But until Reyes actually saw Guerin again, we wouldn’t know if we’d only postponed the inevitable. If Guerin killing Ubie was still in the works.
Because of this, we kept up the round-the-clock surveillance on Ubie. And why I’d scolded Angel in the psychiatrist’s office. He’d been on Ubie detail for the last few days.
We thought we’d found Guerin a couple of times, but he continued to slip through our fingers. I needed to know if the threat on my uncle’s life had been neutralized or only postponed. And we wouldn’t know that until we found the little snake.
Cookie lowered her head. “I was worried that might be the case. And all I can think of is that he’s lost interest in me. How pathetic am I?”
“On a scale of one to Kanye? You don’t even register. You’re not pathetic. Trust me, I’d know.”
She sniffed. “Yeah?”
“Absolutely. Or you won’t be once you turn your blouse right side out.”
The front door to the office opened, and a tall—very tall—blond guy walked in.
I stood to welcome him to Davidson Investigations when recognition flooded my cells and rushed down my spine like a jolt of electricity.
There are moments in life that leave you stunned. Moments that take your breath away and make you forget your native tongue.
Reyes’s brother walking into the office was one such moment. Not that brother. Not the godly one. The other one. The one that could have been his brother by kidnapping had the people who kidnapped him as a child not handed him over to a monster. That was my suspicion, anyway.
I’d been investigating the Fosters before my world got turned upside down, before I’d ended up, first, living in an abandoned convent for eight months while the bun I’d popped in the oven baked to simple perfection, and after, living in upstate New York for a month under the throes of amnesia because of having to give up said perfect bun.
As far as I could tell, the Fosters panicked when their families got suspicious. That was my best guess, anyway. Why else kidnap a child and then get rid of him weeks later? So, instead of handing Reyes back to his birth family, they sold him to Earl Walker. Or just handed him over. Either way, they gave Reyes to a monster. And not in the supernatural way, either. Earl was a man so evil, so vile, it wafted off him like a toxin.
Cookie and I had yet to figure out if Shawn Foster, the man standing in my office waiting for me to speak to him, was a legitimate adoption or if he, too, had been kidnapped.
“Are you Ms. Davidson?” he asked, his voice low and smooth.
When Cookie had first described Shawn Foster to me, she’d commented on how opposite he was in looks to Reyes. But that applied only to his coloring. Where Reyes was dark, Shawn was light. Literally and celestially. His aura was stunning. Brighter than most. More pure. He had blond hair cropped short and pale skin. But his features were bizarrely similar. Beautiful. Angelic. Very much like Rey’aziel’s. Which would explain why my suspicions shifted into overdrive.
“Yes.” I stepped forward and took his outstretched hand. “Sorry, you just look really familiar.”
“I should,” he said with a grin. “You’ve been investigating me for a while now.”
* * *
We stood in an awkward silence, mostly because it took me a moment to recover from his statement. He knew I’d been investigating him. His parents. Did he know about Reyes? He was younger than Reyes. My age, actually. And from what we found out earlier about him, he was living with his parents again while he went to graduate school at UNM. He was in engineering. And he was still gazing at me, waiting for his statement to sink in.
“Oh, right. Well”—I shot a save me expression to Cookie, who was still busy trying to reset her jaw—“not so much you as … your parents.” I realized too late that investigating his parents could seem worse than investigating him.
“Good,” he said, dropping my hand and acknowledging Cookie with a nod. “Then you’ll have a jump start on my case, should you choose to accept it.”
“Your case?” I asked, gesturing toward my office, which was just past Cookie’s, a.k.a. our reception area.
“Yes. I’d like you to find my real parents.”
I almost tripped, then closed the door, giving Cookie one last holy crap look before it closed completely.
“Please, have a seat.” I offered him the chair across from my desk, then went straight for the Bunn. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He was still standing, checking out the digs. “This is nice.”
“Thanks. My husband recently had it redecorated.”
“Right.” He sat down at last and put a folder he’d been carrying on my desk. “He owns the bar and grill downstairs.”
Was that all he knew? I could only hope at this point. “Yes, he does.”
I’d been having strange encounters with both the living and the dead, with both demons and angels, with poltergeists and the mentally unstable, my entire life, but I could honestly say this rated really close to the top.
I sat across from him and took a sip of liquid courage. “How did you know about the investigation?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. But when I saw you drive by my parents’ house the other day, I remembered seeing you parked down the street about a year ago.”
“You have a great memory.”
“You were there for quite a while.”
Try days. “And that’s unusual because…?”
“You parked. You never got out. You didn’t live in the neighborhood, but you sat down the street for some time.”
“Of course.” Wasn’t he the perceptive one.
“So, the next time you did a drive-by, I took down your license plate and had a friend run it.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Very.”
“And resourceful,” I added.
He lifted a shoulder in modesty.
“What have your parents told you?”
“That my mother was in labor for thirty-six hours. That she eventually had to have a C-section. That she nursed me until I was two.”
“I see.” When we’d looked into the case before, we were almost certain Shawn Foster had been abducted by the Fosters as well, and that they’d gone through a shady adoption agency, one that had only been open a few months and had facilitated only three adoptions, Shawn Foster being one of them. “But you don’t believe them?” I asked. Why would he be here if he did?
“I don’t. For several reasons. And I don’t think you do, either.”
I still had to wonder if he knew anything about Reyes. I gestured toward the file. “May I?”
“Of course.”
He leaned back while I thumbed through the folder he’d brought. It was mainly pictures, notes on inconsistencies in his parents’ stories, statements from relatives who didn’t remember Mrs. Foster ever mentioning the pregnancy to them, and one final slip of paper in the back that pretty much sealed the deal. A DNA test. The Fosters were most definitely not his parents. Not even close.
“Do your parents know you did the DNA test?”
“No.”
“So, you believe you were adopted?”
“Do you?” he challenged.
“What do you mean?”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth in thought, his blue eyes studying me. “You’ve been looking into this for quite some time. I’d like to know why. And what your thoughts are.”
“Mr. Foster—”
“Shawn, please.”
“Shawn, all I have are thoughts without a single shred of evidence to support any of them. I couldn’t possibly divulge my ramblings without proof. It would be very irresponsible.”
“Well, that answers that.”
“What?” I asked as he stood, grabbed the file, and turned to leave. “Wait. That answers what?”
“You’re just like them.”
“Wait, please.”
He swung around and marched toward me until I had little choice but to take a step back. When we were nose to nose, he answered, his voice low, his face flushed. “Lies. Runarounds. It’s all I’ve gotten my whole life, and I’m done. I’ll find out the truth myself, one way or another.”
The anger in his expression, the pain emanating out of him, the glittering wetness between his lashes, cut sharply into my chest. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I’d promised Reyes to stay out of what he considered his business and his business alone. But Shawn had come to me. Surely Reyes would understand.
And, quite frankly, Reyes could bite me. He was my business.
Shawn turned again, but I took hold of his arm. He stopped but didn’t look at me, and I could tell he was embarrassed by his behavior.
“There is a reason I was looking into your case. I have no evidence whatsoever, but I believe you were abducted by the Fosters.”
He must’ve believed the same thing. He registered no surprise at all. “Why do you think that?”
“Because—” I stopped. Took a deep breath. Wondered if I was taking my life into my own hands. I could only be killed by another god. And Reyes was another god.
Oh yeah. He was going to kill me.
“Because,” I continued, opening the bag to let the cat out of it, “because my husband was abducted by them as well.”