Stiles laughed and pulled me to his chest for a quick hug. “How did you figure it out, anyway?”
I couldn’t wait to tell my sister Stevie, a crime-solving expert, that I’d actually figured out a crime. “It was a combo pack of whammies. That University of Virginia thing was sticking to me like glue, but then I remembered that was because Dean Maverick had mentioned it’s where he got his law degree. So at first I thought it was him, you know, creating a crime to cash in on some lawsuits.”
“But?” Stiles asked, his eyebrows raised as he tightened the blanket around me.
“But while he’s a total tool, the talking-funny thing and the smell of cigarette smoke didn’t jive with him. Though, the crease in his pants sure fit. He does like a nice cheap suit.”
Stiles brow furrowed. “Still don’t know where you’re going with this, Hal.”
“Talking funny was what made me check Westcott Morgan’s page on Facebook. He’s a writer. They know all sorts of words and phrases unique to other countries, right?”
“Right…”
I shrugged. “He called me m’lady when we first met, and used the words ’tis I when he introduced himself. That was what made me suspicious, but when I got to his page, there was a picture of him at his friend’s wedding the night of Gable’s murder—and he had on a suit with creased pants and a cigarette in his hand. Lots of people smoke when they’re stressed, right? And I’d suppose he was pretty stressed after kidnapping three women and holding them hostage, but he was probably especially stressed when he went to get that SD card, and in the process of moving Kerry so he could dump her and look like a hero, she got away.”
Stiles blew out a long breath and rubbed his hands together. “I still don’t know how the heck she survived out here in the bitter cold for two days.”
I shivered, so grateful she had. “Me neither, but miracles happen all the time, Stiles. All the time.”
He gave me a light nudge. “That’s fair. Is there more I should know? You know, in case someone asks me how you figured this out?”
“Well, coincidence would have it that Westcott went to the University of Virginia, too, and he’s pretty skilled at taekwondo, which explains what Officer Little said about the guy who attacked Uncle Monty.”
A look of realization came over Stiles’s face. “Ohhh, he said he fought like an amped-up ninja, right? He couldn’t stop talking about how the department should pay for us to have classes in martial arts.”
“Well,” I teased, “he did get away…”
Stiles paused for a second and then he pulled his phone from his pocket and said, “So lover boy’s blowing up my phone right now, worried sick about you. I say we call it a night, and get you back to him before he blows a gasket next.”
My heart smiled at that. Right there in my chest.
Chuckling, I asked, “Do you think the officers need anything else for tonight, because I feel like poop and they look like they have their hands full with Westcott and his carrying on about Jason Momoa.”
“Um, yeah, could you fix that so he forgets, because you’re my best friend and everyone in the department knows it. They’re going to start asking questions. And while you’re at it, fix the girls’ memories, too.”
I snapped my fingers, the warmth of my magic surging through my veins. “There. All done. But I have one last question for you.”
“That is?”
“How am I supposed to explain how I got us out of those shackles?”
He grinned. “Bobby pins, Kitten. Lots of bobby pins.”
Epilogue
Three Days Later
“Oooh, yours is really nice, Hobbs,” I complimented. “For a boy from Texas, you’re all right.”
He grinned his devastatingly handsome grin. “I admit, it’s a pretty good one.”
We were lying side by side on the ground in the snow, beneath the big oak tree in my backyard, covered in Christmas lights at ten o’clock at night, staring at the stars and making snow angels and laughing like silly teenagers.
I was feeling much better, and the knock to my head from Westcott Morgan didn’t hurt so much anymore, though I did still have an ugly knot.
My Uncle Monty was due out of the hospital at the end of the week, and Uncle Darling had decided to extend their stay another couple of days so we could baby Monty and give him all the love he so deserved.
Hobbs stopped moving his arms and looked over at me. “So how was Kerry today?”
I sighed. There was a lot of trauma there. Trauma that would take time to heal, no doubt. “She’s better. Still shaky, but better.”
Kerry had asked to see me when she found out I was the person who’d stayed with her in the ambulance, and I’d agreed.
When I first saw her, thin and pale but with a semi-smile, I almost burst into tears, I was so glad she was awake. When she told me the chilling story of how she’d met Westcott Morgan, when she’d relayed how he’d lured her in, I could do nothing but be there for her in silent horror.
“Did she tell you how she met Westcott?”
“At a coffee shop in Chester Bay. They’d been dating about a week before he kidnapped her. But she didn’t know it was him who’d grabbed her, by the way. He wore a Halloween mask and he injected her with a mild sedative.”
Hobbs’s lips thinned. “I don’t understand what he was going to do with her. Why did he take her from the shed in the first place?”
“Well, from what Stiles said, by the time he took Kerry, he was already feeling the weight of what he’d done. The snowball effect of having to keep these women alive and fed and keep himself out of trouble was getting to be a lot. He was getting scared. Things got really out of hand when my uncle saw him. He still doesn’t remember that night, but of course, Westcott didn’t know that.”
Uncle Monty, when showed Westcott’s picture, couldn’t remember him at all.
“So he was going to get rid of her. That’s why she was in the trunk of the car that night, but they were caught on camera, and that’s why he needed the SD card.”
I nodded my head. “That was the plan. He didn’t want to kill her, according to his statement. He just wanted to get rid of her so he was in the clear. So he roughed her up, drugged her, and threw her in the trunk. He was going to do the same thing with Jasmine and Lisa. Like I said, I think what really happened was, he got in too deep and he couldn’t get back out. So his solution was to ditch them and run, but he knew when Kerry escaped, the night he planned to dump her somewhere off the interstate, that his image would be on that SD card.”
Hobbs sighed, folding his hands over his flat belly. “So he went back to get it, so there’d be no evidence; got caught up with Gable, who he didn’t expect to pull a shotgun on him; got into a fight, managed to get the gun, and shot him?”
I flapped my arms in the cold snow. “And knocked Uncle Monty out cold—but not before Gable managed to pull off his mask. Uh-huh. That’s how it went down.”
“Remember you mentioned Anna said Gable seemed agitated and she thought he was drinking again, but he didn’t smell like alcohol? Do you think he saw something the night Kerry escaped?”