“The fuck do you mean?” Carla growled. “Idied, Jack. Ifanythinghad a lasting effect, I would know.”
“But you didn’t die every day. Maybe it’s just things that happen consistently.”
“That’s a shitty theory.”
“Ouch,” said Jack, leaning back against the cushions. “It’s just a thought.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, but why are we fine when Boris isn’t?”
“Maybe his lady is sucking his soul every night.”
Jack dragged his fingers through his hair. “But he hasn’t been sleeping.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” he said, just as the newscaster appeared again, wearing a serious face and a tan suit. “Maybe.”
Hannah was missing again.Alongside her, another couple. Denise and Charles Swenson vanished in the night and were discovered missing by their two teenaged children. Authorities determined from the bloodstains throughout the home that the couple were most likely assaulted in their bed, attacked by either their own children or a particularly crafty intruder.
Neither was for certain.
The details of Hannah’s disappearance remained exactly the same. Her husband offered nothing new in his interview. Camera footage showed search parties combing through the wilderness and finding nothing.
A knot of despair formed in Jack’s throat. He sat back against the couch, knees folded against his chest. Below him, Carla was silent, eyes glued to the screen.
“Blood,” she said when the segment ended. “Both scenes are bloody.”
“Yeah,” said Jack in half-hearted agreement. Lots of disappearances involved violent crime. But it was strange when three people disappeared in the same day, leaving nothing but splatters of blood in their wake.
“They left their family members behind,” said Carla, tilting her head back to meet Jack’s eye. Even with her smudged makeup and wild tangles, she was lovely. He fought the urge to press his lips to her forehead, to trail his fingers through her hair. But they couldn’t afford to get distracted right now. Not when they were so close to finding answers. “And they’re all suspects. What do you make of that?”
“Misfortune?”
“You think they did it?” Something dark and angry glinted in her eye. “You think someonemadethem do it?”
A shiver bolted down Jack’s spine, left him cold and shattered. “I fucking hope not.”
She groaned, jumped to her feet, and began pacing again. “There’s something we’re missing.”
Jack nodded. “What were you saying about investigating Enzo?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
The sub-basement was hiddenbehind a bookcase. Jack watched in horrified fascination as Carla dragged her lacquered nails across the back of the shelf, pausing at a nearly imperceptible dent in the wood above a collection of legal volumes.
Privately, Jack speculated the Ronnie either had a legal background or wanted people to think that he did, because the entire house seemed like it belonged to a lawyer and not a mob boss. Massive desks with decanters of bourbon, shelf after shelf of books about history and law, marble floors… Jack supposed he wouldn’t know what a mob boss’s house was supposed to look like, but this wasn’t what he’d expected.
A click. The bookshelf groaned as Carla grasped its side and yanked it open. A gaping doorway greeted them. Beyond, stairs plunged into blackness. “In here. This is where they go when they really wanna be left alone.”
“Will we be able to get out?” asked Jack, feet rooted to the floor. No way was he going down there.
“There’s an escape route,” Carla said. “Come on. I wouldn’t bring you down here if there was no way out.”
But Jack just shook his head. “Anyone could barricade that entrance?—”
