“Who was she?” I asked, trying not to sound anxious. “Did she give her name?”
“The tip line’s anonymous. The operator tried to talk the woman into coming in and filing a report, but the woman said Harris threatened to tell her husband they were seeing each other. She said he would ruin her marriage if she ever came forward. Given all the pics on the guy’s phone, it’s likely he’s a serial offender. Who knows how many women might be out there, wanting to get even with a guy like that? I’d thought maybe Theresa was one of them, but she wasn’t in any of the photos on his cell, and with the exception of the networking group they were members of, I can’t find any other common thread connecting her to Harris. If I can’t come up with a motive, the investigation’s dead in the water.”
“I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”
He raked the dark waves of his hair from his eyes, rubbing them as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything. And I wouldn’t have. Except I was unloading all this on Georgia over a few beers last night. I had no idea she even knew Theresa. Then she mentioned your custody case. She said there was no love lost between you and Theresa, and she thought maybe if I asked you, you might know something.”
A cold sliver of unease poked at the edge of my mind. “What are you asking me to do?”
He reached in his pocket and slid his business card over the table toward me. “I know Theresa’s hiding something. If you can help me figure out what it is, maybe I can gather enough evidence to bring her in. And if I’m right, and she was actually involved with Mickler, then it seems to me like that might help you, too.”
“Help me how?”
“If Theresa’s arrested on suspicion of murder, your ex-husband’s attorney would probably advise him to let go of the custody fight.”
“Murder? I thought you said Harris was missing,” I said cautiously.
Nick laced his hands together, leaving the card untouched on the table between us. “He’s been gone more than a week. So has his wife. There’s been no ransom call, and no activity on their accounts. Like I said, I’ve been doing this for a long time.” He let the implication hang in the silence that followed.
I picked up Nick’s business card, trailing a finger over the pointed edges. It would be far too easy to frame Theresa for my own crime and let her take the fall for it. Maybe Theresa did deserve to lose her future husband and family. After all, she’d had no qualms about stealing mine. But no matter how I felt about her, she was going to be Steven’s wife—my children’s stepmother. She might have done a lot of terrible things, but kidnapping Harris wasn’t one of them.
I’d been the one to put Theresa in the spotlight, even if I hadn’t intended to. I’d used her name and worn her clothes. I’d crossed a lot of lines these last two weeks, but if I let Nick arrest her for my mistakes, what kind of monster did that make me?
This. This had to be the line I wasn’t willing to cross. I couldn’t bring Harris back from the dead, but maybe I could keep someone else from paying the price.
I held Nick’s card to my chest. “I’ll do some digging and see what I can find.”
CHAPTER 25
“This was a terrible idea.” Between the flashing lights and screaming kids and blaring video games, I was one Whac-A-Mole away from a migraine. I had made the mistake of letting my sister choose the destination for our monthly lunch date. I’m guessing this animatronic house of horrors appealed to her because it didn’t require her to keep Zach entertained for an hour while he was strapped like a sanitarium patient to a high chair. At least here, we could let him loose to run.
“Driver’s choice,” Georgia reminded me, brushing a grease stain from her shirt with a wad of paper napkins.
“Easy for you to say,” I said absently, checking the time on my phone. Still no messages from Vero. That couldn’t be good. “You’ve got the keys to the getaway vehicle.”
When the van hadn’t started that morning, I’d given Vero my keys and asked her to call her cousin Ramón to have it towed to his shop. On the way home, she was supposed to stop by the bank and take out a loan for the fifteen thousand dollars we were now short to pay back Andrei Borovkov’s wife—or sell the car. She’d opted for the loan. Vero was supposed to then arrange to meet Mrs. Borovkov, gracefully back us out of the deal, and return the advance Irina had paid us. I, for one, would feel much better once the woman’s blood money was out of my house.