“Good to know.” Tom pushed the cheese plate away, no longer hungry. “I hope Croft is more successful with her search than I’ve been with mine.”

“You’ve been trying to track that kid’s e-mail.”

Tom just looked at him. “Jeff Bunker told you?” Because of course he would have.

“Yeah. It all came out over dinner when his mom and mine teamed up to make sure Zoya and Jeff know never to drive to San Francisco alone again. You weren’t able to track it?”

“Not to the source. I think they’ve pulled their server offline. Or maybe they only hook it up when they want to use it.”

“Before this morning, I’d hoped that they’d gone quiet because DJ was dead.”

“Yeah. Asshole,” Tom muttered. The picture of Liza standing in front of that glass door would not vacate his mind. “How are Mercy and Abigail doing?”

“Abigail is okay but Mercy is wrecked. She held it together for Abigail, but once we were alone, she fell apart. After a month of watching her every move she’d grown a little complacent. Her word, not mine. She knew he’d never give up, but, like the rest of us, she hoped he was dead. She was worried about Liza because of the way she left this afternoon.”

Tom felt his cheeks heat at the question in Rafe’s direct gaze, but there was no way he was going there. Especially when he didn’t understand it himself. “She was upset for a while, but I think her friend helped cheer her up.”

“Her friend?”

“Mike.” The groper. Smug bastard.

“Right.” Rafe shook his head again. “If the e-mail trace is a bust, what else do you have?”

Tom opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I can’t talk about those things.”

Rafe pulled a notepad from his pocket. “Good thing that I can talk about it.”

“What?”

Rafe waved the notepad. “A summary of my own Eden project file.”

“You’re not—”

“Supposed to be working on it. Whatever. If you can’t talk to me, you can listen.”

Tom settled on his stool. “I wondered what you’d been doing for the last month. I figured you wouldn’t sit idle when it came to Mercy’s safety. Hit me.”

EIGHT

ROCKLIN, CALIFORNIA

WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 8:00 P.M.

Mercy dipped her spoon into the carton of rocky road. “Why don’t you just talk to him?”

Liza rolled her very sore eyes. Because as soon as she and Mercy had been alone, Mercy had opened her arms and patted Liza’s back while she cried. “He had a fiancée. Her name was Tory.”

“Oh.” Mercy winced. “Was?”

“She was killed. Murdered, actually. It was a little more than a year ago, when I was still in Afghanistan. He went dark, wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t answer any of my e-mails.”

“A year isn’t all that long, is it?”

“No.” That Liza had lost her own husband wasn’t something she wanted to discuss, even with Mercy. So she added the one fact that would ensure Mercy understood. “She was pregnant.”