He pursed his lips. He didn’t know about that, but it did often lead him in the right direction.
“You said there’s no body?” his sister asked, her tone ranging higher in hope.
“Not yet. It’s probably in the Atlantic.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” she said. “Men like Jace, like this man—they’re proud of their work. Too proud, if you ask me, to let it go unseen. Jace left me where someone would find me. He wanted the cops to know there was nothing they could do to stop him. If you don’t have a body, she might not be dead. There might still be time, baby brother. I know she’s important to you.”
“What are you saying? That he’s keeping her somewhere? Alive? Like a prisoner?” A scoff escaped him.
“If he is, it won’t be for long,” she suggested. “Or maybe she ran away. Maybe he’s too ashamed to let people know she got away from him, that’s he’s not all-powerful.”
“We have a suicide note,” he told her.
“Maybe he wrote it.”
Reyes shook his head. It was too convoluted. The truth was usually simple, the simplest thing staring you in the face. “We have footage of her jumping off a bridge.”
“Then maybe she’s finally free,” his sister said sadly. “The only way to get an asshole like that off your back is if they think you’re dead. I should know.”
Reyes flinched. Lucia believed Jace had never come looking for her because he didn’t think she’d survived that last beating. That’s what allowed her to sleep at night. That, and the nine-millimeter she kept tucked under her mattress. A present he’d given her for Mia’s first Christmas.
Her words burrowed into him. “I gotta go,” he told her, feeling a powerful urge to return to the residence. He had to be missing something. Something that would nail this guy.
“Emil?” she said before he could hang up.
“Yes, Lucia?”
“Be careful. If this man is as bad as you think, then he’s more dangerous than you or I could ever imagine.”
“IWANT HIScar.” Reyes dumped the cell phone and note onto Will’s desk.
“What?” His partner nearly spilt the coffee he was slurping. “What’s all this?”
“That,” Reyes told him, “was in the PO box.”
“A crappy old cell phone?” Will didn’t look impressed.
Reyes reached over with a sigh of exasperation and plugged it into the outlet on Will’s cubicle. He entered the passcode, then dropped it in his lap. “Turn it on.”
Will looked from him to the phone. Setting his coffee down,he did as he was told. The screen flared to life, the image of the happy couple. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing on here.”
“The photos,” Reyes told him. “Look at the photos, man.”
As his partner scrolled through image after horrifying image, Reyes watched Will’s face move from confused to shocked to disgusted. “He did these things to her?” he finally asked.
Reyes handed him the note in answer.
Will read it through the plastic bag, then set it carefully on his desk. He took a deep breath and rubbed his forehead. “Why his car?”
“Think about it,” Reyes began, which is exactly what he had been doing from the post office to the station, the wife’s words—His hideaways will not be obvious—pestering him mile after mile alongside his sister’s. “Right now, we have circumstantial evidence. We have some physical evidence, too, but nothing that concretely puts him on that bridge. Just a fuzzy video that a judge is just as likely to throw out as admit based on insufficiency. If we find one thing that draws a line between these dots, we’ll have him.”
“And you believe that one thing is in his car?” Will asked skeptically.
Reyes cocked a brow. “Where’s the first place he went after forcing her off that bridge?”
“I don’t know. To work?” Will suggested half-heartedly.
“Yes, but how did he get there? He didn’t walk. He didn’t take the bus. That guy has probably never seen the inside of public transportation in his life. His assistant said he came in late that morning because of a flat, and we saw the spare tire on his car. So where was he between the bridge and his office?”
