Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 129001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
“Okay.”
“What else?” he pushed.
God, he was good.
“I don’t know if it was a hoodie,” I confessed.
“Baby, that happens,” he said gently.
“Why do I feel like that’s important?”
“Because everything is important in this. But you have to know, witnesses second guess what they see all the time. Fear is a factor. Adrenaline is spiking. The gravity of a situation plays a part. Emotional and physical reactions clash and break up shit in your brain. But think about it logically. How important is it if he’s partial to wearing a hoodie?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“It’s not important, Larue. If he had some kind of fetish and wore a bright-red clown wig, I gotta know that. What he chooses to cover his body means dick to me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I concluded it with the thing that was really haunting me.
“You think today was about him.”
His pause was scary.
And what he said next was worse.
“Yeah, baby. Today was about him.”
Forty-Nine
Don’t Ever
I had not yet been up to the house on the hill.
The next day, when Bohannan took Celeste and I up there, I found it wasn’t a house.
It was a log cabin.
A pretty log cabin that was a little bit smaller than my place. It had a fire pit with Adirondack chairs surrounding it in the front. It had trees all around. It had no access to the lake, possibly because the pitch was very steep to get down there.
But it had impeccable views.
For instance, I could see through the trees nearly the entirety of Bohannan’s compound, save for part of the boys’ house, since it was tucked into the pines off to the side.
I could see my place, totally.
And I could see the somewhat bigger house up from mine on my side of the lake. It was higher up the hill, exposed to view, but it also had a switch-backed set of steps to get down to a small pier on the lake.
Taking all of this in, I swung directly into impossible, but phenomenal, fantasies of Celeste marrying some marvelous man and filling that big house up top with family. Camille and Joan moving into this cabin, expanding it, and filling it with babies. Us building a getaway cabin for Fenn (and James?) to bring their family for visits. And the boys splitting off, one of them moving into my place so they could have space for their families.
Yes, I was in this with Bohannan deep.
I was also watching David, who was doing something at the spout on the back deck. He was working on a Sunday because Robyn’s pregnancy had, so far, been a display of hormonal fireworks that even her very devoted husband needed a break from on the weekends.
I knew this because it was so bad, he’d asked, falteringly, as he was so desperate to know if she was crazy, or if he was.
Unlike many mothers, Fenn, my first, had been a breeze.
Which made me completely unprepared for how Camille had done me in.
So at least I could set his mind at ease that he wasn’t going crazy, and neither was Robyn, and better yet, this was temporary.
But so he could get through it, I advised him that breaks were good for the both of them.
He’d texted to say he was going to come that day for a few hours and do some work.
I stopped thinking on all this when I stepped into the comfortable, attractive, but sturdily furnished and rental-ready environs of the cabin.
They’d swept it before we got there so the guts of the case weren’t spewed everywhere, but it still was clearly a command post, and a fastidious one. No fast-food debris or spent coffee mugs that needed cleaning. And the three large white boards that took up a lot of the space had been turned around.
Special Agents Everett Robertson and Ben McGill looked like who they were. Clean cut, fit, no-nonsense G-men.
The lead, Robertson, was a tall, handsome Black man wearing dark-wash jeans and a subdued dark orange turtleneck (it was Sunday).
His partner, McGill, was white, had thick auburn hair, a lot of freckles, and was wearing khakis and a plaid button-down under his navy sweater.
I’d met them before, briefly. They’d both been in suits then.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t the first time I wondered why Bohannan had gone from the army to the FBI, and now had the appearance and wardrobe of a lumberjack biker.
I’d need to ask him about that.
It might be Sunday, but it wasn’t fun day. They were in their roles and their task today was important. There were greetings and oodles of courtesy and respect, with some gentleness for Celeste due to her age.
But they had things to do that day, and talking to us was only part of them, so it didn’t take long before Robertson stepped back, and McGill sat with us in the living area and launched in.