“You can’t blame them,” I defended.
He shook his head. “What I’m saying is, that’s their damage. And they’ve been embroiled in that damage for a really long time. All of them, hanging on to it. So it stands to reason with what happened to Alice, that would be Lana’s go to. We’ve looked at everyone who has anything to do with Dale, Audrey, Will, Alice or Sarah, which sent us looking at everyone who had anything to do with those players. Unless I’m losing my touch, there’s no one in that mix who would drive all the way to Berkeley to snatch a college freshman and drag her back to Washington to kill her, roll her in plastic and leave her in a lake.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, knowing he saw Alice, knowing how deeply he investigated that, knowing he saw Malorie, knowing he just listened to all I said about Lana and that lot, and last, knowing he’d spent hours with those letters, I asked, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t wanna say what I think.”
“Say it anyway.”
“Right, then, you don’t wanna hear what I think.”
I leaned to him and grabbed his hand.
“Bohannan, I’m not just here for my sage wisdom on how to valiantly and highly successfully raise teenage girls.”
His lips tipped up, but his head dropped down, and he watched himself as he turned my hand in his.
What he didn’t do was tell me.
I was about to prompt him when, abruptly, his head came up.
“When you saw that guy out your window, and you texted us, what was your first thought?”
I sensed this was a very important question, but I felt the answer was obvious.
“That he shouldn’t be there.”
“You were surprised when we thought it was about you. A fan or some photographer,” he noted.
That needle bomb exploded again, piercing my skin everywhere from the small of my back to up over my scalp.
“You’d seen him seconds, who did you think he was?” Bohannan pressed.
“Alice’s killer,” I whispered.
“Why?”
“Needle bomb.”
“What?”
“It just happened again. Just now. It starts at my lower back, but it feels like, in a wave, thousands of needles are being jabbed in, from my back all the way up over my head.”
“Have you ever felt that before?”
I shook my head, but then clenched his hand.
“Mom had a man friend I didn’t like. I was there, in the house, when she told him about me, when before, she’d kept the fact she had a kid from him, and he lost it. Shouting at her. I came out of my room and looked at him, he looked at me, and it wasn’t as intense, but it happened then. I was probably, I don’t know, eleven.”
“You see him again?”
I shook my head.
Bohannan didn’t say anything.
Now I was clutching his hand. “Do you still think this is about me?”
“No, baby,” he said quietly.
He then took in a big breath.
And he held my eyes when he said, “I think it’s about me.”
Thirty-Seven
You Pay Attention
“Explain,” I demanded.
“You like me.”
“Yes.”
“A lot.”
I gave him a look.
He smiled, but he didn’t mean it. He was trying to inject levity.
I wasn’t feeling like being leavened.
“You’re not tight with your mom.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“But she’s your mom.”
“Yes, Cade, just tell me,” I snapped, impatient.
“She’s your mom, and you were eleven and you needed her, you probably felt something for her, if only because she was what you had. And this guy shouting at her was a threat to her.”
Now I was following.
And my skin started prickling.
Bohannan explained it anyway.
“You saw that guy out your window, heading to my home, you like me, you sensed a threat…to me. And you pay attention. You can read people. And we aren’t sure, but we think you were right.”
“Oh my God.”
“So, baby,” he scooted closer, and held my hand tight, “what I think is, this isn’t about Audrey or Alice or Malorie or Lana, or Bobby and Dale being cheating assholes who didn’t know how to talk to their wives about things they wanted in bed. It’s about me. He’s calling me out. He’s testing me. And that means…”
Oh God.
Oh dear God.
“There’s not going to be a pattern. There’s not a profile. Malorie being vaguely connected to Alice is a red herring. It’s to lead me off track when there isn’t a track. The next person could be anybody. Because this is him versus me.”
Thirty-Eight
Catastrophic
If you have an abundance of it, as a parent, you strategize the real estate of your house very carefully.
Even before Bohannan really kissed me, I understood why Grace and he put the boys in the basement, and Celeste’s room was all the way down the hall, to the front of the house, whereas Bohannan’s was at the opposite corner in the back.
Warren and I had not lasted long after Fenn was born.
Angelo and I were married for almost eleven years, and we had Camille right away, because I wanted my kids to be born close together and have every opportunity to build that brand of sibling camaraderie (fortunately, in this, I succeeded, though truthfully, they did it).
Me not having sex did not mean I wasn’t sexual. I gave myself orgasms regularly and had what I would estimate was an above-average, very healthy sex drive.
Angelo was a self-professed sex addict, and perhaps this was a thing (and I’d done research on it not only because of how it affected my life, but possibly using it in books, and I still thought it was a cop-out, but I say that with the caveat that I have a block to it, because it might exist as a bona fide psychological condition, but Angelo had used it in an attempt to keep me).
In other words, Angelo and I had sex all the time.
So we made very good use of baby monitors and our real estate.
This was on my mind as I was standing in my jammies, brushing my teeth in Bohannan’s bathroom.
It wasn’t the only thing on my mind, which was understandably cluttered.
After the bombshell Bohannan dropped in his office, as I fought hyperventilating, he explained that this was not outside the norm. In fact, it had been one of the factors that led to him searching for someplace out of the way and safe for him and his family.
He’d been fulfilled by his work with the FBI, and as such, wanted to keep his name out of the high-profile cases. But the media tipped it, and investigative journalists-cum-authors pushed it, and he was outed.
And when you get that kind of reputation, it can detrimentally affect your work.
An example of which, it could trigger disturbed people to play cat and mouse with you.
“When I quit the Bureau, and we moved here, I installed the fence and gate. And I don’t have cameras and sensors around the property just because I want privacy for my family,” he explained.