connection before his ex-wife could pick up the line and then tucked away his phone for good measure. Ellery, he noticed, hadn’t touched her phone all day. “Still maintaining radio silence, I see. Afraid the dog is going to start hounding you?”
He smiled at his own pun, but Ellery didn’t look amused. “My father,” she said.
Reed sobered up in a hurry. “He called you again?”
She took a long time with her answer. “Worse. He showed up outside the hotel this morning. That’s what took me so long this morning.”
“He followed you out here? Why?”
Ellery traced a random pattern in the condensation on her glass. “Why else? He wants something from me.”
“Money,” Reed guessed. From the little he knew, John Hathaway was always looking to make a quick buck. He might easily have caught wind of Ellery’s fame and believed it somehow transformed into dollars.
“Nothing that easy.” She sat back with a sigh. “Turns out he has another kid, a daughter who’s fifteen years old. She’s got leukemia the same as Daniel. He wants me to get tested to see if I can be a bone marrow donor for her.” He waited, and she eventually met his eyes. “I told him no.”
Reed felt the horror of this immediately. If Tula were sick, he would go to the ends of the earth to make her well again. John Hathaway, he presumed, was a desperate man.
“Mom looked for him, you know,” Ellery said, “when Daniel was first diagnosed. But he’d completely disappeared by then. She phoned everyone in the family and told them we needed Dad to come home. He says he never got the message, but the only way that’s true is if he never went looking for the messages in the first place. He left us and he didn’t look back, didn’t want to have to pay money or feel guilty. Turns out, he was off making some other family. Screw the rest of us.”
“You have every right to be furious with him,” Reed said quietly.
“I wasn’t even a match for Daniel. It probably wouldn’t work this time, either.”
“Maybe not.”
She flicked her gaze over him. “You think I should do it.”
“It’s not up to me.”
“Yes, but that’s what you think.”
He thought for a moment. “I’d want to meet her. If she’s part of him, she’s part of you, too.”
“She’s not anything to me. She’s some fifteen-year-old kid living in Michigan. What do I know about fifteen-year-olds? I wasn’t anything like them even when we went to school together.”
“She’s your sister,” Reed pointed out gently.
Ellery stiffened, her eyes growing wet. She said nothing for a long time. “All these years, I told myself he left because he didn’t want a family. Nothing personal. He just couldn’t hack it. Turns out, he wanted a family. He just didn’t want us.”
Reed got up from his side and went to sit next to her. Whatever work it took to reach her this time, he wanted to do it. Cautiously, he slid his hand over to cover hers. She didn’t look at him, but she didn’t pull away. She tilted her face toward the sky.
“That’s the truth of it,” she said, her voice rough with emotion. “He didn’t care if we lived or died. Why should I bother with this girl now?”
Reed felt his heart crack open, because he knew the answer to this one. “Because,” he said, squeezing her, “you’re not him.”