Cain reached over, picked up the photo, and said, “Well, I guess I have to find him my way then.”
Immediately she turned and cried out in alarm, “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll bring him back to this town. We don’t want him here,” she said, her stress evident.
He slowed down. “Is he that bad?”
She nodded. “He would shoot you as soon as look at you.”
“A lot of men are like that in the world,” he said, his voice hard.
The old man looked at him, a tremor evident in his hands and his lips as he spoke. “Please, if you contact him, leave our home.”
“Do you think he’ll come after you?”
“Yes, of course he will,” Pedro said. “No one is safe if he is around. They’re both bad, two peas in a pod really, but Tristan? He’s the worst.”
And, with that, Migi got up and left the room.
The old man slowly stood. “She called the cops on Tristan once, way back when,” he said. “He was bad news back then, but he’s really ugly now. He’s always threatened to come back to take her out. So she steers clear of him.”
“What would be his reason to go after her?”
“She called the cops on him,” he said. “The same reason he killed cats as a teenager. Just because he can.”
Cain nodded slowly. “Got it,” he said. “At the same time, it might just give him a reason to come back and have a second chance.”
“He doesn’t need a reason. He would do it just for fun,” the old man said. “Please don’t bring him here.”
At that, Cain said, “In that case,” he said, “we’ll find another place to stay.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “We don’t need this kind of trouble.”
“The trouble was here long before we came,” he said. “It always has been.”
“That’s true, but now you are stirring up stuff that will hurt Migi.”
“Did she ever do anything to hurt him?”
“Except for calling the cops, no,” he said, “but even that was too much for this asshole.”
“Well, we’ll see about it in the morning.” And he walked back upstairs.
He knew that, from somewhere inside the house, Migi was watching him. He didn’t know where, but the layout was such that there were likely little hiding spots for her to check out her guests because she was just that kind of person. But it was obvious that she was legitimately spooked. Now he wondered if anybody would get any sleep in this house tonight.
As he walked back into their rooms, he heard Eton on the phone with Ice. By the time the call was over, Ice was totally up to speed. Unfortunately she also didn’t have any good news on Bullard. Cain bit down his disappointment on that. His team was out searching. Her team was out searching. For all he knew an entire army had been mobilized. Since Terkel had confirmed that Bullard was still alive, then Ice would dive under every wave to find him.
Terkel was rarely wrong. Still everyone had to be wrong sometime. Maybe this was the time. But Cain sure as hell hoped not.
Just then Eton said, “Some weird undercurrents are going on in this town.”
“They’re really spooked downstairs,” Cain said. “They’ve asked us to leave, if we contact Tristan. They’re afraid of a certain amount of retaliation.”
Eton looked at him in surprise. “For what?”
Cain quickly explained what Tristan was like growing up and how Migi had called the cops on him.
“And he still threatens her?” Eton asked.
“What they saw when he was a teenager was a total disregard for life, torturing animals and such. And, when he came back years later as a man, he mobilized all the younger toughs into his own little gangsters.”
“Well, we don’t have to stay here and make them uncomfortable. We can gather all the information we can get tonight and will pull out early tomorrow.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Cain said. “They’ll be happy enough to see us go.” He looked around at the paperwork. “You learn anything new?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not so far. Strange that Petra isn’t here yet.”
Cain stopped at that. “She should be back by now, shouldn’t she?”
“Except for the fact that she doesn’t live here,” Eton reminded him. “She did say she was coming back though,” he added quietly.
“I know. So I’m wondering what the holdup is.” Cain thought about that and said, “I’ll go back and take a look.”
Chapter 6
“You think that’s wise?” Eton asked Cain.
“Maybe not, but I don’t feel like I can leave her to deal with all this alone. And we don’t know who that shooter was after.” The more he thought about it, the darker his soul felt. “I don’t like anything about this now,” he said. “I’m gone.”
With that, he raced from the bed-and-breakfast and headed back to the crime scene. What he really wanted to know was if she was okay. But, in his heart, he realized things were not only not okay but that something seriously wrong was going on.
*
Petra had been sitting on the step beside the old man, as the cops came and went. Several came to talk to her a number of times.
They’d asked her about the two men; she told them to go to the bed-and-breakfast. One had already been dispatched in that direction. She just shrugged, knowing the men could hold their own. The fact of the matter was that, if they hadn’t gone into that bedroom, her sister still wouldn’t have been found. She just couldn’t believe her sister had been lying here dead for all this time, for months. They didn’t even know how long yet.
The cops had asked her several questions about it, and she was hard-pressed to come up with actual dates when she’d last heard from her sister. But then even that was blurred. When was the last time she heard from her via phone? She didn’t know. And, no, she had no idea what happened to the child. Her sister had threatened to keep it and then, in the next breath, had threatened to abort it.
Petra never did get any answers, but to think of her sister lying up there with a bullet in her forehead, having been there for several months, was just beyond anything she could comprehend. And to know that this old man beside her had known. She just shook her head and buried her face in her hands.
When she heard the whispered words from beside her, she finally came out of it and stared at Morgan in shock. “You’re sorry?” she asked in confounded disbelief. “You’ve let somebody lie there in that condition for God-only-knows how long.”
“Four months,” he said. “Four months and twelve days.”
That was the first inkling she had as to how much it had cost him too. She groaned. “And you seriously couldn’t tell anyone?”
He shook his head. “Chico told me what he’d do to me.”
“And it’s quite possible he would have carried out his threats,” she said, “but he’s gone now.”
“Good,” he said sadly. “He should never have been born.”