Sam wasn’t sure what else he could possibly say. He didn’t know anything about Mary Lou’s life here in Sarasota. Was she still attending AA meetings? Did she have any friends? Was she seeing anyone? He didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know.
He heard Noah shift his weight slightly, and he knew another FBI agent was approaching them. Time to answer those freaking questions all over again.
“Is he asleep?” a voice asked softly. It was a voice he’d recognize anywhere.
“I don’t think so,” Noah told Alyssa Locke.
What the hell was she doing here?
Sam opened his eyes and pushed back the bill of his baseball cap as she sat down beside him. Right in the grass. He’d expected Noah and Claire to risk getting their clothes dirty, but Alyssa?
She certainly got to Florida fast enough.
“Hey, Sam,” she said, as if they’d run into each other on some city street instead of her coming nearly a thousand miles to see him. She took in his beard and his shoulder-length hair—he looked remarkably like Jesus with a hangover these days—without a single comment or so much as a blink.
“I figured you could use a little moral support,” she told him. She was wearing her dark hair short, and with her pretty face, perfect cafe-au-lait skin, and big green eyes, it made her look almost fragile. Delicate.
He knew better. Alyssa Locke was tougher and stronger than most men he knew.
God damn she looked good, like she might’ve actually put on a pound or two in the months since he’d seen her last. She’d been too skinny back then, but now she looked . . . healthy again. Strong and healthy and female. More like the way she’d looked the last time he’d seen her naked.
Which had been too, too long ago.
“Have they estimated a date and time of death yet?” she continued. “Because as soon as they do, we need to get on the phone with Coronado and establish the fact that you were in California when it happened.”
“So I am a suspect.” Sam exhaled in disgust. “That’s just great.”
“It’s standard procedure, so suck it up,” she told him briskly. “Don’t take it personally.”
He laughed. “Yeah, right. Go into the kitchen and look at Mary Lou and then come back here and tell me not to take it personally when it’s implied that I did that.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the house. Glanced at Noah, who was listening to every word they said. “I’m sorry,” she said to him. “Are you with the Sarasota office?”
“I’m with Ringo—Sam,” he said. “I live here in town, and when he called, I came. I’m not a lawyer, but I know quite a few, and I’ve been encouraging Sam to wait before answering any more questions—”
“I’m on Sam’s side,” Alyssa interrupted. “We’ve—” She glanced at Sam. “—known each other for some years now. We’re friends. Mister . . . ?”
Sam laughed. Yeah, right. They were friends and he was having lunch tomorrow with the pope.
She gave him another look.
“Noah Gaines,” Noah said, clearly noticing all of it. Sam’s laughter, Alyssa’s sharp look.
She held out her hand to Noah. “Alyssa Locke.”
Now she was the one who was watching for any kind of reaction, which, of course, Noah didn’t give her because there was none to give.
When she glanced at Sam again, he shook his head very slightly. Noah didn’t know. As he’d promised her, Sam hadn’t told anyone about those nights—on two separate occasions—when Alyssa had come to his room and completely rocked his world.
Back before Mary Lou had told him she was pregnant. Back before Alyssa had hooked up with Max. The fucker.
“How’s Max?” he asked her now.
“Worried about you,” she answered.
Yeah, right.
“Do you have any idea who might’ve done this?” she asked.
“No.”
Something flared in her eyes at his uncooperative response. “Look, I know how hard this must be for you—”
“Yeah, and it’s so much easier now that you’re here.” Truth was, he had absolutely no idea who would want to kill Mary Lou. He had no clue at all. One of the aliens from outer space that his mentally ill neighbor Donny DaCosta saw lurking behind every bush would have been just as accurate a guess as anything else Sam might’ve been able to come up with.
Alyssa was silent for a moment. Then she said, quietly now, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Max wanted to send someone who knew you, and—”
“So he could ask you whether or not you think I’m lying when I say—again—that I didn’t kill her?”
“I know you didn’t kill her.” She usually looked around him, above him, past him, or even through him. But now she looked directly into his eyes and even held his gaze. It was the longest amount of time she’d ever allowed herself to do that—aside from those couple of nights that they both were naked, and he was making love to her. Just remembering the way she’d looked at him back then made his chest hurt. “I heard you when you said it the first time, Starrett, and I don’t need to ask again. Has there been any information on Haley’s whereabouts?”
“No,” he told her. She actually believed he didn’t kill Mary Lou. Man, now his throat ached, too. “All I know is she’s not in there. Haley’s not . . .”
His daughter wasn’t decomposing in one of the other rooms of the house.
“Thank God for that at least,” Alyssa said softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thank God for that.” Thank God. His daughter’s mother was dead—maybe killed in front of Haley’s eyes. And Haley—helpless and completely defenseless—was God knows where. To his complete and total horror Sam started to cry.
He’d thought he was succeeding at being stalwart, but really, maybe all he’d been was numb.
Before the FBI had arrived, before Noah and Claire had rushed over, Sam had gone inside and searched the house, every room, every closet, his stomach in a knot. Behind every single door, he’d expected to find Haley, her face as unrecognizable as Mary Lou’s.
Instead, he’d found the kitchen table set for three—with two adult chairs and one booster seat—and toys scattered across the living room floor. There was clothing in laundry baskets, clothing on bedroom floors, clothing hanging in closets and in dresser drawers. Shampoo and soap on the edge of the tub, and makeup and hair gels out on the sink counter.
It was a house that looked lived in and comfortable. Apparently, after she’d left him, Mary Lou had stopped spending every spare minute cleaning.
Sam had found a stack of papers and envelopes on the kitchen counter. Bills and the like. On the top were the papers for the divorce lawyer, signed and dated from more than three weeks ago.
Mary Lou hadn’t been messing with his head.
She’d just been dead.
He’d found lots of signs of life in that house as well as potential clues as to the time of day the murder had taken place—shortly before dinner—but he hadn’t found his baby daughter’s dead body.
The relief he’d felt was short-lived—replaced by fear. Where in hell was she?
“Give me a minute,” he said to Alyssa now as he struggled to get back in control.
Her eyes were wide in her face. “Sam, my God, it’s all right if you—”
“Give me. A fucking. Minute.”
She knew him well enough to stand up and walk away.
But Noah knew him even better. He put his arms around Sam, just like he’d done when they were kids back in Texas.
Just like Walt—Noah’s grandfather—had done for both of them more times than Sam could count.
“It’s okay,” Noah murmured. “You don’t have to be Superman. Don’t freak out just because you’re human, Ringo.”
Ringo.
Sam could remember the first time Walter Gaines had called him that. It was the day after Luke Duchamps broke his leg falling out of that tree. Noah had approached Sam—he was Roger back then—after the final bell at school and asked him if
he wanted to come over again, this time to check out his grandfather’s new personal computer.
Roger was more interested in Walt’s cooking after having sampled it the day before. And sure enough, when they came in the kitchen door, Walt was stirring something in a big pot that smelled heavenly. The old man had a bad leg, bad enough to make him limp when he walked, and when he cooked, he often perched on a stool in front of the stove.
“Nostradamus!” he greeted Noah from his seat, with a broad smile. It was weeks before Roger found out that Nostradamus was some kind of fortune-teller and that Walt had started calling Noah that back when he was five for his propensity for saying “But Grandpa, what if . . . ?” Walt gave the pot another stir. “And his trusty sidekick, Ringo! Who’s hungry?”
Roger was. He was starved—and for far more than Walt’s cooking.
That was the day he’d met Dot, Noah’s grandmother and Walter’s wife. The day before, she’d been visiting her stepdaughter Jolee, Noah’s aunt, whose own daughter, Maya, had just given birth to Walter’s first great-grandchild.
Roger had been shocked when he met Dot Gaines. Shocked but also enormously curious. Enough to ask Noah about her.
“She’s white,” Roger whispered, as if it were a secret, even though Dot had gone upstairs.
Noah had nodded. “Yeah. So what?”
“So . . . you’re black.”
“Actually,” Noah said, “I’m at least a quarter white. My father was half white. And my mother, well, she looked black, but she was probably at least part white, too. Many African Americans are. Have you read much about what it was like to be black in America before the Civil War?”
Roger shook his head.
And Noah had proceeded to give Roger both a lesson in the harsh realities of slavery in America, in which a shameful number of babies born to female slaves were the offspring of their white owners, and a lesson in genetics, in dominant and recessive genes.
“The way I figure it, sooner or later everyone in the world will be the same shade of brown,” Noah told him.
Roger had wandered around Noah’s living room, looking at the pictures on the walls.
There was a wedding photo of Walt and Dot with a little black girl standing beside them. And there was a picture of an African-American woman holding a tiny baby. She was very pretty and smiling at the camera as if the person taking the picture had just told a good joke.
“Who’s that?” Roger asked.
“That’s Mae,” Noah said. “She was my aunt Jolee’s mother. She was married to Grandpa before he married my grandmother. She died during the war.”
“The Civil War?” Roger asked.
Noah didn’t laugh at his stupidity. He never laughed at stupid questions. He just gently corrected. “The Civil War was in the 1860s. Mae died during World War Two—you know, the one against Hitler and the Nazis. That happened back about forty years ago, in the 1940s. Look at this.” Over on the end table next to the sofa was a picture of Walt in a fancy uniform. “My grandfather was a colonel in the Air Force. It was called the Army Air Corps back then. He commanded a squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen—black fighter pilots. You ever hear of them?”
Roger shook his head.
“Soup’s on, gentlemen!” Walt called from the kitchen in his big, booming voice.
Noah smiled at Roger. “You will.”
Sam Starrett was full of surprises, not the least of them being that his best friend from his childhood was black.
Alyssa sat in the observation room at the Sarasota FBI office, watching Starrett be interviewed by Manuel Conseco and his assistant, a young woman named Emily Withers.
“Mary Lou left San Diego six months ago,” Sam said with remarkable patience, considering he was answering the same question for what had to be the seventeenth time that hour. “She served me with divorce papers the next morning. It was an amicable parting. We both agreed that our marriage wasn’t working and we were taking steps to end it.”
He looked exhausted. His clothes were rumpled and looked slept in, and, with his hat off, she could see that his hair really was as long and shaggy as she’d thought. Thick and brown, it was sun streaked and wavy as it touched his shoulders. It was faintly reminiscent of the style so beloved by teeny-boppers in the early 1970s. He looked like he might’ve been trying to pass as David Cassidy’s bigger, meaner, Navy SEAL brother.
His face—the part that showed above his beard—was tanned.
Whatever he’d been up to in the months since she’d seen him last, he’d been spending quite a bit of time outdoors. And that beard was another clue as to where he’d been—he was sporting a full one instead of the neatly trimmed goatee and cowboy-style mustache that he usually favored. The beard, along with his non-Navy regs length hair, told Alyssa that he’d probably been spending a great deal of time in a country that started with the letter A and ended in “stan.”
The fact that he hadn’t shaved upon his return was another hint that he—and probably the rest of Team Sixteen—were intending to go back there in the very near future.
And yet, despite all that excess hair, he was still striking looking. Tall and muscular, with blue eyes and a killer smile, he was loaded with pure alpha male charisma. It was quite remarkable, actually. Just during his walk from the parking lot into this building, female heads had turned.
Alyssa had stopped counting at seven.
And that was without his smile up and operating.
Alyssa had always thought that Sam Starrett’s built-in drool factor was something of an embarrassment to the human race, in particular to the females of the species. She’d hoped that most women were smarter than that—that most women had learned to avoid men like Starrett, who obviously could kick all of the other men’s butts and look good doing it, but who had little to redeem him when it came to sensitivity or responsibility.
And then she’d gotten to know Sam.
No, actually, first she’d slept with him. Which proved that she at least wasn’t smart enough or strong enough to be able to avoid the biologically preprogrammed Darwinian allure of the alpha male, aka Homo jerkus.
The really stupid thing was, she’d hated Sam Starrett’s guts for years. He was crude, he was rude, and he was so completely full of himself. She’d needed a bottle of ibuprofen and a day off after spending just five minutes in the same room with the man.
But he was gorgeous.
And in his own special redneck, Texas cowboy, foulmouthed way, he was quite funny. And unbelievably smart.
And had she mentioned gorgeous?
Alyssa had been doing okay keeping her distance from him, though. Until she’d had a family crisis.
Because her littlest sister had died due to complications surrounding a late-stage miscarriage, Alyssa had been beyond frightened when her other sister, Tyra, had gotten pregnant. Alyssa spent nine nerve-wracking months anticipating another tragedy before Tyra finally went into labor.
And upon hearing the news that the baby had been born and both mother and daughter were healthy, Alyssa had had something of an emotional meltdown.
And Sam Starrett had been there.
He’d been both sweet and kind.
He’d gotten her drunk, too, the son of a bitch.
And sleeping with him had suddenly seemed like a really great idea.
Alyssa still dreamed in vivid detail about that first night they spent together. She’d never had sex like that before in her entire life. The night was a blur and some parts of it she still couldn’t quite remember, but some of it she would never forget if she lived to be two hundred. The intensity of what they’d shared had scared her to death, and in the sane light of morning, she’d made it clear to Sam that their encounter had been a one-time thing. There would be no repeats.
But then she ran into him again, six months later, in a hellhole of a country where the passengers of a commercial airliner had been taken hostage by terrorists.
And again, he was gorgeous. And funny. And smart.
&
nbsp; And rude and horrible. And sweet and kind.
And again, she’d been drinking, and going up to his room had seemed like a brilliant idea.
That second time, they’d been on the verge of something more. A real relationship. Alyssa had just started to get to know Sam—and actually found herself liking the arrogant prick—when he’d received the news that a former girlfriend, Mary Lou Morrison, was pregnant.
He’d rushed off to “do the right thing” and marry Mary Lou, and that was the end of that.
Except Alyssa had never completely been able to forget about him.
And now Mary Lou was dead.
Or was she?
Alyssa had taken a quick look around the inside of Janine’s house before following Manuel and Sam downtown.
Two things stood out.
The first was that, though the house was occupied by three people—two women and a nineteen-month-old girl—there was only one body in the kitchen. Which meant that the other woman, presumably Janine, and Haley were still alive and out there somewhere.
But they’d taken nothing with them when they’d left. There were empty suitcases in one of the bedrooms, and no telltale spaces in the closets or drawers where clothes had once been kept.
Toothbrushes were out in the bathroom. A fairly battered and probably much beloved Pooh Bear was in Haley’s crib, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling. An opened bag of Pampers sat on the nursery floor.
Wherever Janine and Haley had gone, they’d left in a hurry, taking absolutely nothing with them.
Which made Alyssa wonder if whoever had shot and killed Mary Lou hadn’t simply taken Janine and Haley and killed them in another location.
Although why do that? Why not just kill them all at once in one giant bloodbath?
But if they weren’t dead, or if they weren’t being held against their will, why hadn’t they surfaced? Where had they gone? Why hadn’t they told someone that Mary Lou was dead?
The second thing Alyssa had noticed was Mary Lou.
Kind of hard to miss her.
Alyssa had met Sam’s wife only two or three times over the past few years. The woman she remembered had brown hair and was voluptuous, not particularly tall, and definitely prone to carrying some excess weight.
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