“Then do it. This has nothing to do with me.”

“Then why would a friend of Megan’s say that Megan told her not long before she went missing that if anything happened to her, you were the guy responsible?”

Rebecca gasped, her eyes rounding.

“That’s a lie!” James said, and he was on his feet. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but that’s all fucked up.” He leaned across the table, his features tight, a vein popping in his forehead, his lips barely moving, as he said, “I never, ever lifted a finger to her. We’re done here.” And with that, he and Rebecca Travers walked out of the building.

Rivers and Mendoza followed them, and Rivers noted that when Cahill attempted to guide her by the elbow past the front desk, she shook him off. And she made certain she pushed the door open herself.

“You set him up.”

“Maybe.”

“So what do you make of that?” Mendoza said as the glass doors swung shut behind them.

“What’s the old quotation? ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”

Mendoza’s eyes narrowed as she stared through a front window, watching James Cahill drive away, Rebecca Travers in the passenger seat. “And what does it say if she was scorned for her own sister?”

“Nothing good,” he said, watching the taillights fade into the slim stream of traffic. “Nothing good at all.”

* * *

It took James hours to fall asleep at his room at the inn. No way could he have faced his house, where the cops had torn the place up again. After a frosty drive back to the inn, during which Rebecca had barely spoken a word, he’d dropped her off. He’d waited until she’d driven off, then surreptitiously followed her back into town from a distance. From a side street with a view of the Main Street Hotel’s parking lot, he’d watched as she found her usual spot, locked the car, then walked inside the brightly lit hotel.

All the while, as condensation had collected on the inside of the windows of his Explorer, the questions the cops had fired at him in that airless room during the interview had ricocheted through his brain—his gun being found at the murder scene, pictures of Willow in his bed, the insinuations that he was involved in her death and Charity Spritz’s in San Francisco. And how was Jennifer involved—why had Megan’s car been found on her boyfriend’s property? And Sophia—they thought she was related to him?

No—that was just wrong! All of it was wrong!

He’d known he couldn’t sleep in his bed at the house, at least not tonight.