to cave in on himself in what was now a familiar pose of defeat. “We pulled a whole bunch of prints off her car – mostly hers, her parents’, and her friends. She gave lots of people rides, apparently. But no fluids or anything like that. No body, no ransom note – no ransom phone call. Every day we don’t find her, it becomes less likely that, when we do, we’ll find her alive. You know that.”
“I do.” Ghost nodded. Stood. “I’ll be in touch. Eden’s going to do some digging.” He paused at the door and glanced back. “Let me know if you hear anything useful.”
Vince refused to make eye contact; stared sullenly at his desk. Finally, he nodded, though.
~*~
“It’ll take time to run the DNA,” Ratchet said a half hour later, back at the clubhouse. “But my lab guy pulled a long, blonde hair off the shirt you found out by the mill. Just based on a look under the microscope, he’s saying it matches samples pulled off Allie Henderson’s hairbrush. DNA should confirm in a few days.”
Ghost nodded. “Eden took a photo of it. She’ll show it to the parents.”
“You know,” Fox mused, “when I decided to move to Tennessee, I wasn’t anticipating ‘getting framed by a high school kid’ to be the sort of problem I’d tackle.”
“You’re not tackling it,” Walsh said. “Your old lady is.”
Fox licked a fingertip and held it up to an imaginary stove, grinning. “See? Give him long enough, and he’ll eventually come up with a good line.”
“Guys,” Ghost said. “Don’t make me ship you off to different chapters.”
He got near-identical unimpressed looks – though they did stop bickering.
“Good,” he told Ratchet. “Keep me posted. Fox: given Eden the greenlight to sit down with Jimmy Connors. You gonna go with her?”
“Yeah, probably.” He stood, and stretched, lazy as a cheetah after a nap, not at all worried about catching his prey: people tended not to get away once Fox put them in the crosshairs. “Might even take the asshole along. Get him some practice handling things like a civilian.”
Walsh snorted. “And just like that, I’m not the least favorite brother anymore. Kind of a relief.”
“The hate’s all one-sided, baby,” Fox said, and leaned in to give his brother an exaggerated, loud kiss on the cheek as he passed.
“Ugh,” Walsh muttered, but his heart didn’t sound in it.
“What’s your read on this?” Ghost asked, seriously, as the front door closed behind Fox. “Do you think Jimmy Connors killed her?”
“And is trying to pin it on us?” Walsh shrugged. “Could be. We make good scapegoats. You blame it on another civilian, and it’s easily proven false. Someone would bother to find out that it’s false in the first place.”
“No one cares if we’re guilty of a particular crime or not,” Ghost said.
“Already guilty in the eyes of the public.”
Ghost sat down on the edge of a table, the soft click of Ratchet’s fingers over his laptop keys almost soothing. “At first, I wanted the graffiti to stop. And then finding the Henderson girl seemed like a good way to build a little public good will. Now I think we have to find her.”
“To keep from looking guilty,” Walsh said, nodding. “Story of our lives.”
~*~
Eden’s favorite part about freelancing was the distinct lack of red tape. Sure, nothing she learned would have been admissible in any kind of court, but she got answers; the pursuit of knowledge was what had drawn her to the force when she was young, and it was the thing that persisted to this day.
“That car up there, the blue one,” she said, lowering her binoculars, and Axelle put the GTO in gear and pulled away from the curb, settling a few car lengths behind their quarry.
Traffic was slow out in front of the school, the lanes clogged with students and parents exiting, a crossing guard in an orange vest directing at the intersection. But Eden wasn’t worried about losing Connors; once Axelle caught sight of someone, there was no outrunning her on four wheels.
Eden sat back, content to wait for the moment.
“What’s our angle here?” Axelle asked, braking for the crossing guard. “Do you want my help questioning him? Or am I just your wheels?”
Eden smiled to herself. “Oh, I’ll want your help. Boys like Jimmy – if I’m correct in assessing someone who was shamed in front of his own party – might shake in their boots when MC presidents roll up, but he’ll be dismissive and condescending with