SUCH A GOOD GIRL: An urgently timely gripping mystery with a heartbreaking twist (Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Book 9)

by Willow Rose

  “I am really sorry,” I said. “She shouldn’t be calling you.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t doing much anyway. It’s been a couple of quiet weeks around here. I was happy she thought of me. I miss her and the others too.”

  I sighed. “That’s sweet. But it won’t happen again. I promise.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you Friday when I pick up Angel?”

  I nodded, crossing my arms across my chest. I was about to walk away when I paused, then turned around.

  “Actually?”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you take her tomorrow? Something has come up. I have to go away for a few days.”

  He smiled. “Sure. I’d love a couple of extra days with my daughter. It’s no problem.”

  “Great. I’ll have my mom come over for the big ones.”

  “What’s going on? Where are you going?”

  I paused for a few seconds, realizing I hadn’t thought this through. It just felt like the right thing to do at this moment.

  “I’m going back to D.C. Something has come up, something urgent.”

  He smiled again. There was a sadness to it. He was still angry about me breaking up our engagement. I knew he was, even though he was trying to hide it.

  “Always trying to save the world,” he said with a sliver of bitterness to his voice. “You don’t change, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not planning to, no.”

  Chapter 23

  Rachel took the pills down from the cabinet, then grabbed her glass of water. She poured out the pills in her hand, an entire handful of them, then stared at them, thinking how strange it was that such small things could be so deadly.

  It’s for the best, Rachel. They’re better off without you, and you know it. This way, you don’t have to cry anymore; you don’t have to be such a burden. It’ll be all over, and then you won’t have to feel anything anymore. Can you imagine? Never feeling this pain ever again?

  The small voice in the back of her head was right. She couldn’t bear to feel like this anymore. She couldn’t keep crying. She couldn’t keep feeling this profound sadness that wouldn’t leave her alone. It was too much.

  Rachel felt the tears as they welled up again, and she let them run down her cheeks as she readied the pills in her hand. She sniffled, then stared at them, making the final decision.

  No way back now.

  She parted her lips, closed her eyes, and lifted the hand with the pills, leading them toward her mouth, and shuffled them all inside. She then grabbed her glass of water and lifted it toward her lips when her phone lit up next to her with a message. Rachel didn’t know what drove her to look, but she did, and as she saw the message on the display, the words jumping out at her, she dropped the glass with water on the tiles, then hurried to the sink and spat out all the pills. They spurted into the sink while she coughed and spat, making sure each and every one of them was gone.

  Crying, she leaned over the sink before washing the pills down the garbage disposal, sobbing, her torso shaking heavily. She then reached for the phone and opened the message, reading through it, her hands shaking heavily, her breath getting stuck in her throat.

  WE NEED TO TALK, it said. YOU’RE NOT ALONE. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE IT HAPPENED TO ME TOO.

  A picture of Richard Wanton accompanied the text. Seeing this, Rachel gasped for air. She had to lean on the counter as her knees gave way underneath her. Rachel stared at the picture, feeling sick to her stomach. It was a strange sensation since it usually was one you’d want to avoid, but she welcomed this nausea. It was the first thing she had felt that wasn’t sadness in a very long time. For once, she was feeling something, something real.

  She was feeling anger.

  Another text popped up on her phone as she was still looking at the photo sent to her in the first one.

  MEET ME IF I CAUGHT YOUR INTEREST. WE’LL TALK. FIVE O’CLOCK ON WEDNESDAY.

  Then a second went by, and a pin in Maps was sent to her, showing her the location for a restaurant downtown. Rachel looked at the jar of pills on the counter. Half of them were still left inside of it. She grabbed it and looked at it, then threw them in the trash. For the first time in weeks, she wasn’t ready to give up. She had one more fight left in her, and that had to be taken care of first.

  Chapter 24

  I landed in D.C. right around noon the next day and drove my rental car straight to the hotel. I threw my suitcase on the bed, then pulled out my laptop. I opened Instagram on my phone, then scrolled through Kimmie’s feed, stopping at each and every picture to study it. I had done it before and knew she hadn’t posted anything in about six months, but I kept wondering if there was something in her old photos that might give me a hint or a direction to go in. There were a lot of pictures of her and Chad from the time they lived together.

  After he had left me for her.

  It filled me with disgust. And anger. So much anger that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a long time.

  We had children together, Chad. Dang it. We were a family.

  Now, Chad was gone, and I had no one to direct this anger at except for Kimmie. I felt it rise in me and grow stronger and stronger with every picture I looked at.

  What am I doing? I hate the woman, and now I am trying to help her?

  I put the phone down with a deep exhale, then rubbed my forehead, closing my eyes, realizing I had no idea why I had come back. What was I trying to do here? Get closure? Forgive her?

  I stared at the articles on my computer screen. I had been reading everything I could find about the murder of the young girl, Samantha Durkin, in Richard Wanton’s apartment. I wondered about her and who she was. The media had written tons about her, and what most people—like her colleagues, family, and friends—said about her was that she was “such a good girl.” I chewed on those words. It was something we often said about young girls, but what did it really mean? That she got good grades in school? That she worked hard, maybe even volunteered at an animal shelter? What? And why was it important for a girl to be good? Would we say the same about a boy? If Kimmie ended up getting killed, would we say the same about her? That she was such a good person? I probably wouldn’t. She slept with my husband for crying out loud. And what if I died today in some tragic death? Would they say the same of me?

  Probably not, I decided and chuckled. I knew my mother thought I had made a mess of myself, and Matt was so angry with me it was like he almost hated me. I believed I had done a lot of good in my life; I had saved a lot of people, and I had helped put a lot of bad guys behind bars. But had I done good? It depended on who you asked, didn’t it?

  I grabbed my phone again and went back to Kimmie’s Instagram profile, encouraged by a thought that had suddenly struck me. I remembered when Chad had just left me for Kimmie. I had been obsessed by checking her profile and going through her pictures, seeing what she and Chad were up to and how oh-so-happy they were. I would look at her in all those pictures and feel sick. I would be so jealous that I wasn’t as pretty as her and tell myself that’s why he left me—because I wasn’t blonde and didn’t have long legs like she did—because I wasn’t skinny and fit like her. It was self-torture, but we do that to ourselves sometimes, right?

  I know I did. I was very good at torturing myself.

  I found an old picture, then paused and clicked on it. It showed Chad and Kimmie in front of a sign. His arm was around her, and she looked up at him with loving eyes. The picture still made me feel sick, just as it had before, but I had never realized just how much love there had been in her eyes when she looked at him.

  Could it be that Kimmie was really in love with Chad? There were always two sides to every story, and if you asked Kimmie, maybe she had just followed her heart. She had fallen in love with the wrong man.

  My man.

  Chapter 25

  THEN:

  Things were calm, and more than a month had passed since Samantha slept with Wanton i
n his hotel room. She was getting on with her life and career and beginning to feel like maybe she could just forget it ever happened. She had been drinking and done something stupid, but maybe no one ever needed to know. Perhaps she could put it behind her.

  Maybe.

  She didn’t know if she was just being paranoid, but she felt like people looked at her differently when she walked around the TV station, especially in the newsroom where all the reporters and the anchors sat. Sometimes, she’d felt like they’d look at her weirdly or stop talking as she entered the room. Some smiled strangely at her, like Mitt Paige, the most prolific anchor at the network. Before they went away to the conference, he had never noticed her or looked in her direction, but now, for some reason, he kept saying hello to her and smiling, almost grinning as they passed one another in the newsroom or the hallways. She even caught him turning his head and checking her body out as she walked past him once.

  It made her feel slightly uncomfortable if she was honest. Because why had that suddenly changed? Was it because they knew what had happened?

  Sam felt so embarrassed; she could barely think about it. She had told no one what happened because she was so scared of them looking down on her, of them telling her she was a fool. She hadn’t even told Natasha, and she told her everything. But this, she hadn’t been able to share. It was simply too embarrassing. Sam couldn’t believe she could have been so stupid.

  Drunk and stupid.

  “Are you almost done?”

  Sam looked up from her screen. Jarrett, the assistant producer of the day, glared back at her, an annoyed look on his face.

  “You’re running late,” he continued. “You better get going.”

  Sam grabbed her laptop, then rushed to the edit suite, where a guy named Greg was waiting for her. She knew him a little, as they had chatted once in the cafeteria, but she had never worked with him. He was supposed to be the best, so she wasn’t worried. But people said he was also a tough guy—especially on the interns.

  “Glad the princess could make it,” he said when seeing her rush inside. “Let’s get to work, shall we? We don’t have long, and with your lack of experience, we’re gonna need all the time we can get.”

  Samantha nodded and sat down. She opened her manuscript, so she was ready. As she did, a private message blinked in the corner of her screen. The newsroom computer system had a feature where you could write direct messages to each other, and they were deleted right after you read them, so if it were from the producer, you’d better write down what he said, so you’d make sure you got the directions correct.

  Samantha clicked to open the message, expecting it to be from the producer or maybe the reporter whose name would eventually be on the story once it aired.

  But it was from neither of them.

  It was from him. Richard Wanton.

  MEET ME IN THE BATHROOM NEXT TO EDITING SUITE 10. I WANT TO KISS YOU.

  Sam stared at the screen and the words blinking in front of her, barely able to breathe. What the heck was this? She couldn’t leave now.

  I AM EDITING, she wrote back. LATER?

  NO. YOU COME NOW.

  Samantha stared at the words, trying so hard to think of a way out of this. But she couldn’t find any. This was Richard Wanton, for crying out loud. He was the CEO. He could ruin her life without as much as blinking.

  She stared at Greg next to her, her palms getting sweaty. He was editing the first couple of sequences together on the timeline.

  “Uh…”

  “Yes?” he said without looking at her. He stared at the computer screen in front of him where the footage was uploaded. Sam had looked through it all and found the clips and interview bits she wanted to use, so it would be easier and faster for Greg to put it all together in the end. But she wasn’t sure if what she had done was good enough—if it was sufficient.

  Sam took a deep breath to gather her courage. Her heart was racing with fear. There was no way she dared to say no to Wanton.

  “I…I need to…go to the bathroom real quick.”

  Now, he was looking at her, his weathered face folding in worry. “You think you have time for bathroom breaks? We have forty-five more minutes before the next reporter comes in here, and if you’re not done, then there will be no story in the news tonight.”

  Samantha swallowed as another message ticked in from Wanton.

  NOW.

  Samantha almost jumped in her chair when she read it. She felt so anxious; her heart pounded in her chest.

  “Uh…okay…but I just…I really have to go, and…”

  Greg sighed deeply and rolled his eyes at her.

  “All right. You’re new, so I’ll let this one slide. But hurry up, okay? I am not taking the fall if this story isn’t done in time.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re playing a risky game here,” he continued lecturing her. “Remember, they won’t give you another chance like this if you fail to make the deadline. Just be prepared for that. It’s all on you if you do.”

  “Naturally. And don’t worry. It won’t be long. I promise I’ll come back as fast as I can,” she said, got up, then rushed out of the suite while Greg shook his head at her with a loud tsk-tsk.

  Chapter 26

  They sat at the back of the restaurant in a corner, Kimmie keeping her eyes on the plate in front of her. She was done eating, but Tristan was still working on finishing his burger. Kimmie was down to only thirty-one dollars of the cash she had stolen from the body of the guy who had attacked her in the apartment.

  She was still shaking at the thought of him pointing that gun at her. She couldn’t believe how lucky she had been or how brave her son had been. He had saved her by coming back through the window. He had seen the gun pointed at Kimmie, then grabbed the pot with the plastic plant in the windowsill and thrown it at the attacker. Tristan was a pitcher at the high school and a darn good one, so he had hit the man just right in the head, hard enough to make him go down. Kimmie and Tristan had then stolen his cash and run for their lives. They had hitchhiked and been picked up by a nice woman who helped them get out of town. She didn’t even need an explanation. She said she could see the desperation in Kimmie’s eyes and knew she had to help.

  “You don’t need to tell me the details, hon. I have seen that look before,” she simply said, then floored the accelerator.

  Now that the money was running out, Kimmie was running out of options too. There was no way she could pay for the room they were staying in, and she was beginning to consider the possibilities or the lack thereof. Would she have to leave in the middle of the night? Would they end up living on the streets?

  Meanwhile, she kept her eyes and ears open for the mentioning of her name. She had seen no cops around so far and hadn’t seen their faces plastered on the big TV screen above the bar, where they mostly showed baseball, but also the news. Yet, she didn’t believe they weren’t looking for her. She knew they would be.

  Both the FBI and Richard Wanton.

  Kimmie drank from her beer, then glanced toward her son. He was no longer a boy. In the instant he saved her life, he became a man. And what a handsome one he was. Just looking at him made her smile. She’d do anything to be able to give him his life back. It wasn’t fair to have it stolen from him like this at the age of sixteen. He was supposed to be out there trying to get in contact with girls, worrying about his acne and grades. Not be with his mother on the run from the police and assassins.

  What have I done to him?

  Kimmie exhaled and finished the beer just as Tristan took the last bite of the burger. He looked up and smiled at her, and she smiled back lovingly like only a mother was capable of.

  Kimmie avoided eye contact with anyone as they went back to their room upstairs to turn in for the night. She watched the news once more just to be certain they didn’t mention her or Tristan, then turned the TV off and laid in the darkness. The inside of this room was all they had seen for several days now, and she wondered just h
ow long she could keep this up. At some point, people were going to ask questions or ask for money, and then they would be in trouble. So far, they had just ordered food and put it on the room. Thirty-one dollars wasn’t going to get them very far.

  Kimmie closed her eyes to try and sleep. Sleeping was the only thing that made all this awful worry go away. If she could, she’d sleep all day, even though she knew that wasn’t the solution for anything.

  As she dozed off and her breathing grew heavier, she didn’t even hear the person crawling up on the balcony outside their room.

  Chapter 27

  The streets were wet, and it was still pouring down as I drove through town. The windshield wipers on my rental car made a strange sound as they tried to keep my vision clear. The GPS on my phone told me I still had fifty miles left.

  I had planned on waiting until the morning to go and was already in my bed, ready to get a good night’s sleep, when I couldn’t find rest. Maybe because I kept thinking about the conversation I’d had earlier with Isabella when I called her.

  “Any news?”

  “No, we haven’t found her or the boy yet,” she said, sounding more than exhausted. “And it worries me.”

  “I feel like there is something you’re not telling me.”

  Isabella sighed. “We ran a DNA test on the blood we found in the bathroom and had a match.”

  “So, you know who tried to kill her?”

  “Sure do.”

  “And that made you even more worried,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “His name is Yossi David. He belongs to one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, Black Koll.”

  “I know them,” I said. “Run mostly by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies.”

  “Exactly. They have branches in Tel Aviv, London, Paris, and here in Washington. They offer their clients what they call ‘the skills of operatives highly experienced and trained in Israeli’s elite military and governmental intelligence units.’ You know.”