“It must have been horrible.”
“Yes, it was.”
“But it’s over now. How do you feel?”
“How do you think I feel?” Chelsey replied, her voice like the edge of a knife.
Gavin blinked nervously. He reached out for her hand, but she yanked it away. “I know it will take time for you to get past this. That’s understandable. But you’ll get counseling. Everything will be fine.”
Chelsey kept staring at him. This fraud. This hypocrite. Did he really think she had any interest in his fake sincerity? His sugar-sweet lies?
“I did everything they asked,” Gavin continued, his eyes oddly desperate for her to believe him. “I got the cash. I gave it to them. I followed all of their instructions. The only thing I wanted was to get you back safely. They said they’d tell me where you were.”
“Instead, they left me to die,” Chelsey said.
“I know.”
“Gavin, who is Hink Miller?” she asked.
He hesitated. “You know about him?”
“The police told me.”
He shook his head bitterly. “Hink was a client. I represented him on an assault charge last year. That was all. I haven’t seen him since then.”
“They found part of the ransom money in his house.”
“I heard that, yes.”
“He was murdered. Someone shot him the day after you paid the ransom.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Chelsey threw back the blanket and got out of bed. She swayed a little as she stood, but then she steadied herself.
“Are you sure you should be getting up so soon?” Gavin asked.
“Don’t worry about me.”
She went to their walk-in closet and turned on the light. At the back wall, she reached to a shelf over the hangers and threw several sweaters to the floor. With both hands, she felt around the rear of the shelf. There was nothing there. She returned to the doorway and folded her arms across her chest.
“Where’s your gun?”
Gavin took a long time to answer. Finally, he said, “I don’t know. It’s missing.”
“Missing? It was there a couple of weeks ago. I saw it. The gun and a box of bullets.”
“I went to look for it on Thursday, and it was gone. The kidnapper must have taken it.”
“How would the kidnapper know where we keep the gun?”
His voice rose with a wave of outrage. “What, are you a prosecutor now? Is this some kind of cross-examination? I don’t know how he found it! The house was bugged. He was listening to us for days. One of us must have said something about it.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
“Well, maybe he searched the house.”
“He was there to abduct me, Gavin. Why would he take the time to steal a gun?”
“I have no idea!”
She came and sat next to him on the bed. “Was it you? Did you do this?”
“What?”
“Did you arrange for me to be kidnapped? Did you kill this man Hink? Did you ask him to kill me?”
“Did I—? Are you out of your mind? No!”
“The police seem to think you did.”
“The police are wrong. That’s what they do. They choose an easy suspect, and then they cherry-pick and misconstrue the evidence so that it looks the way they want it to look. I see that with my clients all the time. For God’s sake, Chelsey, I would never do this. You know me.”
“Do I?”
“Of course, you do.”
“The look in your eyes in the hospital,” Chelsey murmured, shaking her head. “You couldn’t believe I was alive. You were certain you would never see me again.”
Gavin banged his fists against his forehead. “You’d been gone for days! I told you, I was terrified! I thought you were dead!”
“Or did you assume Hink had killed me and buried my body? Like you’d paid him to do?”
Her husband shot off the bed. “This is nuts. I’m not going to listen to this.”
He crossed the bedroom, then stopped where he was and turned back to her, his face stricken. He approached the bed and slid to the floor in front of her and put his head in her lap. When he spoke, his voice was muffled.
“I know you’re upset. I don’t blame you. But you have to believe me, I didn’t do this.”
She listened to his labored breathing. After a while, she summoned a smile and reached down and cupped his cheeks with her hands. “All right, Gavin. If you say you’re innocent, then I have to accept that.”
“You believe me? Really?”
“We’ve had our differences over the years, but you’re still my husband.”
“That’s right.”
Chelsey stroked her fingers through his curly hair. She knew he liked it when she did that. “I’m not thinking straight. Plus, I’m starving. I think I’m finally ready to eat something.”
“What can I make for us?” Gavin asked.
“Actually, I’d love pizza. What about Thirsty Pagan?”
“Sure. We can drive over there.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not up for that. I’m not ready to leave the house. Would you go get one for us and bring it back?”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay alone?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“It won’t take long. An hour or so at most.”
“Good.”
He stood up, then bent down and pressed his lips against hers. They were dry and cracked. “We can start over, can’t we?”
“Whatever you say.”
Gavin grabbed socks from his dresser and sat down on the bed to put them on. He slipped his feet into loafers, then disappeared down the hallway to the stairs that led to the lower level. She heard the outside door open and shut, and she went into the hallway and stood beside the front window. A few seconds later, she watched Gavin’s car drive away.
When he was gone, she hurried into his office. His MacBook was on the desk. She knew the password to access his files — she knew all his passwords; he reused the same one over and over with slight variations — and she accessed his desktop screen and loaded the internet browser. She went to Gmail and logged into the private account he kept for his geocaching activities.
There were no secrets between husband and wife.
She stared at the lineup of messages in his in-box. Her eyes flicked down the list of unread emails and stopped when she got to one that had been sent overnight, around two in the morning.
The sender’s email handle was Razrsharp. The subject of the message said:
A new treasure hunt
Chelsey clicked on the message to open it. The email consisted of nothing but two rows of numbers:
46.7104776
92.2194869
GPS coordinates.
She copied the numbers and plugged them into a mapping utility, and the location came back on the west side of the city. When she checked the street view, she found herself staring at a remote section of Skyline Drive in the woods near Spirit Mountain.
Chelsey turned off the computer. She headed for her car.
Serena pulled onto the shoulder of Getchell Road, near a point where a small white cross was dug into the ground. She got out and walked into the weeds and squatted near the cross. There were rosary beads and dirty plastic flowers hanging over the post. A name had been painted on the cross in black, but two years had gone by, and the paint was fading. She could barely make it out.
Jonah Fallon.
It had happened right here. She stood up and looked in both directions down the lonely highway, seeing nothing but endless lines of trees. She’d been in this location once before, when she’d been helping Abel Teitscher scour the forest during the early part of the investigation.
Irony of ironies, she’d been called away from the case to deal with the suicide of Nikki Candis.