Montoya, who’d come a little late to the party, was skeptical. “Whoa. Wait. All these twins? Seriously?” he wondered aloud. “The twin girls who were taken, the mother who’s a twinless twin, and now Bridges having a twin brother he didn’t know about. What’s going on? Are we on some hidden camera show?”

Bentz didn’t have time to argue the facts. There was another girl missing and now, they had a place to start looking. The farmer who brought Zoe Denning into the station was a local who knew the area.

Zoe’s description of the isolated cabin in which she and her sister had been held coupled with Rand Cooligan’s knowledge of the terrain and the spot where he’d found her running through the field had helped. The police had narrowed the possibilities to six tracts that met the description of a small, run-down and isolated shack with a long, possibly quarter-of-a-mile lane and forests bordering the river. Four were dismissed as Cooligan knew the owners.

However, Bentz didn’t think just because the farmer could vouch for the landholders that put them in the clear, so he was dispatching deputies to those parcels. The other two he would personally visit.

“There’s the Shepherd place,” Rand said in the meeting. “Small one-room house, been abandoned for five, maybe six years. Never seen anyone going in or out, and the gate’s padlocked, rusted shut. I know ’cuz me and my boy went hunting that way just last fall.”

“And the other place?” Bentz asked.

“The Tillman place?” Rand shook his head. “The owner, Sigmund Tillman, was an older guy. Oh, gosh, he’s been dead now, what? Twenty years. Left the place to his daughter as I recall.”

“But she doesn’t live there?”

“Nah. And she’s dead, too,” Rand said, thinking hard and nodding. “Murdered. Far as I know they never caught whoever did it.”

“Tillman?” Selma whispered, her eyes rounding. “There’s a man named Tillman in our support group. Milo. His twin sister’s name . . . Oh, God, I should remember this.”

“Myra,” Rand said.

“Okay, we’ll start there.” Bentz looked at Montoya. Another twin? Well, why not? To his partner, he said, “Let’s roll.”

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 31

“Jacob killed your sister?” Brianna repeated, and wondered how far off the rails Milo was. Jason had a brother named Prescott, she knew that, but not one named Jacob. Even if there was a brother who looked identical to Jason, why would he have killed Milo’s sister?

A cold feeling slid down her spine as the words identical to Jason slipped through her mind. Her heart froze. Was it possible? Did he have a twin? Hadn’t Jase said something about his mother leaving after his infant brother had died?

Was it all a lie?