Toni gasped. “How is he still alive?” The injuries had to be extensive, given the amount of blood that covered the man’s face and torso. Even his legs hadn’t been spared.
Instinct drove her to find a linen closet in the hallway where she pulled out a stack of towels. She ran back to the man and dumped them beside him.
Jeff lifted his phone to his ear. “Call 911 for me.”
She glanced over, but he wasn’t talking to her. Toni got a towel and touched it to the man’s face, wincing at the damage. He’d been beaten.
She looked over his body, acknowledging the gaps in his shirt. “I think he was stabbed.” She wiped a cut on his chest. “No, this is shallow, like a slice.” Meant for maximum pain with not too much damage, until it was done over and over.
The man’s muscles contracted under her treatment.
Jeff said, “Copy that.” Then, “Toni, we’ve gotta go.”
“He’s not bleeding too much from any one place.” The guy was simply bleeding slowly from everywhere. And who knew what internal damage there was? “He needs a hospital.”
Jeff hauled her away from Greg Simmons with his hand high on her arm. “We have to go. The cops are already on their way, and Tate is going to make sure an ambulance shows up as soon as possible.”
She turned, still moving with him as he headed for the kitchen. “What do you mean already on their way?”
“Someone called them. A neighbor who saw us come in the back.”
Toni gasped. They had been seen entering? That wasn’t good. She couldn’t afford to be found. Not yet. Not until she figured out who she was. “One second.” She raced to the hall and used her shirt hem to wipe her fingerprints from the door handle, then ran back to Jeff. “Let’s go.”
They snuck out the back way and ran flat out to the truck. No point trying to hide the fact they were leaving when they’d already been spotted. It would be better to ditch the vehicle in a place like Jeff had hid his at the lake. Then they could lay low…forever.
Jeff gunned the engine, and they turned the corner at the end just as a black and white cop car with the K9 logo emblazoned on the side pulled onto the street.
Toni ducked her head so it would look like a single occupant vehicle. Just in case that helped them evade the police for longer. “Why does it seem normal for me to avoid the cops?”
“Plenty of people live their entire lives without encountering the police.”
“It’s not that.” She sat up and fastened her seatbelt. “That guy was tortured. My instinct was to run with you, not stay to see how I’d be able to help the cops by providing them with all the information I have.”
“I can’t answer that for you.”
And yet, Toni couldn’t help wonder if their lives weren’t closer than they’d thought. Maybe she and Jeff didn’t know each other, but his work with a refugee camp and the fact he’d suffered a major injury on an operation involving a high-value target? That didn’t sound strange to her, even if it did seem like the plot of a movie and not at all real life.
“Did you care about that guy when you walked away from him, knowing you left him injured?”
“Of course,” she said. “I would have helped him if not for the police.”
“Then you’re not a bad person. You just have a healthy sense of self-preservation.”
She frowned out the window, feeling the pull of a smile on her lips. He made lives like theirs sound perfectly reasonable rather than admitting what they’d done was technically illegal.
They’d fled the scene of a crime. Instead of confusing and distracting the cops with their presence, they could get Greg Simmons the help he needed and, in the meantime, work the case.
“Do you think this had something to do with me, with the man who tried to kill me at the lake?”
“We have no way to confirm that. But it’d be a pretty serious coincidence if it’s not.”
“So Kristine goes missing. The same night, I’m nearly killed. Now the killer comes to Greg—for what? Information?”
“That would be my guess. And Tate said he had more to tell us. I need to call him back.”
“But what could the killer need from Greg?”
“Your name, maybe. Where to find you since he hasn’t been able to so far?”
Toni nodded to herself. That made enough sense.
“Can you dial for me? You can put it on speaker if you want.” He handed her his phone, then moved his hand back to the wheel.
Toni dialed Tate’s number and held the phone between them.
“Hudson.”
“It’s Jeff, and Toni is here too.”
Before either could say anything more, Toni needed to get something straight. “Are you going to give us up to the cops?” Before, she’d only possibly been involved. Now, she was definitely a part of this.
Jeff pulled the car to the side of the street, in front of the library.
“I want to know if you’re going to double cross us.” Maybe that was too sensational a term for what he would be doing, but she needed to know.
“I get that you’re going to have to learn to trust me.”
“You interrogated me until I passed out.” Not that she was mad about it, exactly. It was more the principal of the thing.
“My methods are…unusual. But I gave both you and the police my word. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“Even if evidence comes to light that I’m a murderer?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Okay?”
Toni glanced at Jeff. She shrugged, not exactly satisfied with the fact she had to trust this guy she didn’t really know. Why was that so hard when trusting Jeff with everything she was hardly seemed like a bad idea? Tate and Jeff were completely different men. But really, did she know Jeff much better than she knew Tate? And yet trusting Jeff seemed almost…instinctual.
“For now, I’ve got an address for you,” Tate said. “Turns out you might’ve been right about that car in the corner of the parking lot at the gym. I jimmied the lock and found some stuff inside. Registration and all the other paperwork in the glove box are in the name of an older woman who lives just outside of town. She’s known as someone who takes in strays.”
“And you think that’s me?”
“Whoever Chautona Havig is, she works as a cleaner at the gym and I have her home address.”
“Text it to me,” Jeff said.
“It actually leads to a location above a garage on a farm just outside of town. You—uh, she—probably pays cash, and there’s little to no record of this woman’s existence. I’m wondering if the name is fake. But I can’t call the landlady until daybreak, so we have nothing until then unless you guys want to go check out the apartment yourselves.”
“Doesn’t matter if the name is fake or not,” Toni said. “If it’s me, I want to know so that I can figure out why I have a fake name and a life under the radar.” One where no one missed her absence.
“When I find out what the police have on Greg Simmons’s attacker, I’ll call and fill you in.”
“We’ll do the same with the apartment,” Toni said. “Thank you, Tate.”
He made a sound like, “Mmm.” and hung up.
“An apartment?”
She shrugged. “It’s either mine or it isn’t, and we need to find more leads as to who I am. Other than that, I have no idea. Aside from my memories.”
All of which made her shudder even now, despite the fact it had been hours since she’d resurfaced from the latest round of dreams. They might not even be real. For all she knew, her mind could be making up what it thought were memories, but was actually an attempt to fill in the gaps for her. The dream images didn’t necessarily mean she was remembering her past.
“Let’s just go look at it.” Even though the last residence she’d entered had a tortured man in the living room.
Jeff squeezed her knee, then grasped the steering wheel again.
What would they find at her apartment—if that was what this was?
Answers, or more blood?
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“What’s that?”
She realized she’d muttered the words aloud. “Nothing. I just keep wanting this to all be over, but I guess I have to accept the fact it might never be.”
He stayed silent all the way there and parked out of sight, halfway in a hedge on her side. She had to get out his door, and he helped her do that. No wonder his truck looked so torn up, parking so close to thorns and sharp edges of branches.
“Okay?”
She realized she hadn’t let go of his hand and started to drop it. “Yep.”
He didn’t let go. “I don’t exactly believe you.”
She shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.” He leaned close.
Was he going to kiss her? Did she want him to? Toni had no idea the answer to those questions. But she wanted to know, and the truth very well could be found inside that apartment.
“We should go check out the place.”
He let her hand go and she motioned to the garage, which had probably been a barn at some point.
She couldn’t exactly make out his features in the dark, but thought she saw disappointment on his face. He feels the same way I do. She wanted even more to be done with the questions then, if only so that she and Jeff could see what lay beyond simply not knowing who she was. Even if she planned to eventually leave…just as soon as she knew where to go.
Jeff’s life didn’t need any more complicating than what she had already done to it.
At the top of a wooden set of stairs built up against the exterior of the barn was a door topped with a light fixture. She stared for a second while also wondering if a security sensor would illuminate the whole staircase if she was to move within the field of vision. With no way to avoid it, she took the steps two at a time and knocked. After waiting a full two minutes, she tried the door handle. “Locked.”
Jeff reached for his back pocket.
She stared at the door for a second, then took a step back and lifted the mat. “A key.”
“So, you do live here?”
“I don’t know. It seemed logical.” Toni put the key in the lock. “I guess we’ll find out.”
They both stepped inside before either flipped on a flashlight. Toni went to the kitchen and turned on the light above the oven so it wouldn’t be too bright through the blinds.
There was barely anything on the walls. A small circular table and two chairs on one side of the room that made up the dining area. Threadbare couch and coffee table. The TV was small and older looking, certainly no flat screen. There was nothing on the counters, or even in the sink.
“This place looks like it’s barely lived in.”
“Maybe you don’t live here.”
It wasn’t exactly familiar. She wandered down the hall and found a bathroom in need of renovation, though it was clean. Towel on the rail. Toothpaste put away in the cabinet. Whoever lived here—her?—wasn’t a slob, and she wore minimal makeup.
She continued to the bedroom and pushed the door open, Jeff right behind her.
It was hers. She knew it the moment she saw a picture of Maya on the bedside table. But what was on the walls made it so much worse. There might have been a way to mitigate the damage of what they found, but not when he spotted it as soon as she did and pushed her aside to get into her bedroom.
Jeff stormed to the far side, where the wall was covered with photos.
Newspaper clippings.
Maps.
And more photos.
“This is…” Jeff pointed to a photo. “Why do you have my family photo on your wall?”
What was going on?
He turned to her with thunder in his expression. “What is this, Toni?”
Before she could answer, someone called out, “Hellooo…anyone here?”