he couldn’t help rising to the fight. “Nah, Ms. Winnie. Don’t you worry, I got you. You want a costume? I’m your man.” His stomach clenched as he thought about how ill equipped he was for the promise he’d just made.
“Don’t you have a job to do? You know, trying to find my missing, fugitive sister? Or are you going to just let her get away with murdering the vet and William Poe’s wife?” Christina rebuked.
She stared at him, and some of the anger that had filled her features seemed to melt away, replaced by shame. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, not waiting for him to talk. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just...just...”
“Hurting,” he said, finishing her thought.
She sighed, not admitting he was right, but he could see from the way her posture softened that he’d hit the truth. Of course she would be hurting and scared, and probably overwhelmed. Her sister was her only family, since their mother had passed away a few years back.
“I want to find her. Alli needs to come home,” she said, her gaze moving to Winnie and the bandage on her arm.
What was he missing? There was something happening that they weren’t telling him—he could feel it in the air.
“What’s going on?” he asked, tired of skirting the issue.
“Huh?” Christina looked up at him, a look of shock flashing over her features. “What do you mean?”
“You guys are hiding something.” He turned to Wyatt, who all of a sudden seemed wholly consumed by the process of making another sandwich. “What is it that you don’t want me to know?”
His mother walked into the kitchen, almost as if the question had beckoned her to the room. She glanced around at Christina and Wyatt, as if giving them some signal. “Everything’s fine, kiddo. We’re all just worried about Alli.”
“Did she do something you aren’t telling me? I mean, besides murdering Bianca and that other woman and then going on the run?”
His mother smiled. “It’s not what she did but what she didn’t do that is the problem.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
His mother touched his shoulder. “Just work on finding Alli. Then we can deal with everything else.”
Some of the fondness he was feeling toward being home drifted away. He’d forgotten how the family always turned inward first—and because of his time away, he now stood outside the circle.
“Look, why don’t we run over to the impound lot?” Wyatt said, waving the peanut butter–laden knife around in the air.
“You’re not leaving me here alone to wonder what’s going on,” Christina pressed, but she glanced over at his mother with a question in her eyes.
“Don’t worry, I’ll watch Winnie,” Eloise offered.
Whatever was going on revolved around that little girl. Waylon glanced at Winnie. How was she involved with all of this? Was it possible she was Alli’s daughter? Was that why there was such a rush to find the woman—and why they had been adamant that he come home to help them in the search? He pushed the thoughts from his mind. Alli had always told him she was unable to get pregnant. The child couldn’t be hers.
* * *
THE IMPOUND LOT was attached to the prerelease center on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t much of a place. Wyatt punched in his key code, and the gate of the chain link–enclosed lot opened with a grinding sound. There was a collection of beat-up old cars and one late-model Mustang. Most of the jalopies had flat tires or shattered windshields, and more than a few had both. The lot even had a few campers that looked like they’d escaped the show Breaking Bad, complete with what Waylon was sure were meth labs inside.
He chuckled, but his humor was short-lived as they drove around the corner and came into view of the convicts’ exercise yard. One of the prisoners looked over, and as he caught sight of Wyatt’s patrol unit, he spat on the ground and flipped them the bird. As the other prisoners noticed, the middle finger came in almost a concert-style wave, rippling through the yard.
“Nothing quite like the royal welcome, right?” Wyatt said, ignoring his fan club.
“I’m acquainted with the lifestyle,” Waylon said with a cynical laugh.
Christina tapped her fingers on the car door. “That’s what you guys get all the time? No wonder you both have chips on your shoulders.”
He and his brother looked at each other and shared a smug grin. A few middle fingers were nothing compared to facing down a drunk man with a gun who wanted to kill him for some past injustice he felt he had suffered at the hands of the police. It was a strange feeling to know that most of the time, wherever he went, people despised him.
Sure, it was true most of the population weren’t criminals, but the people they worked with every day weren’t the general public—in his case, the criminals he worked with were even worse than Wyatt’s. For Waylon, when he was working on a base between deployments to war zones, the people he arrested were well trained in weapons and self-defense—his job was to handle trained killers. Wyatt just had to handle drunken idiots.
Wyatt parked his car next to a black Hyundai Genesis. “It was pretty beat-up by the time we got the report that it had been abandoned. You know how that goes,” his brother said, motioning toward the wreckage.
The car had a flat tire on the passenger’s side, and its windshield was shattered. For a moment, Waylon imagined Alli’s car on the side of the road, people smashing it just because they could. People had a strange, innate need to destroy things that stood alone or abandoned. It was almost as though anonymity was enough justification for them to give license to their destructive nature.
“I went over this car with Lyle, top to bottom,” Wyatt said, getting out and walking toward Alli’s car.
“What all did you find?”
Wyatt shrugged. “We ran fingerprints, but nothing came of them. And all we found inside was the normal crap—wadded straw wrappers and a few fries under the seats.”
“But nothing that you think would help us figure out where she could have gone?” Christina asked.
Wyatt looked over at her. “You and I both know she’s in Canada somewhere. She’s probably watching a hockey game, drinking Molson and laughing at how stupid she thinks we are.”
“She’s not like that. She knows you aren’t stupid. She just got herself into a bad spot, and it escalated. I don’t condone what she did, but there has to be more to it than we know. She had her problems, but I never thought she was capable of...you know,” Christina said. She looked down at the ground with what Waylon assumed was shame.
He wanted to tell her he was just as confused and upset a woman he had once loved had made such a stupid series of decisions, but there was no making any of what Alli did better. There was only bringing her back so she could pay for her crimes—and so he could ask her all the questions he was dying to ask. He just couldn’t understand how she had fallen into such a pit of self-destruction. Sure, she had never been exactly healthy, but he’d never thought she was capable of taking a life.
Then
