Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📕

I hit the spot of the hidden pond. Yellow crime scene tape flutters and flaps in the wind, but the place is deserted now. TBI’s long gone, and FBI hasn’t yet arrived. I expect I’ll be requested to face-to-face once the feds hit town, so I figure I should make use of what time I’ve got. I check the map Gwen emailed and start driving the route.

Boot changes to staring out the window; I roll it down so he can stick his head out, but not enough that he can jump if he gets excited. He seems content. We pass the broken-down wreck of the two abandoned houses. Then the crime scene of the McMansion; this one’s still active. I don’t stop. A couple of deputies eyeball me as I drive past, and I don’t acknowledge them. They don’t know me, and the closed expressions tell me they’re not giving me any benefit of the doubt.

The hill slopes down. The road curls through dark trees and not a lot else, and then we emerge into full spring sun. The meandering rough track meets a positively spacious blacktop farm-to-market road. I turn south. It leads me past fields and distant farmhouses, and then a couple of businesses. I slow down and check the map, and yep, I’m nearly to the end of Gwen’s track. Right on target.

I stop at the first business—a gas station—and buy a soda. Once the elderly black proprietor makes it to the register, we do some friendly chatting about nothing in particular. When I show him my badge and ask kindly to take a look at his camera recordings, he looks crestfallen. “Ma’am, I’d be glad to help you out if those cameras were real. They ain’t. Just there for show. I can’t afford the real stuff.”

“What if you get robbed?”

He shrugs. “Get kids in here all the damn time,” he says. “Mostly polite since I know all their mommas. No black boys robbing me out here. Only white tweakers, time to time.”

“Okay. Here’s my card, you call me if you get in trouble,” I tell him, and slide it over. He nods and pockets it. “You recall anybody coming by here early morning on Monday, maybe? What time you open up?”

“Five,” he says. “But Mondays I stock shelves ’round three thirty or four. And I live right upstairs.” I’d suspected that, since it was a two-story building. “Cars don’t usually come by here that early, but I saw one that day.”

“What kind?”

“Some kind of big black SUV. Sorry, I don’t know nothing else. Didn’t see the driver, and it didn’t stop in, since I didn’t have the lights on. Just kept on going.”

“Heading where?”

He points wordlessly in the same direction as the rest of the map track. I nod and thank him and add a couple of bottles of water, snacks, dog treats, and a shallow plastic bowl from the shelves. I don’t intend to be gone so long, but this place looks like it could use the money. I pay and go, putting all that in the trunk except the soda for me, water for Boot, and the doggie bowl. I fill it halfway with water for him on the ground and let him out; he makes straight for it and sloppily drinks, then noses around excitedly and leaves a few territorial squirts. When I whistle him back, he comes at a run. I toss the rest of the water, and we’re back on the road.

Two miles down I approach the distant, sedate traffic of the freeway. There’s nothing between the small convenience store and here except a broken-down old car repair shop that’s been boarded up for a while, and a shiny new truck stop right close to the intersection. When I check the map, the truck stop is where the GPS track ends.

This is where my man stopped and got rid of his phone, or at least took out the SIM card. I feel my pulse quicken. If he stopped, could be that he needed gas; no reason he would have chosen a busy location like this otherwise if he was up to no good. And I know from experience that this is a gas desert for about a hundred miles in either direction, so he’d have to get it here.

I fill up myself and head inside. The place is in a lull just now, but there are probably half a dozen truckers and a few civilians shopping the snacks and drinks. More lined up at the Arby’s counter in the back. I go straight to the register, pay for the gas, and ask for the manager.

He’s a slender Asian man in his midthirties, and he seems pretty cooperative when I show him my badge and tell him I’m just looking for a quick peek at his surveillance. He clearly knows the value of keeping in the good books. So he leads me to the back.

They have a pretty elaborate setup—no fewer than seven cameras outside covering the pumps and the building’s exterior, plus more for the inside of the shop. I doubt my guy would have come inside. Not worth the risk. So I focus on the gas pumps around the time the phone signal was lost.

And I get him. I get him. I feel my heartbeat jump into a race, and I lean forward, intent on the black SUV that’s gliding into a spot on the very far pump at the end of the lot. He stayed as distant as possible from the cameras. I’m not sure if the resolution is good enough to get us a plate; it looks to me like he’s deliberately dirtied up the front and, likely, the rear to obscure details like that. But there he is: your average white male, features not distinct, wearing a baseball cap with no logo I can see, jeans, a checked shirt.

Then I lean forward, because a movement in the vehicle has caught my eye.

There’s someone in the passenger