Identity Crisis(82)

She needed to tell her father about this. He would know what to do. Daddy’s little girl. She stared down at the email and shivered. He had researched her, then. If he knew her father, he had researched her. He hadn’t just picked some random reporter from the crowd. He had chosen her specifically. Her hand was shaking so bad that she dropped her iPhone, and it skittered across the floor of the motorhome. ‘Bastard,’ she said beneath her breath. Daddy’s little soldier. They’d called her that in school, teased her mercilessly. He couldn’t have actually known about that. How could he have reduced her to this in just one short text?

She scrambled to pick up the phone. When she could get her fingers to stop shaking enough to cooperate, she texted.

Where are you?

The response was almost instant.

Never far, Carla. Never far. Didn’t you think I’d check up on you to see how you were doing?

‘Jesus!’ She caught her breath with a little sob, and looked frantically out the windows of the motorhome, but there was a jumble of people. Lots of them now leaving after Tess’s little appeal to the mob. He could be anywhere. He could be anyone. He could be a she, though she was pretty sure he wasn’t.

Why are you doing this? She forced her fingers to type.

Because Tess is a lie. Tess isn’t who you think, Carla. Tess isn’t who anyone thinks, and she should pay for her slutty ways.

She gulped the dregs of a cup of instant coffee she’d made just before Tess and friends had spoken to the press then she texted again.

Tell me. Tell me who Tess is, then, and how do you know?

This time there was no response. She waited for what felt like an eternity, and when she was pretty sure he was done playing with her, she stood on legs now a little bit more steady and shoved the door to the motorhome open. She could see Mike Pittman standing on the sidewalk in front of Thorne’s house, typing frantically onto his iPhone. He gave her an absent nod when she came to stand by him.

‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’ she asked.

He offered a bored grunt. ‘You’ve been standing here in the same crowd of loony-tunes I have, Flannery. If I’d seen anyone suspicious, how the hell would I have known?’

The man was right there, she thought. She stood staring at the front door of the house, and for a second she was tempted just to march right up there, knock on the door and force the issue. For a second.

Thirty minutes later, they were all four tucked neatly into the back of the Pneuma Inc. limo with Garrett and Kendra facing Dee and Ellis.

Kendra had been the ice queen since Don’s phone call with the news of more emails from Razor Sharp. Frankly, under the circumstances that worried Garrett a lot more than her hyperventilating or losing her breakfast. He knew she couldn’t have completely shaken off all of those feelings, all those memories every email from that bastard must bring back to her, and yet she seemed to have shut it all away. How could anyone have gone through what she had and not taken it all badly? And yet she was cool, distant.

Across the seat from him, Garrett could feel his brother studying him over the top of his glasses like he always did when he was about to ask a question Garrett was sure he didn’t want to be asked. ‘What?’ he said.

Ellis smiled his slow, lazy smile, the one that seemed much more freely given since Dee came into his life. ‘Just worried about you, bro. That’s all,’ he said. ‘They were pretty rough on you out there.’

Garrett shrugged. ‘I’m fine. That was nothing I haven’t had to handle before.’

‘And you handled it well,’ Kendra said. ‘I didn’t get the chance to tell you that after we talked to the press.’

‘I have no doubt he did,’ Ellis said. ‘Like he always does. Needlessly.’

Garrett bristled. ‘I really do appreciate your concern, but I don’t really need this lecture again, Ellis. Not right now.’

‘He’s right, though,’ Kendra said.

Across the seat, Dee still held Kendra’s hand in a grip that could have never been misconstrued for anything other than fiercely protective. Garrett was amazed there wasn’t a broken finger or two. And he felt a huge sense of relief when the look Dee offered him was warm and empathetic, so much more than he deserved, but then Dee had always given him so much more than he deserved. God, he could understand why his brother loved the woman. She was so good for him. What the two of them shared was the very essence of what he tried to capture in Tess’s novels, what he was certain every person longed for down deep. He did. He longed for it so badly that at times the ache felt as though it would rip him apart – to have come so close so often, to have almost been there. He studied Kendra out of the corner of his eye. What had happened that she had so shut out even that longing, something that seemed so basic to the human psyche?