“What?” Nate asked.
“We were being followed. I knew it.”
“Want me to turn around?” But as soon as he said it he shook his head. “They’ll be gone by the time I turn around. Did you get plates?”
“Dark American sedan, no front plates, I couldn’t read the rear plates. Tinted windows. I only saw one person in the car. My sense was ‘male,’ but I didn’t get a good look before he did a one-eighty.”
“Someone is keeping tabs on our investigation,” Nate said. “My money? The detectives.”
“But they can just ask.”
Nate didn’t say anything. Lucy feared he was right, and she didn’t like the idea that they couldn’t trust the local cops.
And if they were tracking Nate and Lucy, why? Did they know they screwed up? Were they trying to fix it … or trying to thwart the FBI? And if so, why?
Or it might not be the detectives at all. It could be someone else tracking the case to find out when and if they found Ricky Albright’s body. When and if they found clues to the killer.
Lucy sent Ash a text message, then said to Nate, “I’m making sure Ash doesn’t go anywhere without backup. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re going to find out.”
Chapter Six
Lucy pulled into her garage and came in through the kitchen door a few minutes after seven thirty. Something smelled amazing—lasagne and garlic bread, she realized a moment later. Her mouth watered. She was exhausted and a bit worried about entertaining Max, but now all she could think about was food. She dropped her bag on the kitchen desk and called out, “Sean, Jess!”
“We’re in the living room,” Sean said from down the hall.
Lucy took a deep breath and mentally prepared herself for Maxine Revere.
Max, a stunning woman with dark-red hair and vivid blue eyes who dominated any room she entered, was seated on the couch. Impeccably dressed, as always. They’d met Max, an investigative crime reporter, in January when Max was looking into the twenty-year cold case murder of Lucy’s nephew. They’d butted heads at first but in the end worked together to take down a killer.
“Hello, Max. Good to see you.”
“Sean said that you had a long day. I won’t stay long.”
“You’ll stay for dinner, though,” Lucy said.
“With that amazing smell? If you kicked me out, I’d request a doggie bag.” Max smiled. She truly was an attractive woman, tall and stately, and had she been more muscular, she would have fit in with Diana Prince and her gang of Amazon women.
“I promised you dinner when you called from the airport,” Sean said. “And we already talked business, so now we can relax. Dinner won’t be too much longer.”
Lucy sat down in the comfy chair, and Sean motioned if she wanted wine. She shook her head. If she drank a glass before dinner she’d fall asleep.
“Dillon said that you weren’t doing a lot of traveling since learning about what happened to your mother,” Lucy said. Her oldest brother, Dillon, was a forensic psychiatrist who had worked with Max on a couple of cases since they met earlier in the year. Both Sean and Dillon had kept in touch since, and through them Lucy learned that Max had uncovered the truth about her mother’s disappearance sixteen years ago and in the process discovered she had a sixteen-year-old half sister.
“That’s true. I don’t want to leave Eve alone in New York. But I may have to, because we’re running low on content. My producer agreed to put the show on hiatus for December, and we have January’s program planned—local New York cold case I’ve been working on until this situation here came up. Ryan’s staying with her while I’m here.”
“I think it’s pretty terrific that you and Eve are getting to know each other,” Lucy said. “It can’t be easy, after everything that happened.” Lucy knew this from experience, as Sean had only discovered he had a son last year, who then lost his mother in July.
“She’s a smart, interesting teenager. I’m a bit perplexed that we get along so well, considering. She’s far more easygoing than I was as a teen. And even with everything that happened to her this year, she’s naturally optimistic.”
Sean glanced at his watch. “Dinner’s just about ready. Give me five minutes.” He called upstairs, “Jess! Kitchen time.”
Jesse ran down the stairs with Bandit, the playful two-year-old golden retriever, on his heels. “Hey, Lucy,” he said as he walked by and followed Sean to the kitchen.
“You met Jesse?” Lucy asked Max.
“Yes, I got here just after Sean returned from Jesse’s soccer practice. Dillon told me what happened over the summer, but without much detail. Sean filled me in on the rest.”
Lucy didn’t know why she was so tense with Max knowing so much about her and her family. Max had promised she wouldn’t write about any of them without their explicit permission.
“Relax, Lucy. My case isn’t even connected to the FBI. I’ll admit, I’ve really enjoyed working with Sean. He’s unusually smart and quite uncanny in how he finds information I’m looking for.”
Lucy couldn’t help but smile. “From you, high praise. Sean hasn’t talked a lot about the case, but he said he was intrigued.”
“In September, Realtor Victoria Mills was stabbed and drowned. One of her business partners, Stanley Grant, confessed shortly thereafter, claimed that Victoria learned he had embezzled money from the company and he killed her in the heat of the moment, came clean a week later because the guilt ate him up.”
“You don’t sound like you believe that.”
“I want to hear it from him directly. There’s a few … well, I don’t want to say yet, but he pled guilty and no one questioned it.”
“Usually if someone pleads guilty, they’re guilty—there are cases of false confessions, but cops are pretty good at weeding those out.”
“His lawyer and the prosecution were working on a plea deal to avoid the death penalty and give him a chance of parole. Then this morning, Grant changed his plea. I wish I was there. Sean developed a contact at the courthouse, who claimed that it was spontaneous. His lawyer quit right then and there—told the court that they didn’t have the time to take on a capital case and his client didn’t inform him of the change. Judges don’t like it when there’s a change of attorney, it can delay everything. He suggested that Grant and his lawyer work it out, but Grant said he didn’t trust his lawyer to have his best interests at heart. In the end, Grant agreed to a public defender and tomorrow they’ll be back in court for a procedural issue. I’m meeting the lawyer tonight.”
“This late?”
“I can be persuasive.”
True, Lucy thought. “How did you become interested in this case? It’s not your usual kind of investigation.” Max specialized in cold cases—cases that the police didn’t have the time or resources to pursue. “Sean said the victim was a family friend.”
“Loosely. I know Victoria’s family, only met Victoria once when I represented my family at her wedding. But her father and my grandfather were friends, and Grover and his wife came out to California several times over the years, including to my grandfather’s funeral.