A lake like this one.
He spotted a house on the right. It looked abandoned except for one car sitting in front of it.
Gabrielle’s.
The house was either a log cabin or one of those snap-together facsimiles. Hard to tell from here. Adam carefully padded down the hill, ducking behind trees and shrubbery as he went. He felt foolish, like a kid playing capture the flag or paintball or something. He tried to think of another time in his life when he had done this, when he’d had to sneak up on someone, and his mind had to travel all the way back to the Y summer camp when he was eight.
Adam still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got close to the house, but for a split second, he wished he was armed. He didn’t own a handgun or anything like that. Maybe that was a mistake. His uncle Greg had taken him shooting a few times when he was in his early twenties. He liked it and knew that he could handle a weapon. In hindsight, that would have been the smart play. He was dealing with dangerous people. Killers, even. He reached into his pocket and felt for his phone. Should he call someone? He didn’t know who or even what to say. Johanna would still be on her flight. He could text or call Andy Gribbel or Old Man Rinsky, but what would he tell them?
Where you are, for one thing.
He was about to grab his phone and do just that when he spotted something that made him freeze.
Gabrielle Dunbar stood alone in the clearing. She was staring right at him. He felt the rage build up inside him. He took a step closer, expecting her to run off or say something. She didn’t.
She just stood there and watched him.
“Where’s my wife?” he shouted.
Gabrielle kept staring.
Adam took another step into the clearing. “I said—”
Something smacked him so hard in the back of the head that Adam could actually feel his brain jarring loose from its moorings. He dropped to his knees, seeing stars. Working on pure instinct, Adam somehow managed to turn and look up. A baseball bat was coming down on the top of his skull like an axe. He tried to duck or turn away or at least lift a protective arm.
But it was much too late.
The bat landed with a dull thud, and everything went dark.
Chapter 49
Johanna Griffin was a natural rule follower, so she didn’t turn off the airplane mode on her smartphone until they’d stopped moving on the active runway. The flight attendant made the standard “welcome to Newark where the temperature is” announcement as Johanna’s texts and e-mails loaded up.
Nothing from Adam Price.
The past twenty-four hours had been exhausting. Kimberly had been hysterical. Extracting her horrible story had been painstaking and time-consuming. Johanna had tried to be understanding, but what on God’s green earth had that kid been thinking? Poor Heidi. How had she reacted to the news about her daughter and that horrible website? Johanna thought back to that videotape of Heidi in the Red Lobster parking lot. Heidi’s body language made complete sense now. In a way, Johanna had been watching an assault on that tape. That guy, that goddamn stranger, was pummeling her friend with his words, breaking her heart with his revelations.
Did he comprehend the damage he was wreaking?
So Heidi had gone home after that. She had called Kimberly and gotten her daughter to tell the truth. She had stayed rational and calm, even as she withered away inside. Or maybe Heidi hadn’t withered away. Maybe, because Heidi was the least judgmental person Johanna had ever known, she had dealt with the bad news and was ready to fight back. Who knew? Heidi had comforted her daughter. She had then tried to figure a way of removing her from the terrible mess she had gotten herself into.
And maybe that had gotten her killed.
Johanna still didn’t know what had happened to Heidi, but clearly it was somehow connected to the revelation that her daughter had become a whore—forget the more marketable terms like sugar baby—for three different men. Johanna had started to dig into it, but that would take time. Kimberly didn’t know the men’s real names, which was another wow, but hey, there was a reason they were called johns. Johanna had spoken to the president of the sugar babies website, listened to her rationalizations, and wanted to take a long, hot shower after she hung up. She—yes, in a nice feminist touch, the site was run by a woman—defended her company’s “business arrangements” and her clients’ “right to privacy” and said there was no way she would reveal any information without a court order.
Since the company was located in Massachusetts, that would take time.
Then, after dealing with this crap, the annoyed county homicide cops wanted a full debriefing on Johanna’s renegade trip to New Jersey. This wasn’t about ego for her. She wanted the bastard who killed her friend caught. Period. So she told them everything, including what Kimberly had just told her, and now those guys were getting the court order and putting manpower toward figuring out who the stranger was and what his connection to the murders might be.