The Third Grave (Savannah #4) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,127

like some kind of Nancy Drew moment when the final and dangerous clue to the mystery is revealed within the clasp of a small piece of jewelry. So I just put it back with everything else.”

She’d lied.

Intentionally.

His eyes narrowed. Why? Why would his partner lie to him?

Because she has something to hide? What the hell do you know about her? Only what you’ve been told. Only what she’s told you.

A knot of fear began to tighten in his stomach. She was a recent hire, he did know that much, and the department vetted all of their employees, of course. She’d transferred from New Orleans. That’s where she’d learned about blood spatter.

Or so she claimed.

And now both Nikki and Delacroix were missing?

“What the hell?”

Fear galvanized him. He swept his phone from the counter and snagged the keys to the department’s SUV from the table. He reached for the door, but second-guessed himself and hurried back upstairs, retrieving his service weapon and holster. “Not this time,” he told the dog, who looked eagerly up at him. “Walk, later.” Reed had one foot out the door when his phone jangled. He looked at the screen. Not Nikki. Not Delacroix. A number with an out-of-state area code. He answered as he shot out the door. “Pierce Reed.”

“Uh. Yeah.” A male voice he didn’t recognize asked, “You’re the detective, right?”

Reed slowed. “Yes.”

“Yeah. Good. I, um, I saw you on TV. You’re in charge of that missing girl case, aren’t you? The one where they found the girls.”

Reed froze on the back walk, his toe hitting something that had wedged between the bricks and the root of an azalea bush. He bent down, still listening, and picked up the object, expecting it to be a dog toy. “That’s right. Who’re you?”

“Dennis. Dennis Kaminiski. And . . . and uh . . . y’know twenty years ago, um, I was visiting my aunt in Savannah. I did that every other summer or so.”

“Yeah?” Reed said, his interest piquing.

“Yeah. And well, my aunt still lives there, in the Savannah area, and she texted me a news clip where you were asking about a couple of teenagers who were in the movie theater that night. The night those girls disappeared?”

Reed couldn’t believe his ears. “You know them?”

“Well, yeah, I am one of ’em. Me and Carl Jetkins, we were at the movies that night, but we weren’t supposed to be. We, uh, we snuck in through a side door. Carl, he knew someone who worked there and knew that the security cameras weren’t working and that this guy would let friends in the side for free. So we went to the flick and ducked out the same way we came in.”

“You saw something.”

Reed listened hard. Finally, a break!

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t come forward?” He was listening hard.

“I was a kid. Doing a lot of things that I shouldn’t. That day I was supposed to be with my grandma. She was out of it, didn’t really know I wasn’t there. She was in the bedroom, I was in the living room, had the TV on and snuck out. No one was the wiser.”

Stunned, Reed listened, barely aware that the object he’d picked up wasn’t a dog toy as expected but an e-cigarette.

“Anyway,” Kaminiski continued. “I think maybe I saw what happened. A guy came in the same way I did, I think, and took the girls out early. I saw him with two of ’em.”

“You mean three,” Reed said, trying to reconstruct the events at the theater.

“No, man. Just two. Blond. Girls. Maybe like ten or twelve or so. I just caught a glimpse, you know?”

Reed’s attention was laser focused on the conversation with the first witness to come forward in two decades.

“And I think maybe the little one, she was hiding. Carl, he said he saw a kid hiding under the row of seats, you know. He told me as we were leaving and he said he thought she maybe touched his ankle or something . . . I don’t really remember, but he was pissed about it. Like, she knocked over his drink or something.”

Rosie.

The reason she wasn’t taken. Because she wasn’t with the others.

“Would you recognize him, the guy who took the girls?”

A pause. Then, “I don’t know. It was dark by then and I didn’t really know anyone in Savannah. I lived in Cincinnati with my folks. Now, I’m closer. Just south of Charleston. Anyway, like I said, I was only there visiting. And really, I wasn’t