next to the Jetta. Mac tore his gaze away from the approaching Becca to witness Hudson slam the door to his truck and stride toward the diner’s front entrance.
How long had they been an item? he wondered.
Becca waited for Hudson, but they didn’t so much as touch as they entered the diner. Mac was shifting his thoughts on how he planned this interview to go when Gretchen took the bull by the horns and gestured toward a nearby table. “Let’s move over here.” She grabbed her cup of coffee, slid from the booth, and shifted to a chair. Mac would have agreed that the table was a better choice than the intimacy of a booth, but her ever-constant decision-making—never so much as waggling an eyebrow at him for direction or corroboration—really bugged the hell out of him.
It was evident Walker and Becca Sutcliff were together and, Mac guessed from the looks they passed between them, definitely a couple. He made quick introductions all around, then they sat and the waitress poured a couple more cups of coffee while a busboy swabbed at their recently vacated table.
Becca’s hair was scraped into a ponytail. She wore a black-and-white plaid scarf around the neck of her leather coat, and the way she pulled the scarf from her neck was nothing short of sinuous, at least in Mac’s opinion. He remembered very clearly how she’d been as a teenager: wide-eyed, skinny, skittish, and smart enough to keep her thoughts to herself. He hadn’t put together that Hudson Walker might be more interested in her than his own girlfriend, Jessie Brentwood, but then maybe that was just conjecture on his part now.
Hudson Walker had filled out over the years and had earned a few more lines around the corners of his eyes, as if he squinted in the sun a lot. He was dressed down, jeans and shirt, lightweight jacket—a far cry from Christopher Delacroix III’s tailor-made wool suit. The man’s tie had probably cost more than Mac took home in a week.
Hudson took a seat across from Mac’s. He gazed across at Gretchen, who was sizing him up but good. “You’re Hudson Walker,” she said. “The vic’s boyfriend from twenty years ago?”
“The ‘vic’ being Jessie Brentwood? You’re saying you identified her body?” Hudson asked, turning to Mac.
“Still unconfirmed,” Mac said. “We’re waiting for DNA.”
Hudson swivelled his gaze to Gretchen. “I dated Jessie, yeah.”
Walker was weightier since high school, more in demeanor than actual pounds. And Mac understood before the man said a word that Hudson Walker had no intention of helping him any more now than he had when he was younger.
“You wanted to see me,” he said in a tone that let Mac know just how he felt about that.
Mac opened his mouth, but Gretchen jumped in again. “Everybody said Jessie Brentwood ran away, but then those bones showed up.”
“But you’re still not certain they belong to Jessie, so maybe this is a little premature.”
Mac said, “I think it’s just an exercise—confirmation. We’ve gone through all the missing persons files. We’ll find those remains belong to Jezebel Brentwood.”
Becca drew in a quick breath. Her skin was pale. In fact, she looked out-and-out sick.
“You all right?” Mac asked.
Hudson turned to her. “Becca?”
“I’m fine.”
“Was it something I said?” Gretchen asked wryly.
Mac cringed. His partner had no class. “Are you sure you’re—”
“Excuse me.” Becca suddenly scraped back her chair and headed toward the women’s room, which was clearly marked at the end of the row of booths.
Hudson half rose from his chair but let her go.
“She always scare so easily?” Gretchen asked in mild surprise.
Hudson’s gaze shifted to Mac’s partner, and Mac had to fight to keep his lips from twitching with amusement. Gretchen was pissing Hudson off but good. One of her favorite tactics, though what good it would do in this case, he had no idea. Before Hudson and Gretchen could go to the next level, Mac said, “I’d like to just run over the sequence of events before Jessie Brentwood disappeared.”
“You just said you don’t know if the remains are even Jessie.”
“Slow days at the department,” Gretchen said. “We’re up to our asses in cold cases instead of current events.” She took a sip from her cup, scowled, and added cream. “Crime’s on a downswing. What can I say?”
“It’s no secret I thought something happened to her twenty years ago,” Mac cut in. “You were one of the last people to see her.”
Hudson hesitated a moment. Mac could almost see when he made the decision to tamp down his annoyance and just get on with it. “We had a fight,” he stated rotely. “She didn’t think I was being honest with her. I didn’t think she was being honest with me. We were both right.”
“And what were you lying about?” Gretchen asked.
“More like omissions of the truth. We were in a high school romance that had run its course.”
“You liked someone else,” Mac said, his eyes following the path Becca had taken.
“It was over. That’s all.”
“You didn’t follow her into that maze and stab her to death?” Gretchen asked conversationally.
“She was stabbed?” Hudson asked. He turned to Mac for corroboration.
Mac nodded curtly. “That’s the ME’s opinion.”
Walker seemed to think that over while Mac, with a warning look at Gretchen to keep her big trap shut, asked more questions about the timeline of the last night Hudson saw Jessie. It was more of the same from his notes from twenty years ago, less really, as Hudson’s memory wasn’t as clear as it had been then.
“She said she was in trouble,” Hudson said. “Something was out there.”
“In trouble? What do you mean? Trouble with her parents? At school? Maybe pregnant?” Gretchen leaned a little forward in her seat.
Mac wanted to smash his foot down on hers. She seemed determined to blab all aspects of the case before he was ready. Some of the information had to be held back from the press, the populace in general, so that only the police and Jezebel Brentwood’s killer knew the truth.
Walker lifted a hand and dropped it again in weary exasperation. “It wasn’t as defined as that. More a case of something unclear—like trouble was going to find her. I think she said something like that. ‘Trouble’s coming’ or something. I don’t remember her exact words, but she was on edge. She couldn’t sit still.”
His story was the same as it had been for twenty years.
“Did you suspect she wanted to run away?” Gretchen asked.
“I just thought we were having a fight. We’d had a bunch of ’em. The only time she said she wanted to get away was when
