Milo’s face grew hard. “It was later, you remember, after the meeting where Selma told us about her daughters going missing?” An earnest look crossed his face, but of course she still didn’t trust him. “You went to dinner, I think, or out for drinks with Tanisha and Selma after the meeting and Jacob, he was waiting for you by your car.”

Now she got it. Milo was mixed up. That was it. Or he got Jase’s name wrong. “His name isn’t Jacob.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “He’s a reporter. Jason Bridges.”

But Milo’s face had changed. Any confusion in his expression had been chased away by anger. “What he is, Brianna, is a liar. His name is Bridges, yeah, but he’s Jacob and he’s a murdering son of a bitch. He killed Myra.”

He drove as if Lucifer himself was on his tail, taking corners too fast, putting Myra’s Ford through its paces, and all the while he was on his cell phone, listening to Myra berate him, reminding him over and over again that he’d failed. He’d left the city in a rush and now was flying toward the cabin, fields and farmland flashing by.

“You’re out of options. You need to kill her.” Myra’s disappointed voice had been cold. Calculating. As if she’d just stepped out of the grave. But insistent, so much so that he heard it even when he wasn’t on the phone with her.

He’d failed. He knew it now. Actually he’d known it the instant he’d missed his second shot and the pickup had sped out of range. He’d made the mistake of thinking he could fix things, that he could still hunt Zoe down, but had realized that returning to New Orleans had been a mistake.

He’d messed up, bungled the plan big-time, and Myra, that bitch, wasn’t going to let him forget it. He remembered the night he’d nearly killed her, how he’d wrapped his fingers around her thin throat and squeezed, listening to her squawk and gasp, watching her eyes bulge first in disbelief and then in terror.

She’d cheated on him and he’d caught her and confronted her and killed her. Snapped her lying, cheating neck the minute she’d turned twenty-one. Myra with her blood-red lipstick so much like the ribbons that tied his mother’s hair. And those red teddies with their seductive garters, again reminding him of Mother’s damned ribbons. The two women he’d loved had both been bitches and he’d taken care of them, hadn’t he? He’d shown Myra. Shown Mother. Shown both of those lying sluts. His mother should never have left his father and Myra, God, she’d spread her legs so easily for another man . . . She’d deserved to die!