“Where were you the last two days?”

The Merced Police covered this but she wanted to hear it for herself.

“Here at work. I sell farming equipment. You can call the office.” He leaned forward on the table, narrowing the distance between the two of them, and looked her in the eye. “What you should be asking is where was Jared.”

She didn’t see the harm in answering that question. “He was on location shooting a Western in Lancaster.”

“He’s still responsible.” Cleve leaned back again. “Maybe she ran off with the kids so Jared couldn’t hurt them and I couldn’t get custody.”

“We’re exploring every possibility.”

“What are the others?” he asked.

Eve wasn’t ready to tell him any of that yet and there was still a lot she didn’t know. She glanced at her watch. It could take her longer to get home than it did to get up here. She’d be hitting the city in the middle of the four-hour-long morning “rush hour.”

“I need to get back to Los Angeles and the investigation.” Eve took out her card and slid it across the table to Cleve. “Here’s my contact information. You can call me anytime.”

He picked up her card but didn’t look at it. “You ask a lot of questions but you don’t answer many.”

She left a few dollars on the table, slid out of the booth, and stood up. “It’s an active investigation, Mr. Kenworth. I don’t want to say something now that ends up not being true.”

“That’s why you won’t say if my kids are okay,” he said, waiting for her to argue the point, but she didn’t. “I’ll be in LA by this afternoon. I’ll stay there until you find my kids.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “I’ll call you and let you know where I am when I get there.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Traffic was heavier on the way back but it didn’t make any difference. Drivers saw her flashing lights in the rearview mirror and gave her a wide berth, even in Valencia, where the freeway became a parking lot. The rush-hour drivers came to a dead stop to stare at the columns of smoke coming from a new brush fire in Stevenson Ranch, the flames raging across the parched hills, stoked by low humidity and strong, hot winds from the desert blowing toward the sea. The winds could potentially drive the flames to Malibu, twenty-eight miles away as the crow flies, if they weren’t snuffed in a hurry. It had happened before.

Despite the slowdown in Valencia, she managed to get back to the Lost Hills station shortly after 10:00 a.m. Duncan Pavone, Wally Biddle, and Stan Garvey were in the squad room when Eve arrived and were looking at her work on the dry-erase boards. She took a few granola bars from the box in the back and joined them at the boards, letting her eyes drift over the crime scene photos.

“Glad you could make it,” Duncan said to her, glancing at his watch. “But I can’t blame you for sleeping in. Getting the case up on the board like this must have been a lot of work last night and it’s a good thing you did it. Crockett and Tubbs have been assigned to your task force and this has helped me bring them up to speed.”