Kate had shared the office in the town house with her former fiancé, Sir Percival Edwards, and there were two desks built into an L shape that each housed top-of-the-line computers and multiple screens. His desk had two; Kate’s had three.
“Look at this,” he said, indicating the picture he’d found on Jennifer Wilson’s Instagram account.
Kate looked back and forth between the two smiling faces. It was the same smile Natalya had with her sister in the Minnesota picture. With stilettos and a slinky black silk dress replacing the hat, scarf, and fuzzy pink mittens. “Which one is she?”
Even though Kate had seen a picture of Natalie, he wasn’t surprised she’d asked. The two women looked enough alike to be sisters. They were both knockouts, although Jennifer was curvier, shorter, and had more brown in her dirty blond hair. “The one on the left,” he said.
Kate squinted at the photo. “Where was that taken? It looks familiar.”
“You’ve probably been there. It’s the Treasury Bar on the Hill.”
That was one of the reasons he’d jolted. He’d recognized it right away, too. It was the same bar where he and Natalie had first met.
Kate nodded. “This Jennifer Wilson could be a good lead.”
“More than that. Look at the date the picture was posted.”
He zoomed in so she could see it easier. A moment later she gasped. “May the twenty-fourth!”
He nodded. “The night before our mission, and a couple days before Natalie was killed.”
Jennifer Wilson might have been one of the last people to see her alive.
“And look at this.” He scrolled through the pictures. “It’s the last picture she posted, and before that she posted almost daily.”
Kate looked at him. “You think she knows something?”
“I’m going to find out.”
He’d planned to go to Minnesota to talk to Natalya’sfamily, but tracking down Jennifer Wilson had just become priority number one.
• • •
Natalie wanted to scream, but it was another primitive instinct that took over. The urge to survive. To avoid death. To fight.
She turned and tossed the bag toward the man who’d come up behind her. She knew he’d reflexively try to catch it, and she intended to use the moment of surprise to her advantage with a swift kick to an area that would give her the moment she needed to get past him.
He caught the bag with a surprised “oof” and she was about to proceed to part two of her escape plan when she noticed the uniform.
The color slid from her face. The man who’d snuck up behind her wasn’t Mick or a Russian hit man; he was a policeman. Noticing the badge, she corrected herself. Not a policeman, the sheriff, who happened to be a dead ringer for Tom Selleck circaMagnum, P.I. He even had a mustache, although his wasn’t 1980s bushy but trimmed much shorter.
She was relieved, but only for a moment. When you were on the run, hiding for your life and the lives of everyone you loved, with only a fake ID to protect you, a policeman was almost as bad as a hit man. What did he want?
He realized he must have frightened her by coming up behind her. “I’m sorry for scaring you. I was parked around front when I saw the car pulling into the garage.”
Natalie took a deep breath, trying to recover her composure.Act normal.Don’t panic just because a cop showed up out of nowhere.
She smiled as if embarrassed. “You startled me, that’s all. What can I do for you?”
She held out her hand for the grocery bag that she’dtossed to him, but he shook it off. “I’ll carry it for you. I’m Brock Brouchard—the county sheriff. We had some reports from neighbors of lights on in the old farmhouse and assumed it was teenagers or squatters. I was in the area so I thought I’d check it out.”
The sheriff smiled. He didn’t have the Magnum dimples, but even without them, he was a good-looking man in the rugged outdoorsman kind of way. Her mom would say he looked like the Marlboro Man, which was basically how she referred to every ruggedly handsome man.
“Not a squatter or a teenager,” she said. “Just a renter.”
“Do you mind if I see proof of that?”
She knew he had no right to see it, but she also knew that it would get rid of him faster if she just did as he asked. But her heart was pounding like a drum. “No problem. The paperwork is inside.”
