flashed a little.
“You were.”
“Yes.”
“And you dumped her for her sister.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “I made a mistake. I broke up with her based on a lie.”
“That Megan Travers perpetrated.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “As I said, it was a mistake.”
“So you aren’t taking up with her again?”
Just the tiniest bit of hesitation. “No.”
Rivers didn’t believe him. “What about Sophia Russo? You’ve been seen with her.”
“Are you two involved? Romantically?” Mendoza added, putting a finer point on it.
“We were,” he admitted. “That’s over.”
Rivers asked, “Does she know it?”
“Yes.” A muscle twitched in James’s jaw, visible just over the scars in his beard. “I made that crystal clear.”
“You’re certain about that?” Mendoza said, her eyebrow crooking, but James Cahill didn’t rise to the bait. Then he dropped the bomb. “Is she related to you?”
“Is she what? Are you kidding?” he said, in visible distress. “Related to me? Hell, no! She’s a woman I met here. You people are sick.” He scraped back his chair and held up his hands, palms toward the cops. “I think we’re done here.”
And they probably were for now. “Just one more thing,” Rivers said, and texted the officer staying with Rebecca Travers.
“What?”
When Rebecca stepped into the interrogation room and sat down next to James, they told her they’d located her sister’s car.
“Where?” Rebecca asked, her hand at her throat, her eyes round. “What about my sister? Is she—?” She couldn’t get the rest out, and James took her hand, gave it a squeeze and pinpointed Rivers in his glare.
“We haven’t found her,” Mendoza admitted. “Just the car and some personal belongings. The car was parked in a garage near a mountain cabin, a garage owned by Harold Sinclaire. Does she know him?”
Rebecca, ashen, shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
“I know him.” James scowled, ran fingers down his beard. “I sold a tiny house to him.” His eyebrows drew together, creating more havoc with his uneven haircut.
Mendoza’s head snapped up. “When did he buy the tiny home?”
“Last year sometime . . . end of summer maybe,” James said. “Was that it? Was she in one of my homes?”
“No. The cabin is at least fifty years old, maybe more, built solidly on a foundation and with a garage,” Rivers said.
Mendoza eyed Cahill. “Do you remember where Sinclaire’s tiny home was delivered to?”
“It wasn’t. Sinclaire hauled it away himself on a trailer.”
“To take it where?”
James leaned back in his chair, rubbed his chin. “I don’t know. It was built to code, was small enough to be considered an RV.”
“Then I guess we need to know where it landed,” Rivers said aloud, and Mendoza made a note. “It’s registered, right? To Sinclaire?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll need copies of that paperwork,” Mendoza said. “You know that Harold Sinclaire is dating Jennifer Korpi. You were involved with her, too, right? A while back?”
“That’s right,” James clipped out, and beside him, Rebecca tensed, shifted in her chair. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just something we’re trying to figure out,” Rivers said.
“Then do it. This has nothing to do with me.”
“Then why would a friend of Megan’s say that Megan told her not long before she went missing that if anything happened to her, you were the guy responsible?”
Rebecca gasped, her eyes rounding.
“That’s a lie!” James said, and he was on his feet. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but that’s all fucked up.” He leaned across the table, his features tight, a vein popping in his forehead, his lips barely moving, as he said, “I never, ever lifted a finger to her. We’re done here.” And with that, he and Rebecca Travers walked out of the building.
Rivers and Mendoza followed them, and Rivers noted that when Cahill attempted to guide her by the elbow past the front desk, she shook him off. And she made certain she pushed the door open herself.
“You set him up.”
“Maybe.”
“So what do you make of that?” Mendoza said as the glass doors swung shut behind them.
“What’s the old quotation? ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”
Mendoza’s eyes narrowed as she stared through a front window, watching James Cahill drive away, Rebecca Travers in the passenger seat. “And what does it say if she was scorned for her own sister?”
“Nothing good,” he said, watching the taillights fade into the slim stream of traffic. “Nothing good at all.”
* * *
It took James hours to fall asleep at his room at the inn. No way could he have faced his house, where the cops had torn the