“Sorry. I like to prepare myself for abandonment.”
“Want to take Sawyer on the water?” Ellory asks.
Sawyer twists to look at me and immediately holds his hands up. Sawyer loves the lake. Brodrie is terrified of the water.
“Okay. I’m going to change.”
I’m not surprised when Ellory follows me back to my car. He stands around the side and asks, “You okay?”
He asks me this after every kill. I nod as I shove my pants and underwear down to step out of them. “Yeah. He was nobody.”
“He was somebody’s predator,” Ellory says. “You did a good thing.”
“Killing someone,” I muse as I tie my swim shorts.
“Killing someone who has hurt thirty-one people—that we’ve found. Someone who has slipped through law enforcement’s hands countless times with shady alibis. Someone who would have continued to hurt others if he weren’t dead,” Ellory says.
I nod as I change into my own swim shirt, though mine is short-sleeved. I slip into water shoes, too. When I close my trunk, Ellory hands me the bottle of sunscreen I didn’t see him holding.
For the next several minutes, I coat my exposed skin with sunscreen. Ellory watches me, though his eyes aren’t exactly on me. I’m not sure what he’s looking at. I half expect someone to be there when I follow his line of sight, but the road is empty.
Handing him back his sunscreen, we walk side-by-side to the water.
“Where’s Gracen?” Ellory asks.
His question makes Ryan’s voice in my head mutter angrily. “Working, I think. He’s still looking for Emily.”
It’s troubling that she seems to have simply vanished. Just as Jonathan Clark said she did. “Do you think her parents sent her away or something?” I ask.
He hums. “We’ve searched missing people and police reports following her family’s moves. She was pulled out of school, though that was three years before she disappeared. When she was on record as being ‘homeschooled’ by Jonathan at the temple.”
I was homeschooled through the temple, so I frown. “I never saw her there.”
“Yep. The temple’s school is specifically listed, though I suppose she could have been homeschooled at home, but it appears as though both of her parents worked, so… we’re not sure yet.”
“You’re working with Gracen?”
“I am. Ave, Imry, and Voss are too. We’ll find her.”
“I think she’s dead,” I confide.
“There’s a chance,” he says gently.
“How will you find her then?”
“Right now, we’re proceeding as if she’s alive. There’s no evidence pointing to her death.”
“There’s no evidence pointing to her being alive,” I counter.
“True. But there’s something in the way Jonathan said she disappeared that makes me believe she’s alive.”
“He said he doesn’t know what happened to her.”
“I don’t think he did,” Ellory agrees.
He’s talking in circles, and I don’t understand his line of thought, so I drop it.
“Go grab a float and I’ll get Sawyer in his lifejacket.”
