LITMIR.BIZ

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bones showed up.”

      “But you’re still not certain they belong to Jessie, so maybe this is a little premature.”

      Mac said, “I think it’s just an exercise—confirmation. We’ve gone through all the missing persons files. We’ll find those remains belong to Jezebel Brentwood.”

      Becca drew in a quick breath. Her skin was pale. In fact, she looked out-and-out sick.

      “You all right?” Mac asked.

      Hudson turned to her. “Becca?”

      “I’m fine.”

      “Was it something I said?” Gretchen asked wryly.

      Mac cringed. His partner had no class. “Are you sure you’re—”

      “Excuse me.” Becca suddenly scraped back her chair and headed toward the women’s room, which was clearly marked at the end of the row of booths.

      Hudson half rose from his chair but let her go.

      “She always scare so easily?” Gretchen asked in mild surprise.

      Hudson’s gaze shifted to Mac’s partner, and Mac had to fight to keep his lips from twitching with amusement. Gretchen was pissing Hudson off but good. One of her favorite tactics, though what good it would do in this case, he had no idea. Before Hudson and Gretchen could go to the next level, Mac said, “I’d like to just run over the sequence of events before Jessie Brentwood disappeared.”

      “You just said you don’t know if the remains are even Jessie.”

      “Slow days at the department,” Gretchen said. “We’re up to our asses in cold cases instead of current events.” She took a sip from her cup, scowled, and added cream. “Crime’s on a downswing. What can I say?”

      “It’s no secret I thought something happened to her twenty years ago,” Mac cut in. “You were one of the last people to see her.”

      Hudson hesitated a moment. Mac could almost see when he made the decision to tamp down his annoyance and just get on with it. “We had a fight,” he stated rotely. “She didn’t think I was being honest with her. I didn’t think she was being honest with me. We were both right.”

      “And what were you lying about?” Gretchen asked.

      “More like omissions of the truth. We were in a high school romance that had run its course.”

      “You liked someone else,” Mac said, his eyes following the path Becca had taken.

      “It was over. That’s all.”

      “You didn’t follow her into that maze and stab her to death?” Gretchen asked conversationally.

      “She was stabbed?” Hudson asked. He turned to Mac for corroboration.

      Mac nodded curtly. “That’s the ME’s opinion.”

      Walker seemed to think that over while Mac, with a warning look at Gretchen to keep her big trap shut, asked more questions about the timeline of the last night Hudson saw Jessie. It was more of the same from his notes from twenty years ago, less really, as Hudson’s memory wasn’t as clear as it had been then.

      “She said she was in trouble,” Hudson said. “Something was out there.”

      “In trouble? What do you mean? Trouble with her parents? At school? Maybe pregnant?” Gretchen leaned a little forward in her seat.

      Mac wanted to smash his foot down on hers. She seemed determined to blab all aspects of the case before he was ready. Some of the information had to be held back from the press, the populace in general, so that only the police and Jezebel Brentwood’s killer knew the truth.

      Walker lifted a hand and dropped it again in weary exasperation. “It wasn’t as defined as that. More a case of something unclear—like trouble was going to find her. I think she said something like that. ‘Trouble’s coming’ or something. I don’t remember her exact words, but she was on edge. She couldn’t sit still.”

      His story was the same as it had been for twenty years.

      “Did you suspect she wanted to run away?” Gretchen asked.

      “I just thought we were having a fight. We’d had a bunch of ’em. The only time she said she wanted to get away was when she asked me to take off for a weekend with her.” He snorted and picked up his cup. “Like either of our parents were going to go for that.”

      Something niggled at Mac’s brain, something he couldn’t quite catch. So Jessie had wanted to run off for a weekend, so what? And yet…He reminded himself to look at his notes.

      Walker glanced in the direction Rebecca had gone again, and Mac could tell he was starting to get antsy over her prolonged absence. But then the door to the restroom opened and Rebecca came back to their table. Her skin was no longer pale, it was flushed, and Mac deduced that she’d been damn near scrubbing her cheeks raw.

      “You okay?” Walker asked, obviously concerned. Yep, they were involved.

      “Yeah. I’ve been fighting a bug. Guess it’s trying to get the upper hand.” She smiled wanly. Mac didn’t buy it.

      “Can you handle some questions?” Mac asked her. “Or we can check in later.”

      “No, go ahead.” She clearly wanted to get the interview over with. “I heard you wanted to talk to all of us, and since Hudson was coming anyway…”

      “So you two are a couple now?” He wagged his finger between them.

      “We’ve known each other since high school,” Becca said. Her gaze was steady now. “We hang out sometimes.”

      He let it go. For the moment. Then he asked her about her own timeline of what had happened in the days before Jessie Brentwood disappeared.

      Rebecca was even fuzzier than Hudson; she wasn’t a close friend of Jessie’s and only kind of remembered what they’d said to each other in their last meeting. Mac ran through the events of those last few days—what had been happening at their school—but Rebecca could add nothing noteworthy.

      Luckily Gretchen kept her tongue in her head.

      In the end, Mac knew about as much as he had to start with, and that the sexual tension between Hudson Walker and Rebecca Sutcliff was almost palpable.

      Did it have anything to do with Jessie? Was it something entirely new?

      “If those two haven’t hit the sheets already, it’s only a matter of time,” Gretchen observed as they left the diner. Becca and Hudson were climbing into their respective cars as Mac and Gretchen got into the cruiser. “They act like they’re just friends, but something’s going on.”

      “Maybe.”

      Mac pulled out of the lot and, in his rearview mirror, noted that Becca and Hudson’s vehicles drove off in different directions.

      “And what did you say that sent Rebecca to the bathroom for a dash of cold water to the face?”

      Mac looked at Gretchen, then gunned the cruiser into traffic heading toward the station. “Who, me? I didn’t have a chance to say anything.”

      “What then?”

      Mac shook his head, but admitted, “She did look like she was about to pass out.”

      “Something scared her.”

      Mac reviewed what had been said and remarked slowly, “She was already scared when she got here. Why did she come?”

      “’Cause she knew you were going to be calling her and she wanted it over with the support of Loverboy. Who, by the way, is just a friend.”

      “They say that attraction in high school is the easiest to rekindle. What attracted once can really heat up in the now.”

      “Look

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