The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,41

a trap.

“Why’d he kill all those dogs?”

“They’re coyotes,” Tean said. “Look at the tweets.”

“’That bitch deserves to die,’” Jem read, painfully aware of how slowly he did so. “’Somebody kill that bitch, please.’ ‘Somebody get this cunt off my property.’ ‘Wish they made traps for noisy dykes.’ Who the hell is this guy?”

“John Sievers,” Tean said. When Jem glanced at him, Tean shook his head and said, “I don’t know him, but it’s on some of the Facebook and Twitter stuff, and his email address is johnsievers at some personalized domain.”

Jem frowned. “There’s no way Ammon and Kat didn’t come check out her condo when they started looking for her. They had to have seen this stuff.”

“I’ll ask him,” Tean said.

Jem tried again. He tried really, really hard. But he said, “You’ll ask him?”

Tean just frowned and said, “Even if I’m still mad at Ammon, we could use his help.”

“Right.”

“Excuse me?”

Tossing the pages back on the bed, Jem shook his head.

“If you want to say something, just say it,” Tean said.

“I’m trying to be cool about this,” Jem said. “You’re making it really goddamn hard.”

“Why do you need to be cool? I don’t understand. Ammon is the detective investigating her disappearance. We’re trying to help Hannah find her. It makes perfect sense that I’d talk to Ammon and see if we can help each other.”

“Of course it does.”

“You can be a real jerk sometimes.”

“Everybody’s got a talent.”

Tean stared at him, glasses sliding to the end of his nose, his chest rising and falling.

“Glasses,” Jem said quietly.

Tean shoved them back into place and then turned and marched out of the room.

For the next minute, Jem tried to remember Saturday mornings as a kid: Darkwing Duck, Lucky Charms—extra marshmallows picked out of the box, a swimming pool’s amount of milk—and a few quiet hours when he could just hang with Benny, without LouElla breathing down his neck. Then he went after Tean.

“Did you find anything in the kitchen?” Tean said. “Can we go?”

“Nothing in the kitchen, but take a look at this. Here, here, over here.”

“She moved her furniture.”

“No, it’s not the right size. None of the pieces in here fit this spot, for example. These are new pieces. Well, new for this room, anyway.”

“Ok,” Tean said, some of the heat ebbing from his voice.

“And look at these pictures near the front door,” Jem said.

“She cut somebody out.”

“She cut somebody out of a lot of them,” Jem said.

“And there’s only a twin bed and that little dresser in the bedroom,” Tean said. “She and Zalie split up.”

“Looks like it.”

“Maybe we should talk to Zalie.”

“Good idea. Where would Zalie be living now?”

Tean frowned. “Hannah gave me an address for a farm in Heber.”

Jem thought about this and pulled out his phone. He went back, checked the containers in the refrigerator, and searched for Heavenly Helpers Organic Farms. He got a webpage for the co-op. The main page included a few pictures of unplowed fields and then a wall of text. Holding out the phone, Jem said, “I know you’re mad at me, and I know I should be able to do this, but it’s going to take me too long.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Tean said grumpily as he took the phone.

“Gee,” Jem said. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

The doc was pretending to stare at the screen, but a small smile broke free. “Ok, I hear how that sounded. Now be quiet and let me read.” After he’d scanned the page, he opened a new tab and typed in another search. He clicked through several things until the maps app launched, and then he passed the phone back to Jem. The app was currently trying to navigate them to an address in the Heber Valley.

“Good guess,” Tean said. “They own a pig farm that’s part of the co-op.”

“It wasn’t a guess. It was detective work.”

Tean made a throwing-up face. “Want to go out there tonight?”

“Sure. Unless you’ve got your first Prowler date.”

The sun was setting as they drove east, and the last daylight crashed against the Wasatch Mountains, washing the slopes, cresting in blinding flashes at the snow line. Everything was golden—the valley, the young leaves of the scrub oak, the Russian olives, the bird circling overhead, thinning as it turned until it was nothing but a sliver. Everything was bright.

“An eagle,” Tean said when Jem glanced over. “I think.”

Then they hit the canyons and drove into a wall of blue and purple shadows. They followed I-80 through Parleys Canyon, climbing toward Summit