“So he just jilted her.” Chloe Hales spoke up for the first time, her voice unnaturally steady.

Miranda looked at her. “Sisters talk,” she said quietly. “Did Megan say anything to you, Chloe? Was there anyone in her life she was . . . uneasy about?”

The teenager’s brows knit over bright blue eyes that remained fixed on her coffee mug. “What do you mean?”

“Just that. We have some reason to believe that Megan was killed by someone who knew her. Perhaps knew her well, or believed he did.”

“Believed he did?”

Miranda glanced at her husband, then said, “He may have been an . . . admirer. Watching her but not able to get up the courage to actually interact with her. Or he could have been a friend, one she may have confided in without any romantic interest.”

“Or?”

Miranda studied the girl for a moment. “Or . . . it might have been someone she turned to after Paul left. All those weeks of everyone around her knowing she’d been jilted, maybe feeling sorry for her. The day she’d planned for her wedding getting closer and closer. That had to be rough. Painful. It would have been natural to turn to someone else, another man, for comfort. Did she, Chloe?”

“She never would have cheated on Paul.”

“But after Paul ran off with someone else? That wouldn’t have been cheating.”

“She didn’t say anything to me about that,” Chloe muttered, still frowning and staring at her mug.

Frank Hales looked at his daughter, surprise and something else crossing his strong features. “Chloe? If you know something, you have to tell us.”

“She didn’t talk to me,” Chloe repeated.

Bishop said quietly, “But you noticed something, didn’t you, Chloe? Or maybe someone else noticed something, saw something, and told you about it?”

There was a long silence, and then Chloe half shook her head, but said, “Gabby Douglas was always jealous of Megan. Always. She couldn’t wait to say nasty things about Megan after Paul ran off with his cousin.”

“What did she tell you?”

Chloe hesitated again, then looked up, finally, and met Bishop’s steady gaze. “She said she’d seen Megan sneaking around. She said . . . that Megan must not have loved Paul after all, because she didn’t waste much time crawling into bed with someone else. And she said it was worse than being with a distant member of his own family like Paul had.”

“How was it worse?”

Chloe bit her lip.

Miranda said gently, “We need to know, Chloe. How was it worse than being with a distant member of his own family? Who was Megan seeing before she disappeared?”

“Danny Dryden,” Chloe whispered. “He’s . . . he’s one of our cousins. A first cousin.”

—

HOLLIS AND DEMARCO went to the hospital, where Dr. Jill Easton, her assistant, and her colleague Dr. Brady had pulled an all-nighter to tackle the two postmortems.

Though all three looked tired, nobody complained. The two men sat on either side of a metal desk in one corner of the large, sterile morgue, drinking coffee, while Jill joined Hollis and DeMarco next to the remains that lay underneath sheets on two stainless steel tables.