“Riley, please, if he’s innocent, he has nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
Oh wow, maybe I did. They were lovers. I’d been right to wonder about them.
“You’re—you’re having an affair with him?”
She said nothing.
“Riley, please, don’t ruin your life. If Cody killed Shannon to be with—”
“Cody’s not my lover,” she snapped. “He’s my business partner. And I’m not going to let you turn him in.”
“Yourbusinesspartner? What do you mean?”
She scoffed and the gun jiggled a little in her hand. “What does it matter to you?”
“What have you got going at Baker?”
Wait. The answer had been whispering to me for days.
“It’s drugs, isn’t it? Are you moving drugs in the Baker delivery trucks?”
If she was in on it, her husband must be, too. I thought of the boat in their driveway, the big TV.
No reply. She stuffed her free hand in her purse and rooted around again. Hunting for her phone, no doubt. She was going to call Blaine and tell him where to find us. I had to keep her talking instead.
“Did Shannon find out?”
“You know what the problem with Shannon was? She hadeverything. A huge house and a condo in Florida and all the nice clothes she wanted, and she didn’t have to lift afingerfor any of it. But she wasn’t satisfied. She had to start butting into our business.”
Riley was nearly stabbing the contents of her purse now, trying to find the damn phone without taking her eyes off me.
“What tipped her off?”
“Who the hell knows? She just announced one day that she wanted to give us a hand at Baker, and Cody had to say yes—because she wasDaddy’s girl. She was real sneaky about it, going slow at first, working from home, and then the next thing you know she showed up there. She started snooping around from the moment she arrived, like she knew something was up.”
“And she found proof?”
“Oh yeah, she turned out to be a great little detective. Cody tried to reason with her. Begged her not to blow up their lives.”
“And it didn’t work?”
“At first he thought he’d managed to get through to her, but he finally realized she was actually going to tell on him. Betray her ownhusband. Send him to prison so he couldn’t be with his kids. She didn’t leave him any choice.”
Finally she yanked the phone from her purse. With her eyes flicking between me and the screen, she jabbed at it a couple of times and pressed it to her ear.
The call was answered instantly, and someone barked on the other end.
“It’s okay, I’ve got her,” Riley announced.
A pause as she listened. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it could burst from my chest.
“In my car,” she said. “In the parking lot of that tennis and swim place, the one— Okay.” She disconnected and let the phone fall to her lap.
Though Riley’s tone had suggested firm control of the situation, even in the dark I could make out the sheen of perspiration on her face. Could I manage to distract her, see if I could bolt out of the car fast enough so she couldn’t shoot me in the back of the head? Because I had only minutes before Cody arrived.
“So he had the perfect way to make it seem like a serial killing, didn’t he? Did he say he was going to do that—leave Shannon there and confuse everybody?”
