She shook her head side to side. “Like impersonating an old man and calling in a stolen truck, or getting yourself arrested for breaking into a house on purpose? What the hell were you thinking?”

Mike reached for his suitcase. “No one here was going to look at Branford, not without probable cause.” He gave the tiniest of smiles. “But if he invited you guys into his house, you’d have to look around. So what did you find?”

Maverick walked toward the exit and opened the door with a chuckle. “You risked B&E charges just to make us look at Branford? You could have spent a year in jail for Caitlin Bergman, maybe more with your record.”

“I had to shake something loose.” He inhaled the fresh air pouring through the opening. “I’ve done time, Jane, and I’ve got enough regrets to fill a thousand photo albums, but I don’t have a lot of friends. Now are you going to tell me what you found or not?”

She lit her cigarette and stepped out into the parking lot. “Nothing.”

A light sprinkling of rain hit his face when he followed her out into the night. “Then why am I outside?”

Maverick walked toward a row of police cruisers. “You can thank your call to Lakshmi Anjale for that one. I don’t know what you said to the girl, but she spent the last few hours logged into Bergman’s financial database. And, as is her style, she called the station every five minutes in the last hour until we took her seriously. Turns out Branford owns the farm behind his house, all through another name tied to his pizza company. Also, it looks like the name Chad Branford is an alias.”

She opened the door of a detective special. “That and Angela Chapman turned up at a nursing home two miles past his place fifteen minutes ago, said she’d last seen Branford chasing your girl through the woods.” She pointed to the passenger side. “You coming?”

Chapter 85

CHAPTER

85

CAITLIN DODGED BRANFORD for as long as she could, dipping in and out of the creek, up one ridge, down another, drawing him a rugged country mile from the road, but she lost the fight when he tackled her trying to climb uphill and lost consciousness shortly after. She woke once to the sound of swearing as he dragged her up a forty-five-degree incline, a welt pulsing on the back of her head.

She woke the second time on the floor of a moving car, in less pain, but with her hands zip-tied behind her, her ankles bound. She saw bench seating behind her, a bucket seat in front.

Branford’s SUV.

The canted view from the side window changed from dark, rain-filled night sky to the white siding of the farmhouse.

She heard him yell from the front, “Not like this.”