“Yeah.”
“And Bob sent Wayne and Bruce to that house last night to bring Frank in.” She paused. “Does that mean Bob knew Frank was hiding there all along?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. When we told him Frank was missing, he looked genuinely blindsided. And pissed off.”
She stared out the windshield for a long moment. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed.
“You calling Bob?”
She nodded. Waited. Tried again. And again. “Not answering.” She lowered the phone. “I’ll try the station.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
She cocked her head. “Ringing the station?”
“Sapphire …” I kept my voice even. “Bob is a crooked cop. I think you know that now as well as I do. But what about everyone else at the station? Can you trust them?”
She looked at me for a moment. Something moved across her face that I couldn’t quite read. Then she pressed dial. “Nate. It’s Sapphire. Where’s Bob?”
A pause.
“Did he say where he was going?” She shook her head at me. “Has anyone heard from him since he left?”
Another pause.
“Nothing. Okay. If he comes in, get him to call me the second he’s through the door. And, Nate,” her voice dropped slightly, “keep this between us. I don’t want him to think I’m checking up on him.”
A small silence stretched on the other end.
“Yeah. Sure. Will do.”
She ended the call. She hadn’t mentioned the house in Winton. Hadn’t mentioned William Branson. Hadn’t told Nate where we were headed.
I couldn’t decide if that was because she didn’t trust Nate, or because she wasn’t sure how much she should say.
She slid the phone into her jacket pocket, reached up, and gripped the grab rail above her head. Her knuckles went white. She sat like that for a long time, not looking at me, not looking at the country rolling beneath us.
Twenty minutes ago, she’d told me she never gave up. But now, she might be questioning what she was up against. She’d had four years to build her picture of Bob Ackerman. I’d had my whole life to build mine of Frank. I knew exactly what it felt like when that picture shattered into pieces.
I kept my eyes forward and let her have a moment.
The country below us shifted slowly from red dirt to scrubby grass. The first lonely fences appeared. A water tank on a rise. A gate left open on a dirt road going nowhere in particular. A tractor crawling its slow line along a stretch of paddock, raising a thin trail of dust behind it. The Outback, beginning its reluctant crawl toward town.
I didn’t know what was waiting for us at that house in Winton. Neither did Sapphire. But in the last hour, we’d stopped being a cop with a job and a pissed-off rancher she was using as a chauffeur.
We were just two people headed to the same place for the same reason.
Whatever we found there, we were going to find it together.
I told myself I was just doing what any decent bloke would do for a woman walking into a situation without backup.
It was a hell of a lot more than that, and I knew it.
Winton came up under us, a town the color of dust and tin, scattered along a main street that ran east-west with paddocks gone yellow on every side. The afternoon sun was dropping toward the western horizon, and the shadows were stretching long. The entire place looked half-asleep the way Outback towns did on a weekday afternoon when nobody needed to be outside.
Sapphire had the address on her phone. “That side of town.” She pointed. “In the back streets near the showgrounds.”
“Got it.”
