heart though, and it couldn’t bring back Sonya. But maybe Thea could help get justice for the dead woman.
“Please tell me you found the baby,” she said when Raleigh finished with the CSIs and started toward her.
He shook his head. “But there’s some evidence that Sonya delivered the child here, at her house.” Raleigh added a weary sigh to that, and he stopped directly in front of her. “There were some bloody sheets in the washer, and a package of newborn diapers had been opened. So had a case of premade formula bottles. Three of the bottles and four of the diapers were missing.”
Well, Sonya had obviously had the baby somewhere, so the delivery could have easily happened here in her home, but that just led Thea to yet another question. Why wouldn’t Sonya have gone to the hospital to deliver the child?
However, Thea instantly thought of a bad answer to that.
Maybe the gunman was here when the baby had been born. Those thugs could have stopped her from getting the medical attention she needed.
She looked up at Raleigh, and he was staring at her. His lawman’s stare. That meant his comment about the sheets and diapers hadn’t been just to catch her up on what they’d found. This was the start of his official interview, since she’d actually seen the man who was likely responsible for murdering Sonya.
Of course, Thea had already told him some details when Raleigh had found her on the back porch, and she had added other bits of info while they’d waited for the CSIs and ME to arrive. Obviously though, he wanted a lot more now.
But Thea didn’t have more.
“You should be inside the house with Yvette,” Raleigh reminded her. It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned that. “Whoever killed Sonya is still at large, and you could be a target.”
“So could you.” Best not to mention that the gunmen might want him dead because he was Warren’s son.
No.
That would only make matters worse. And as for going inside with Yvette, obviously neither of them wanted to do that, because they both stayed put.
Thea’s heart was breaking for Yvette, since the missing baby was her biological child—a daughter, from what Sonya had told her a couple months ago—but Thea didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with Yvette just yet. Besides, she didn’t even know what to say to the woman. The only thing they could do was hope they found the baby soon, along with finding Sonya’s killer.
“I had at least a dozen conversations with Sonya,” Thea explained to Raleigh. “I visited her here at her house three times, and not once did she ever hint that she was in any kind of danger.”
He made a sound that could have meant anything and kept up the intense stare. He was good at it, too. Unfortunately, looking at him reminded her of other things that had nothing to do with the murder and missing baby.
Once Raleigh had been attracted to her. Obviously not now though. There wasn’t a trace of attraction in his stormy blue eyes or on that handsome face. He was all cowboy cop now.
“And you visited Sonya because of Hannah Neal,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but Thea nodded to confirm that. “Hannah was my friend, and it eats away at me that I haven’t been able to find her killer.”
She caught something in his eyes. A glimmer that she recognized. It ate away at Raleigh, too.
Raleigh hadn’t known Hannah, but Hannah’s body had been dumped just at the edge of Durango Ridge. That meant it was Raleigh’s case, but then, despite his retirement, Sheriff Warren McCall had gotten involved because Hannah had lived in their hometown of McCall Canyon. Plus, Hannah had been murdered in McCall Canyon, too. Murdered, and her killer had left the same obscene message on her wall that he had on Sonya’s.
At the time of that investigation, Warren hadn’t mentioned a word about Raleigh being his illegitimate son. Neither had Thea, though she had known. She had found out Warren’s secret a few months before that, but she hadn’t told anyone. And that was the reason she no longer saw the attraction in Raleigh’s eyes. He hated her now because she’d kept that from him.
But not nearly as much as she hated herself for doing it.
Thea shook her head to clear it, forcing her mind off Hannah and back onto Sonya. Hannah’s case was cold, but what they uncovered here today could maybe help them solve both murders.
“Why exactly did you become friends with Sonya?” Raleigh asked.
It wasn’t an easy question. “It didn’t start out as friendship. I’d been keeping tabs on the doctor who did the in vitro on Hannah.” Actually, she’d kept tabs on anything related to her late friend. “So, when I found out this same doctor, Bryce Sheridan, had done this procedure on another surrogate, I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to see if there were any...irregularities.”
Raleigh’s eyebrow came up. “You think Dr. Sheridan had something to do with Hannah’s murder?”
“No. I mean, I didn’t know. I was just trying to find any kind of lead.” Thea had to take a deep breath before she could continue. “But after I met and talked to Sonya, I didn’t see any obvious red flags. Especially not any red flags about Dr. Sheridan.”
That ate away at Thea even more. Because she should have seen something. She should have been able to stop this from happening.
“Both Hannah and Sonya were surrogates,” Raleigh said, “and both were connected to you. According to the messages left at the crime scenes, the women were linked to Warren, too.”
She couldn’t deny that. Thea knew both women and had worked for Warren for three years before he’d retired and turned the reins of the sheriff’s office over to his son Egan. It was ironic that all three of Warren’s sons had become lawmen, but Thea seriously doubted that Raleigh would ever say that he had followed in his father’s footsteps.
“You think I’m the reason these women were killed?” Thea came out and asked him.
Just saying the question aloud robbed her of her breath, and Raleigh didn’t even get a chance to answer, because his deputy Dalton came out of the house and onto the porch. He wasn’t alone, either. Yvette was with him. The woman was no longer crying, but her eyes were red and swollen, and she had her phone gripped in her hand so hard that her knuckles were white.
“We have to find my daughter, so I hired some private investigators,” Yvette immediately said.
“I told her I didn’t think that was a good idea,” Dalton mumbled.
It wasn’t. PIs, even well-meaning ones, could interfere with an investigation to the point of slowing it down, but Thea couldn’t fault Yvette for doing this. The woman had to be desperate because her baby could be in the hands of a killer.
“You saw Sonya,” Yvette said to Thea. “How was she? Was she weak? Did she say anything about the baby?”
Yvette had already asked these questions several times and in a couple of different ways. So had Raleigh. But Thea didn’t mind answering them again. Maybe if she kept going over what she’d seen, she would remember something else. It was a tactic that cops used to try to get more info from witnesses.
