The phone in my hand feels like poison. I don’t need to hear any of that. I don’t want to hear it. What Adam Warner feels about me or how he felt about the day he found me is best left unsaid. I set down the phone. Millicent is on my lap, purring and kneading her claws into my thigh. I don’t wince. I’m just too caught up in the phone call. Tears fall. I always wanted to tell Adam Warner that I thought of him as a hero, like something out of a storybook. That I had feelings for him too—feelings that went beyond the fact that he’d saved me.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

LEE

As the days turn into weeks we have less and less to go on with the Warner case. It isn’t for lack of trying. Montrose and I have knocked on every door. Interviewed a dozen people. Followed up on tips upon tips.

Abductions and murder are rare.

A cold trail is common.

Coyle and his red truck remain MIA. A conversation with his sister indicates that he’d been seeing a doctor for treatment of a serious illness—something he hadn’t wanted the trucking firm to know. The reeds on his truck? They grow everywhere. I’d jumped to a conclusion.

The truth is, we need the DNA results back. Calls to the lab in Tacoma don’t make things move faster. In fact, part of me thinks that a tech will put your request at the bottom of the pile if you ask too many times. Everything is a number-one priority. No such thing as a number-two.

It looks like a game, but it isn’t. It’s survival. Gulls circle over Oakland Bay in Shelton and drop oysters and clams on the rocks. They glide overhead, just at the water’s edge, and then they aim and release. A shell falls and smacks a rock, and in an instant—before a crow or another lazy bird cuts in—the gulls drop in the air like yo-yos and land with the softest touch. Over and over they do this. All day. I wonder how birdbrain is even a term. The gulls of the Pacific Northwest are amazingly smart. They know a good way to get those shells open.

Montrose hands me a coffee.

“Thanks,” I say as he takes the spot next to me and we face the water.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks.

It could be many things. None of which I want to discuss.

“Not really,” I say.

“You need to,” he says. “It’s there, bubbling beneath the surface. It’s doing both good and bad things to you, Lee.”

“What’s the good?”