Cut Too Deep(55)

“How?” she interrupted. “Did the information come from the garage?”

“Oh no. A traffic cop saw you broken down on the freeway. He’d taken a note of your license plate as a hazard, but was heading south. By the time he’d taken the ramp off to head back up your side of the road, you’d already been towed. Lucky for me, he logged the report anyway.”

A sense of dread settled inside her. She felt as if all of this was somehow inevitable. As if every time she’d gotten on the road and taken a different turn, hoping he would never trace her, had always been meant to lead to this moment.

Her voice was cold. “Yeah, lucky.”

“So it didn’t take much for me to figure out which town you were most likely to end up at, and which garage. What I struggled to figure out was where you were staying. By the time I caught up to you, the only motel in town said you’d already left, but your car was still here. Then I hit the jackpot because someone ordered a whole heap of gaming equipment to a certain Arlington address using your credit card.”

Gaming!

“Mikey,” she said under her breath. “Damn him.”

So Ryker hadn’t been the one who’d gone through her things. It had been Mikey all along, even though he’d denied it. He must have used her credit card to buy what he’d wanted, figuring she’d be long gone by the time the items turned up at his house, then he’d just put the credit card back where he’d found it, not knowing that she would figure out someone had been through her things the moment she’d seen them. No wonder the boy had acted guilty, and that he’d wanted Jenna gone sooner rather than later. He hadn’t hated her, or been jealous of the time Ryker was spending with her. Instead, he’d just been nervous about his order turning up before Jenna had moved on and Ryker hadn’t known how to get hold of her again.

“So that was you in the house that night?” she said, putting the pieces of the last few days together in her mind. “And did you kill all those poor birds?”

He laughed. “That was fun, watching you freak out like that.” His face grew serious and he lifted a finger to wag in her face. “But don’t you think I didn’t put a lot of time and effort into catching all those damned sparrows, ’cause I did. I used glue traps meant for mice, and a whole heap of bird seed.”

“Sick bastard,” she muttered. She hated to think of those poor little birds all stuck and struggling, only for Garrett to come along and crush them in his fists. A few birds seemed a stupid thing to be upset about when Sam lay dead right behind her, but she couldn’t help it. She remembered the first bird at the motel.

“You didn’t find any more wrens, then?” she asked him.

Genuine puzzlement crossed his face. “Huh?”

She shrugged and gave her head a brief shake. “Never mind.” So the first one hadn’t been him after all. Just a coincidence, she guessed, probably like the bang against her door that night at the motel. She’d been right to sense he was near, but not everything that had happened had been down to him.

Something occurred to her.

“How did you kill Stephen Francis and be here, stalking me, at the same time?”

“Now, now, Jenna, sweetheart.” He put an edge on the last word to make it sound like a curse. “I was never stalking you. I just wanted to catch up with an old girlfriend, that’s all.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Perhaps. But here’s the thing—I didn’t kill Stephen Francis.”

“What? So you’re not responsible for his death?”

“I never said that, did I? Being in jail has its advantages. The good thing about being in jail is the number of great contacts you make while you’re inside. Turns out, if you know the right people, you can get just about anything—fake IDs, stolen cars, illegal weapons. It opened up a whole new world to me. I discovered just how useful my set of skills is in a jail setting. You wouldn’t believe how many men in there are desperate to track down women who once claimed to love them, and then abandoned them as soon as they were put inside, just as you did, Jenna! So many wives and girlfriends, often with the man’s babies with them, taking them away as if they think they have any right,” he banged his fist down on the counter behind her, making her jump, “to deny a man to see his own child. That’s what the matter is with you fucking bitches. You think you have the right to take whatever you want and screw the man who gave it to you.”

He seemed to remember himself, and gave a short, sharp sniff and a shake like someone had just walked over his grave. “Anyway, you’re getting me off course. My point is that people with certain talents are able to barter with those talents when they’re inside, for favors that can be completed once they’ve made it to the outside again. So I agreed to find some bitches for some people, and in return, they killed Stephen Francis for me.”