When he thought of his father, Reed pictured the Angus Markham of today, the broad-shouldered, white-haired orator with the quick tongue and ready smile. A lion in winter, he could still command a rally of hundreds as easily as he held sway over the long Markham family dinner table. The Markham household had a distinctive energy when the senator was home, fierce and funny and competitive as the children all angled for a slice of his attention, but there was no question the family breathed easier when he was away. Reed recalled the long amber days of his childhood, when he was still in short pants and his older sisters went off to school, leaving him behind in the care of sometimes their mother but more often the nanny, Lucille, and the housekeeper, Betsy. The big house took on an air of waiting. Reed would linger by the windows with his toy cars in the afternoon, rolling them slowly up and down the wooden sill, all the while watching the circular drive for that moment when the burgundy Caddy would pull up and disgorge his three sparkling blond sisters. They would burst through the front door in a cacophony of sounds, shoving and giggling and swooping him up into their slender arms as though he were a beloved family pet. Reed would clutch them around their necks, exhilarated at their loving fervor but afraid they would drop him. They never did. They did once lose him right inside the family home, and to this day it was as angry as Reed had ever seen his father.
Reed had loved to play hide-and-seek because he was a master at finding anything and anyone. He won every game. Until one drizzly afternoon when it was his turn to hide and he climbed the creaky stairs to the family attic, where he found an old toy chest. It had a painting of Goldilocks and the Three Bears half chipped away on the lid and easily contained a four-year-old boy. He’d grinned in marvel at his ingenuity, not even minding the dust or the dark as he secreted himself inside the chest. The minutes had passed into an hour and his sisters hadn’t come to find him. Reed grew restless, then bored, his elbows and tailbone hard against the wooden box. He’d decided to out himself and crow about his victory, but when he pressed against the lid it did not open. The hook-and-eye closure had apparently slipped into place when he’d shut the lid on top of himself, and he lay trapped in his own little coffin. He’d pushed and pushed, then kicked frantically at the lid, pounding the toy box so hard it jumped in place on the attic floor. “Help!” he had hollered, panic rising. “Come find me!”
Long after Reed had lapsed into silent tears of terror and self-pity, he heard thundering footsteps on the stairs. The latch had opened and there his father appeared looming over him, his face ashen with fear. He’d snatched Reed high up into his arms, holding him strong and tight so Reed knew he would never fall. “Girls!” his father had bellowed with a force that shook the walls. “Get up here right now and apologize to your brother!”
Reed learned they had gotten caught up in some TV program and forgotten about him entirely. Kimberly, Suzanne, and Lynette all sincerely and contritely offered their apologies, but that was not enough to satisfy their fuming father. Angus whipped them each with his belt while Reed looked on, the mean nugget of anger inside him glad to see their pale faces echo some of the fear he had felt, even as his heart squeezed with every crack of the belt. His sisters had sat stone silent at dinner, but that night Kimmy, the youngest, had let him crawl in bed with her.
“I’m sorry,” he’d whispered, although he wasn’t sure what for. He’d only cared that she let him hug her again.
“Me too,” she had whispered back, and they’d never spoken of it again.
There was no more hide-and-seek after that. His treasured game was done. It was Reed’s first lesson on the fragility of family life, how one small act could alter the whole interwoven tapestry and you could sew it back up, but it would never look quite the same.
Back in the colorless room inside LVMPD headquarters, Reed surveyed once more the collection of boxes and folders that contained all that remained of his mother’s life and death. He could smell the years on them, from the sagging cardboard covers to the brittle yellow pages, steeped in dust and decades of neglect. These files were elderly by investigation standards, having passed through three generations of detectives, yet his mother had been young and girlish when she died, not even out of her teens and less than half the age that Reed was now. He needed to find that girl, to know her better, if he was to hunt her killer, but he wasn’t sure how to find her by studying these slim paper bones.
At his side, Ellery opened one of the original murder books and started leafing through it. “Sure enough, here it is,” she said after a moment, tilting the file so he could see. “A statement from Officer Amy Conway verifying that David Owens was on duty with her at the approximate time of the murder. Of course, back then, no one knew she’d end up married to him.”
“Even if they knew, I’m not sure it would have mattered. I’ll bet Owens’s colleagues were extremely eager to cross him off the suspect list.”
“You haven’t, though,” she observed.
“I’m reserving judgment.” David Owens had been forthright and cooperative, answering Reed’s questions about Camilla Flores and the day of the murder to the best of his ability as far as Reed could discern. Still, Reed wasn’t ready to exonerate Cammie’s cop boyfriend just yet. The long pauses and searching quality to some of Owens’s replies might have been due to the intervening decades, but they were also the hallmark of someone spinning circles around the truth. Reed had long outgrown hide-and-seek, but he retained a keen sense for the unseen and unspoken, and his gut told him David Owens was holding something back.
“Amy mentioned something else,” Ellery said as she continued to page through the files. “She said there was another young woman attacked in her apartment by a knife-wielding stranger around the time Camilla was killed. Have you seen anything in here about that?”
“No,” Reed replied, only half paying attention. The box that held the murder weapon sat in front of him, daring him to crack the lid.
“Giselle or Danielle something, she said the name was. We could ask the sheriff about it.”
Reed didn’t reply. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and took a deep breath, mentally steeling himself for what he would find inside the box. He reached inside blindly and his hands met a large heavy metal object encased in a plastic bag. When he lifted it free, he saw it was the horse head bookend that the killer had used to beat Camilla’s head and face as she lay bleeding out on the living room floor. Carefully, he removed the bag and set the horse head on top of it for study. He bent low, putting his own face only inches from the cast-iron surface. He could see dried blood and even a few dark hairs stuck to the side of the horse’s face. There were also the gray remnants of fingerprint powder—a test Reed knew already had failed to yield any useful information.
He raised up to reach into the box again, and this time he discovered an old manila envelope with no markings on the outside. He untied the string that held the flap closed and tilted the contents into his hand. Polaroid photographs. About a dozen of them. He held his breath as he started perusing through faded images. One picture showed Camilla decked out in heels and a sequined minidress and smiling with another dark-haired woman about her own height and age, who Reed guessed would probably be Angie Rivera. Reed lingered over his mother, searching her face for traces of his own. All the pictures he’d seen of her were from the crime scene, where she was barely recognizable as a human, let alone his kin.
Ellery leaned in so she could see, too. “David was right,” she murmured. “You do look a lot like her. Look, even your hair is parted in the same spot.”
Reed touched his head gently with one hand. “I guess it is.”
He moved on to the next picture, another shot of Camilla and Angie again, this time dressed in T-shirts and jeans, posing near a Route 66 road sign. On a whim, he flipped it over, and it read: Getting’ our kicks, 1973. Camilla’s handwriting? Maybe. He flipped to the next picture, and Ellery inhaled sharply at the sight.
“Oh, wow.”
Camilla sat on the cement steps with a baby boy in her arms, his expression blank and bewildered. She squinted in the sun, her hair held back in a bandana, but her thousand-watt smile shone back through the ages. Reed’s chest tightened as he turned over the photo. Me and Joey, it said, and she’d drawn a little heart next to his name, rather like Tula liked to do when she fashioned Reed a homemade card. His throat thickened and he swallowed painfully as he righted the picture once more so he could see Camilla’s beaming pride. Love. He’d been loved at the start. This precious knowledge burst joy in his heart that quickly flared into an old, familiar shame, like this longing was a betrayal of his second family. He hurried to tuck the picture away.
“Who’s that?” Ellery asked as he brought forth the next picture. Angie and Camilla had been joined by a blonder, stouter woman with cowboy boots and a halter top. Reed checked the back. Angie, me, and Wanda, it read. “Okay, so who’s Wanda?” Ellery amended her question.
“I don’t know. I don’t recall reading anything about her in the reports I’ve seen.”
Ellery took out her cell phone and made a note of the name. “We can ask the sheriff about her, too. What else have you got?”
“Looks like the rest are more of the same. Here’s one with David.” He showed her the snapshot of what appeared to be a happy couple, petite Camilla perched on the lap of a grinning, shaggy-haired Owens. They both had cans of beer in their hands. Reed checked the back, but he found no notation of the time or place.
The last picture was himself in the crib, all fat legs and chubby cheeks, dressed in a white onesie and cooing for the camera. Joey, four months, it read on the back. Reed imagined that if he looked close enough he might see his mother’s reflection in the light of his eyes. He carefully slid the photographs back into the envelope and set it aside. They didn’t provide any evidence of anything, except perhaps that Camilla herself had been loved, had been happy before she died.
Inside the box, Reed found more bagged items from Camilla’s apartment: her clothes, which included a diamond-patterned blouse and blue jeans that were both soaked in dried blood and riddled with slashes; her Hamilton watch, also coated in a fine film of blood; a pair of brown flats almost worn through on the bottoms, which about broke Reed’s heart. He forced himself to keep going until he reached the bottom of the box, where the knife lay inside a plastic evidence bag, tagged and numbered.
Gingerly, he removed it for study but kept it inside the bag. Ellery joined him in a sober appraisal of the bloodied seven-inch blade. “I read that they couldn’t match it to her kitchen set,” she said as they stared at the knife.
“No, but her utensils were made up of a bunch of odds and ends, not some fancy Wüsthof set. This is your basic butcher knife that could have been purchased at hundreds of different places. It was never clear whether the killer brought the knife to the scene or not.” Privately, Reed suspected the killer had come prepared. If the motive wasn’t burglary and Camilla had not been sexually assaulted, that meant her attacker had entered the apartment with one intent only. He picked up the bag and held it up so he could see the handle. “Just as I thought,” he said. “There’s blood here by the hilt.”
“There’s blood everywhere,” Ellery replied.
“Yes, but in knife assaults, especially where there are repeated stabbings like in this case, the offender often cuts him- or herself during the attack. Blood from the victim makes the weapon slippery, and so you’ll often see assailants with injuries here or here.” He indicated the webbing of his hand and the fleshy part of the palm below his fingers. “There’s so much blood from this attack that it’s impossible to test it all. But we could justify a more limited analysis, and my recommendation would be to start here, at the base of the knife handle.”
Ellery looked down at the knife again. “Do you think it could be that easy?”
“Remember it was DNA that provided the first new information in this case in forty years. I don’t know that testing the knife will reveal anything, but it’s a shot. Maybe the best one we’ve got.”
They cataloged the remaining physical evidence before retreating to the hotel. Reed had scored a deal on a penthouse suite in a smaller luxury hotel just off The Strip. It boasted nearly as many square feet as his Virginia condo, with two master bedroom suites, each with its own rain shower and soaking tub. In between the two bedrooms sat an expansive living area with low-lying leather furniture designed in modern curves. The kitchenette featured a dishwasher, full-size refrigerator, and granite peninsula, illuminated by golden pendant lights. Most important to Reed, the dining area contained a long conference-style table that would be perfect for setting up a mission control for the case. He took the files they had brought from the sheriff’s office and began spreading out and sorting the information while Ellery did a slow study of the entire suite.
“I think you could do laps in this tub,” she called from the one bedroom. A few moments later, she stuck her head out and waved a miniature bottle of red wine. “This came with a note that says: ‘Welcome and please enjoy with our compliments.’ There’s also a small box of painted chocolate truffles. Did you set this stuff up ahead of time or what?”
Reed gave a tired smile and shook his head. “No, that sort of token is often customary at these sorts of resorts.”
“Yeah? At the Motel Six all you got was little soaps in individual wrappers.” She regarded the wine in her hand. “This is better.”
“Pour yourself a glass and we can order in dinner.”
“Or I could just run out and pick something up.”
He waved her off, returning his attention to his laptop. “This will be quicker and less hassle. Not to mention less greasy.”
“So I can pick you up a salad. I know it’s a desert, but they’ve got to have kale around here someplace.”
He took off his reading glasses and turned around in his chair to look at her fully. “You’re awfully keen to run out again considering we just got here.”
“No. But room service has got to cost a lot of money, right?” She spread her arms. “And this place, Reed … it’s gorgeous, but it’s also just a bit much.”
“I’m paying for it. It’s not a problem.”
“Maybe it’s a problem for me.”
Reed rubbed the side of his face with one hand. Ellery, he knew, had grown up searching for soda cans in the trash to redeem for meager pocket money. She didn’t like to waste a nickel. “This is my fool’s errand we’re investigating, so I don’t think you should have to worry about incurring any expenses. I picked this spot because it seemed convenient and comfortable, but if it’s not okay for you, we can look for someplace else tomorrow. For tonight, though, let’s just order dinner and get some rest, hmm? I’ve been up since five A.M. on the other side of the country.”
“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll have the burger.” She disappeared with the wine back into her bedroom, and Reed went to place the order. He selected a salmon steak with a side of braised asparagus for himself. A virtuous choice, yes, but he had to admit he was already contemplating those truffles.
He heard the shower switch on in Ellery’s suite as he returned to peck at his laptop. The initial search results he’d requested were in, and his heart sank as he read the tally: there were at least 247 women named Angela Rivera living in Los Angeles—and that number ballooned to more than four hundred when he included the surrounding territory. Some names he could discard easily by their age, but that still left more than forty Angela Riveras to run down. Wearily, he closed the laptop and sat back in his chair. The FBI had granted him leeway in taking on this ancient case, but he didn’t have carte blanche to fiddle around endlessly in the desert. He had to be able to show progress within a week or so, or the assistant director would start to get antsy. He could almost hear her now: Run all the DNA tests you want, but do it from the office. There are other, more recent cases that demand attention.
He ambled over to the balcony, slid open the glass doors, and stepped out into the cool night air. Las Vegas had come alive with light, a carnival of flashing neon that stretched up and down The Strip. Reed leaned on the hard rail and contemplated this electronic landscape, from the faux glittering skyscrapers at New York–New York to the bold green MGM that seemed the size of a small Emerald City. In the distance, the Stratosphere tower blinked its watchful red eye, while the intense beam from the Luxor shone high into the night sky—steady, not searching, a signal to all around that this was the place. From his vantage point, Reed could see cars moving slowly along the boulevard, but he couldn’t pick out individual humans. The glitz outshone them all.
He tried to imagine his other life and wondered if he had grown up here as Joey Flores, if he would look at the ten-foot blinking signs and think, I am home. He was half-white or half-brown, depending on who was looking and what time of year it was. Raised as he was in a ten-room mansion by a state senator and his wholesome wife, alongside their three blond daughters, most times the white side won out. Reed examined his own hand in the dim evening light. His fair sisters might as well have been carved from ivory. The household staff had run to more colorful hues, from Lucille with her wide, welcoming bosom and soft ochre skin to Hector the groundskeeper, whose umber face lit up with pride come rose-blossom season. They’d each had their own kids, children matching their own skin with whom Reed had played the odd game of ball or tag in the expansive Markham yard. Privately, he’d sometimes envied them. Reed’s skin was in-between. Neither here nor there. He got a seat at the family table almost by accident, or so he’d been raised to believe.
A lump formed in his throat as he thought of Camilla, a mother so young, with no family around, who was barely scratching out a living for herself. Her son had gone on to hit the family lottery, leapfrogging social strata Cammie herself never would have had a chance at attaining. Everything he had, everything he was, traced back to her violent death. He wondered, if she could see him now, whether she would know him. Whether she would be proud or repulsed at all he had become.
The doors slid open behind Reed, startling him from his thoughts. He turned to see Ellery, barefoot and wrapped in a voluminous white robe, padding out onto the balcony. She’d pinned her hair up and he could smell the lingering scent of the hotel’s body wash, an aspirational mix of vanilla and coconut no doubt orchestrated to recall the beach. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said as she joined him at the balcony’s edge.
He considered just how many times she’d scared the ever-loving crap out of him, starting with the night they first met. “It seems to be something of a vocation of yours.”
“More like a side hobby.” She looked out across the brilliant skyline.
“Well? What do you think?”
“It’s something. Like a totally different city. All the colors and the lights, you hardly know what to look at first. But I guess that’s the point, right? You’re supposed to be paying attention to the blinking signs and the dancing girls and the booze or what have you. All this constant movement and distraction so you forget.”
“Forget what?”
She looked at him. “The house always wins.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Not always, he thought. That she lived would always feel miraculous to him. He had been one of a hundred law enforcement officials working her kidnapping, and most of them had figured by day three that they were looking for a body. Reed had trembled when he’d pried open the closet door and found her lying there, bloody but breathing. Later, with Coben captured and his last victim recovering in the hospital, Reed had been eager to play to the cameras. He and Sarit had even written a bestselling book about the case. Only in reuniting with Ellery all these years later did he see the truth: yes, he had rescued her, and yes, he had stopped a vicious killer, but from her vantage point, he was already too late. He’d re-entered her life expecting gratitude and instead found himself hoping for forgiveness. Only when he realized that she owed him neither did they reach an understanding. He would treat her like a regular person, and in return, she would do the same for him.
She broke eye contact with him and stared hard toward the glimmering casinos. “I finally noticed back in the bedroom,” she said after a minute, still not looking at him. “There are no closets.”
Their hotel suite had a small coat closet, but the bedrooms used wardrobes instead. He’d made sure to check before making the reservation. “That does seem to be the case.”
She gave a small nod, acknowledging his kindness. “You sure do think of everything.”
He thought about her more than he liked to admit. She’d been a fourteen-year-old girl alone on the Chicago streets the night of her birthday, which, even if Reed hadn’t later sketched in the rest of her biography, told him all he needed to understand how she grew up: with not enough. Not enough food. Not enough attention. Not enough love. She’d had just the barest essentials to keep her alive, until the night she’d nearly lost that, too. He could put her up in luxury hotels to the end of her days and it wouldn’t make up for all she’d done without.
“That robe suits you,” he said, changing the subject.
She rewarded him with a grin. “It’s like wearing a cloud,” she confessed. “I may sneak it into my suitcase when we leave.”
He would gladly pay the fee. “We can stay then, I take it?”
Back inside, room service knocked loudly on the front door. Ellery turned at the sound, and he could swear he heard her stomach grumble. “Yeah, we can stay.”
A sudden sound jerked Reed awake in the middle of the night, and he sat straight up in bed, momentarily confused by his surroundings. Vegas, he remembered. He wondered if he’d heard Ellery prowling around in her usual insomnia, but then his cell phone buzzed again on the nightstand and he realized what had awoken him. He groped for the phone and saw the glowing caller ID gave the caller as Angus Markham.
Reed waited until the last second before the voice mail kicked in. “Hello.”
“Reed!” His father’s normally hearty voice sounded strained and hoarse. “I know it’s late as hell, but I’ve been making speeches and glad-handing donors all day and just got in. The streets are slippery tonight, so Kenny drove like he had a newborn baby in the back.”
Reed could hear the clinking of ice hitting the glass tumbler as his father made his customary bedtime bourbon. “What is it that couldn’t wait until morning?”
“God, morning. I’ve got a radio interview at seven, followed by an elementary-school visit, a meeting with the rep from AFSCME, and then we have that ‘GO Virginia’ vote in the afternoon. I’m lucky if they’ve scheduled me time to take a piss somewhere.”
“Ah, the life of the public servant,” Reed remarked flatly.
His father chuckled. “Yes, and I surely do love it, even when I’m dead on my feet. Or at least I’ll love it again by morning. But that’s not why I called.”
“Yes, why did you call?” Reed hadn’t turned on any lights, so his father’s voice seemed to float out of the darkness at him.
“I feel like we haven’t talked much. When did I last see you? Christmas, wasn’t it? You should come to dinner, you and Tula. Your mother misses you.”
“You didn’t call me at three in the morning to tell me Mama misses me.”
“Three,” his father repeated with a grunt. “So, then it’s true.”
“What’s true?”
“Kimmy called me this morning and said you were out working a case in Las Vegas.”
The hairs on Reed’s neck stood up and he got out of bed. “That’s right.” He paced the floor as though he could somehow outrun this conversation.
“Kimmy said…” His father took a drink and started over. “Oh, hell, Reed, she said you were looking into a woman murdered while her baby boy was right there in his crib.”
Reed halted, his heart in his throat. “I never said it was a boy.”
Angus’s breathing grew deeper, unsteady. “You’re chasing your mother’s case,” he said finally. “That’s what you’re doing out there.”
Reed said nothing. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.
His father cursed and took another drink. “Reed, we talked about this, remember? I told you what happened. I showed you the reports. You said you agreed with the detectives—the case was too old, too cold, to warrant new investigation.”
Reed forced himself to swallow. “That was before I found a new lead,” he replied.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“The father of Camilla’s baby—my father—he was married with children. My conception and subsequent birth would have been very messy for him.”
Angus coughed, long and deep. “Seems like the police figured he was married, even back then,” he wheezed when he’d recovered.
“Yes,” Reed said, his voice growing stronger again as he remembered his anger. How many years had this man looked him straight in the face and lied? “But I’ve confirmed it, you see. He was married for ten years at the time, with three daughters, and what was worse—he was running for public office. Imagine how it would look if the truth had come out. His family, his career—all of it down the shitter just because he knocked up some floozy while on a bender in the desert.”
“God.” His father sounded strangled. “You—you…”
“I know,” Reed cut in coldly. “I know everything—Dad.”
“Jesus, keep your voice down,” he said, even though Reed wasn’t in the room, even though he wasn’t yelling at all. “Your mother is sleeping.”
“Did she know, too? Did you all know?” Maybe they’d all been laughing behind his back all these years.
“No, no,” his father rushed to assure him. “Nothing like that. I just—I didn’t tell anyone, okay? All I did was point the lawyers in the right direction and they did the rest. Your mother didn’t know anything about it.”
“My mother was dead,” Reed said, carefully enunciating each horrible word.
There was a shocked silence on the other end of the line. “Okay,” Angus cut in finally. “You feel better now that you’ve got that out of your system? Because you can be furious with me all you want—I’ve earned it—but your mother has done nothing but love you since the day she took you in her arms.”
Reed thought of the picture where Camilla held him, smiling for the camera, and he went straight for the truth. “Did you kill her?” He felt dizzy, nauseated, but he had to know.
“What? For God’s sake, Reed!”
“Did you?”
“No, I didn’t kill her! That’s what you’re out there investigating? Jesus. You didn’t even have the decency to come talk to me first? What if your mother had found out, or your sisters?”
Or the press, Reed supplied mentally. He resumed his pacing in the dark. “You mean, why I didn’t come to you with this life-changing development? Why didn’t I tell you the truth? Gee, Dad, I wonder.”
“Okay,” his father said, relenting. “You’re damn pissed. I get it. But you have to understand, I did it to protect you.”
“Bullshit. You were protecting your own ass.”
“Now, you listen here—I didn’t have to come get you. When I found out Cammie was killed, you were the first thing I worried about, my top priority. Were you okay? Who was taking care of you? I would’ve hopped a plane right that day if I could.”
“Yeah? What was stopping you? Planes stopped running that day?”
“I had to do it legally. Make sure it was kosher.”
“Make sure no one found out you were my real father.”
“Damn straight I’m your real father!” Angus roared. “I’m the only one you’ll ever have, and you’d do well to remember that fact.”
“You couldn’t go swooping in and announce yourself,” Reed continued steadily. “Because if you gave away your real interest in the case, everyone would see you had motive.”
“Will you listen to me? I didn’t want to kill her. I wanted to help her. I just … needed to find the right way.”
“Yeah, you helped her all right. You left her poor and pregnant and then she ended up slaughtered in her own living room.”
There was a heavy silence. “And you think I could do that.” Angus sounded dazed and defeated now, like the old man he really was. “I’ve seen the pictures from Cammie’s apartment that day. I know what happened to her. You think I waited with a butcher knife and then carved her up while you, my son, slept in the next room. That’s what you believe, that I’m some sort of monster.”
“All I know,” Reed said, his voice shaking with anger, “is that you lied. You lied to me my entire life.”
“And that has killed me a little bit every day.”
Reed shook his head, denying it. “So easy to say now, isn’t it, now that I know the truth.”
“I would have loved to tell you the truth, honest to God—you think I didn’t bust my chest with pride every time you won some sort of genius prize or solved a big case or presented me with that precious little granddaughter of mine?”
“You leave Tula out of it.” He didn’t want to hear his daughter’s name on Angus’s lips.
“I loved you. I love you.” Angus sounded mournful; whether for Reed or for himself Reed couldn’t say. “You can call me a liar, but you can’t deny that. You can’t.”
“Where were you on December 11, 1975?”
“You’re asking me for my alibi?”
“I’m telling you you’re going to need one.”
His father took a long time with his answer. “I did not kill Camilla Flores. If you can’t believe that, after all the years you’ve known me—if you really think I’m capable of something so vile and disgusting—then you can come ask me for my alibi for the record. I’ll make sure to have my lawyer present for the conversation.”
Reed ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve been doing this job a long time, Dad, and that’s the answer of a man with something to hide.”
“If you want to come ask me about your mother, face-to-face, and you want to know how we met and what kind of person she was—those questions I will be happy to answer for you. The rest of it … well, I’d ask you to think long and hard before you torpedo my career and our entire family. I can’t stop you. I won’t. But neither will I participate in some sort of revenge campaign to smear my name.”
“I only want the truth.”
“And I gave it to you. I guess that means we’re done.”
“Not hardly,” Reed warned.
They hung up without saying goodbye, and Reed threw his phone at the bed. I love you, his father had said, as though that justified four decades of self-serving lies, as though that absolved him of any sin. Reed had seen plenty of horrors committed in the name of love. He stood there, replaying the conversation, thinking of new rebuttals and accusations, but he knew he’d have to come with actual hard evidence if he wanted to budge his father from his story.
Gradually, his shoulders unclenched and he could breathe again. He crawled back in bed beside his phone and placed it like a stone upon his chest. It was only then that he remembered a key part of the conversation, one he’d been too riled to hear when his father let it slip. Reed picked up the phone and hesitated just a moment before dialing. His father answered right away.
“What?”
Reed didn’t pussyfoot. “You said I was your top priority when you learned that Cammie was killed. How did you even find out?” If they’d kept the affair a secret and Cammie was dead, no one should have been the wiser.
His father apparently weighed the question and decided to answer. “Rufus told me,” he said gruffly.
“Rufus told you. And how did Rufus find out?”
His father’s silence stretched so long that Reed thought he might not answer. “You know,” he said finally, “I’m not sure. I don’t believe I ever asked.”