“Emil,” she barked when he didn’t respond. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he insisted. “Why do you think something is wrong?”
“Because you are breathing into the phone like someone has been chasing you. What’s your heart rate? Huh? Count it for me.”
Nurses,he thought with an eye roll. “My heart rate is fine.”
“Count!” she ordered. “Or start talking. One of the two.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s nothing just… I keep thinking of Mama.”
Losing their mother five years ago was hard on them both, but they dealt with it in different ways. Emil threw himself into his routine—work, run, eat, sleep—as if he could drive the grief out of his heart by staying busy. Lucia threw herself into church. She must have gone to mass more times in a week than there were days that first year. And even though he didn’t exactly share it, he admired her faith. It made her resilient.
“I see.” He could hear her deep inhale through the phone. “Is it another case?”
She knew him too well. “It started as a suicide,” he told her.
“Started?” Lucia was nearly as shockproof as he was. It seemed the Davenport woman had a special knack for knocking people off their guard.
He blew out. “I had this feeling, so I decided to dig a little deeper. Turns out, the husband had been abusing her. I just came across a phone full of pictures.”
“Breathe,hermanito,” she said softly, understanding. “You aren’t back there in that house with the shag carpet. He can’t hurt us anymore.”
“I know,” he told her. “I know.”
“You can’t save them all, Emil,” she told him. “You have tolearn to make your peace with that. It’s enough that you want to try.”
He walked toward his car, something catching in his throat. “This one feels different. It feels… important.”
“Why?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I know her, Lucia.”
His sister emitted a small squeak, then asked. “A girlfriend?”
Reyes dated plenty, but he rarely made strong connections to women. He’d had a couple of steady relationships, but they hadn’t lasted beyond a year, and he’d never brought anyone home, afraid of getting his mother’s hopes up. He liked keeping the pieces of his life neatly ensconced, separate from one another. It was cleaner. He wasn’t even sure he’d been in love, that he was capable of it. His sister said it was because of their childhood. But Reyes knew better. He understood the truth even if he couldn’t quite explain it. It’s like he was waiting on something, like his energy was being diverted, needed elsewhere for a task he hadn’t encountered yet. It sounded crazy, and that’s why he kept it to himself, but he just wasn’t fully available to a woman until that moment passed.A hero’s complex,a shrink had called it once. He didn’t go back. “No.”
She sighed and he could hear her resignation. “Who then?”
“Her,” he said emphatically. “The woman in the restaurant. The one who saved me from choking.”
There was an intake of air on the other end. “What? No. She’s dead?”
Reyes nodded even though she couldn’t see. “Yes, we think. But we haven’t found a body.” It was his turn to sigh. “I don’t know, Lucia. Something about this guy, her husband. He seems…worse.But not on the surface. On the surface, he’s polished. He sets my teeth on edge.”
“Polished just means sneakier,” she told him flatly. “Better at not getting caught. You remember Jace—country-club poster boy on the outside, sadistic asshole on the inside.”
“How could I forget?” Reyes climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. He still had nightmares where he beat the man’sskull in, unable to stop himself. Jace was Lucia’s last bad boyfriend, and by far the worst. Reyes had tried again and again to get her to leave him, until she stopped taking his calls. The night she finally phoned him from a motel room, her voice so low he could barely hear her, he worried he wouldn’t get to her in time, that she would die before he arrived or that Jace would come finish what he started. Reyes had a lifetime of bottled rage at men like Jace, men who had used and abused the women he loved, men who were so small inside they had to hurt someone smaller to escape their own misery. His niece, Mia, didn’t know her father, never would, and it was better that way.
But Jace was a small-time thug masquerading as a corporate square. Once you got past the porcelain veneers and the Ivy League haircut, it was obvious. Henry Davenport was a different beast—colder, crueler, leaner.
Reyes sighed. “This guy makes Jace look practically docile.”
“That’s terrifying,” Lucia replied. “What did he do?”
“Nothing,” he told her. “I mean, nothing I can point a finger at except kill his wife and make it look like a suicide. But I can’t prove that. Not yet. He just feelswrong.”
“Trust your gut, baby brother,” she told him. “It’s the gift God gave you.”
