you please both leave?” Faith asked.
“There’s work to be done. David is here now,” Ruby insisted, her eyes slightly unfocused, as though she’d started drinking early today.
“Then we’ll leave,” Faith said.
“You don’t gotta go,” David said, lifting the hammer, flexing his muscles. “Come show me what you want done. Ma can watch the babies while I…service you.”
“I’m not watching no kids,” Ruby said.
Faith’s mouth had gone dry at the innuendo in David’s voice. She looked at Ruby again, hoping her landlady would intercede; but that was dumb, help wasn’t coming from that quarter. She repeated, “If you won’t go, we will. But before we do, let me make myself clear. I don’t like people having keys to my home, not even you, David. It undermines my feeling of safety.”
“This ain’t your place, it’s mine,” Ruby reminded her. “And what’s mine is David’s.”
David advanced again, his gaze challenging. “Maybe you want me to come back later tonight after you dump the kids. Maybe you want a little one-on-one.”
It was all Faith could do not to punch him. She gritted her teeth and said, “Absolutely not.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You too good for me, is that it, Miss Bishop?”
At that particular moment, Faith didn’t know what to do about this situation, but she did know she wasn’t going to subject either child to another moment of it. Without answering David, she reached around Ruby and opened the front door. Noelle practically bolted, running back to the car heedless of the rain or the puddles.
Even Colin’s enraged screams as Faith backed down the driveway were a better alternative than one more moment in that basement hellhole. She glanced back once to see David standing in her open door, holding the hammer in one hand, tapping it into the open palm of the other, his belligerent gaze tracking her retreat.
THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME since Trip had returned to Shay that he’d had cause to go to the police station. The accident he’d been involved with earlier in the year had been handled by the highway patrol, while the fire that claimed the life of his sister and her husband had been investigated by the sheriff’s department, since the ranch wasn’t within the Shay city limits.
He’d heard rumors the department wasn’t run very well and, as he stepped up to the counter and found himself eye-to-eye with a kid wearing a slipshod uniform and reading a comic book, his expectations fell even further.
“I want to talk to whoever is in charge of the Gina Cooke investigation,” Trip said.
The kid looked blank. “Gina who?”
“Is there a detective here, maybe? Your boss?”
Now the boy looked more comfortable. “You want to talk to the Chief?”
“Sure.”
The boy nodded, turned around and hollered, “Chief Novak? Someone here to see you.”
“Thomas Novak?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
At that moment, a ticked-off-looking man about Trip’s age strode into the front area from the back. He wore a tight green uniform, buttons straining down the front. Heavy black frames perched ponderously on the bridge of his nose. Glaring at the teenager, he said, “Damn it, Lenny, how many times have I told you come get me, don’t shout?” He looked up from the cowering Lenny, met Trip’s eyes and rocked back on his heels. “I’ll be.”
“It’s been a long time,” Trip said. “You’re ‘Chief’?”
“That’s right. I heard you were back out at the ranch. Sorry about your sister and her husband. Hell of a thing.”
“Thank you,” Trip said. If Lenny hadn’t called Novak by name, Trip was pretty sure he would never have merged the skinny kid from their high school days with the corpulent man standing in front of him. “We need to talk.”
“You here about Gina Cooke?”
“That’s right. I have some information you might want—”
“See that, Lenny,” Novak interrupted, as he took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a tissue he plucked from a box on the counter. “Mr. Tripper here is a FBI big shot but he’s going to take the time to help us out. Isn’t that nice?”
Lenny slid Trip a glance.
“Gina is my babysitter,” Trip said. “And I’m no longer with the Bureau.”
“I know that.”
“You went out to my place when you found her car—”
“I was just following procedures. The hunt is over.”
“You found here? Where?”
“We haven’t found her, but we figured out what happened. She ran off with that boyfriend of hers.”
“Peter Saks?”
“Yeah.”
“My housekeeper said you found Gina’s car abandoned.”
Novak folded his glasses into his shirt pocket and leaned on the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Her car was found outside the Quik Mart on Apple Street. She apparently stopped there every day to buy a cup of coffee before heading out to your place. What got a pedestrian to call in was she’d left the window open and the rain was pouring in. Then there were the keys in the ignition.”
“A bad habit of hers,” Trip said.
“That’s what I hear. We sent someone out to your place to see if she showed up for work and someone else to talk to the girl’s boyfriend and her mother. The mother said Gina always leaves her keys in the ignition and that she and the boyfriend had a fight. The boyfriend wasn’t at home, neighbors said he packed up this morning and told them he was going on vacation.” He shrugged. “That Quik Mart is right on the way to the interstate. We figure Saks ran across her, maybe even waited for her to show up there if he knew it was her habit to stop. Maybe he talked her into a little make-up trip. It looks like she decided to go with him. End of story.”
Novak straightened and looked at Trip as though daring him to challenge these conclusions.
“And Gina’s mother is comfortable with this supposition?” Trip asked after a long moment of debating whether to share his suspicions about Neil Roberts with the chief.
“Says it makes perfect sense. Says her daughter was a pushover for Peter Saks.”
“Where did Saks go, exactly?”
“The neighbors don’t know. Camping, maybe.”
“In this weather? In December?”
“Maybe he went south. Hell, it’s
