open and was staring at the contents. “What on earth?” she gasped, and pulled out a box. “A pregnancy test. What’s this for? I mean, I know what it’s for, but who is it for?”
And then both sisters skewered her with their attention.
“Emily?” they chorused.
Her face burned. “I might not be. I mean, it’s just a precaution. You know, to be sure. One way or the other.” Busted, Emily babbled like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, a D-minus science test buried at the bottom of her school bag and one foot out the window at midnight on her way to meet friends. Guilty, on multiple counts.
“There’s a ‘one way or the other’ chance you’re having a baby? I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.” The disappointment in Annie’s voice was reflected in her eyes. “Why haven’t you said something before now?”
“Because if I’m not...” She placed her hands on her belly. “If I’m not, then no one needed to know there was a chance I might be.” She ignored Annie’s reference to seeing someone because it was mortifying to admit she wasn’t. She shot an accusatory look at CJ instead. “And no one would know if it hadn’t been for a snooping little sister.”
“Hey! I was not snooping. I was looking for your phone. I thought I was helping. How’d I know I was going to find—” she brandished the box “—this. But if you are, that means...holy moly, Em. If you’re going to be a mother, then who’s the father?”
“He...” Nowhere near ready to admit the truth, Emily did something she was sure to regret. She lied. “It’s Fred.”
Her sisters gaped at her for a full five seconds, and then they both burst out laughing.
THE JANGLE OF his cell phone made Jack Evans hastily sweep his desk, shoving aside papers and lifting files to check beneath them till his phone slid out from inside one of the folders—the Scarlett Daniels homicide. She was the third victim of Chicago’s most recent serial killer, the South Side Slayer, as the media had dubbed him. Scarlett’s murder was arguably the grizzliest of his three victims.
“Evans here,” he said, managing for once to answer his cell before the call went to voice mail.
“Jack, Brett Watters. I found the daughter of your murder victim.”
“Rose Daniels?” Finally. “Alive?”
“Living and breathing.”
“Where is she?”
“We got a ping off her driver’s license. She was pulled over for speeding near some hole-in-the-wall in Wisconsin.”
Huh. He’d figured if the girl was still among the living, she was running from something, more likely someone, but he hadn’t expected her to make it that far out of Chicago. “Does this place have a name?”
He could hear the sound of his colleague tapping on a keyboard. “Riverton. That ring any bells?”
A whole cathedral full of them. “That’s my hometown, so, yeah, it sure does.”
“Huh. You don’t say. Want me to give the Riverton PD a call, have them ask her some questions?”
Jack opened the top drawer of his desk and plucked a business card out of the pencil tray. He’d put it there almost two months ago, the day he’d returned to Chicago from a rare visit to his hometown to attend his friend Eric Larsen’s funeral.
He’d looked at the card every day since.
Emily Finnegan, Reporter.
The Riverton Gazette.
Beneath that, her phone number and an email address.
He thought about her every day, too, even when he wasn’t looking at her card. He hadn’t wanted to. Simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d thought about calling her but had decided against it. What would he say?
Thanks for a good time? Too tasteless.
See you next time I’m in town? Too vague.
Better to let it be. With some regret, he was now wishing he had given her a call.
Years ago, they had been paired up as maid of honor and best man at Eric and Annie’s wedding. Tall and reedy, a glossy-haired brunette with a brown-eyed gaze that didn’t miss a beat, Emily had returned home for the big event from Minneapolis, where she’d been studying journalism. Quiet, though not so much shy as watchful and reserved. It would have been a cliché for the best man to hook up with the maid of honor, so he hadn’t tried. But he’d wanted to. The next time he’d seen her was at Eric and Annie’s son’s christening. He and Emily were godparents, and a post-baptismal hookup would have been even tackier. Again, he’d let it go.
Eric’s funeral had been a game-changer. A change driven by grief, the raw emotion of the day, the sharp reminder that life could be unexpectedly short. As a homicide detective, Jack knew about death, had seen it up close and personal in a way few did. He possessed intimate knowledge of all the gruesome ways people could die. What he didn’t know, he’d realized the day of Eric’s funeral, was how they lived. He had no idea how he needed to live, and he’d discovered just how clueless he was as he’d helped carry his friend’s casket to the waiting hearse and later stood on the sidelines, watching a young widow with her family, each of them grieving the loss of a man they had loved. They should have been angry with the world, with the unfairness of losing someone so young. They were mourning their loss, of course, but they were also honoring their loved one by moving on with their lives and caring for one another. By living.
After the funeral, Jack had spent a polite amount of time exchanging platitudes with people he barely knew, drinking bitter coffee and eating several crustless triangle sandwiches that were a church-hall staple. He had spoken briefly with Annie and then left. He had encountered Emily dashing out of the coatroom with her jacket slung over her arm. He had done the gentlemanly thing and helped her put it on. They had walked out of the church and into a deluge, so he’d offered her a lift and suggested they go for coffee. That had segued into dinner. He had assumed they’d have nothing in common. The energy of city life pulsed through his veins, and she was a small-town girl through and through. So when he’d taken her home, he shouldn’t have stayed. But he had.
“Evans? You still there?” Brett’s voice dragged his attention back to the business at hand and the card between his fingers.
“Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?”
“Should we have the Riverton PD interview the Daniels woman for us?”
“No.” Jack set the card next to the stack of reports on his desk. “I’d like to talk to her myself. If I leave now, I can be there in five hours. Could you ask them to—”
“She’s not going anywhere. They’ve given her a twenty-four-hour suspension, and her car’s been impounded. She’s been drinking.”
Jack checked his watch. Seven-thirty. An early start by anyone’s standard. He knew Rose had been raised by a drug addict and spent a lot of years in and
