LITMIR.BIZ

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done through most of the nighttime hours: In his head, over and over again, he replayed the phone message he’d received.

      There had been something familiar … not about the voice, which had obviously been disguised, but in the inflection, in the cadence of the words spoken. A kidnapper, or a friend of his sister’s working with her to orchestrate drama?

      He’d heard from the authorities in Shreveport, who had let him know that Frank Landers no longer lived at the address Mariah had given him. They promised to continue to look for him. He’d called Mariah with the news and she’d been bitterly disappointed that Frank hadn’t been found.

      Aware of minutes ticking off, he finished his shower and left the bathroom to see a clean, freshly pressed uniform laid out on his bed. Marquette was as handy as a pocket in a shirt.

      Minutes later, dressed and with a thermos of fresh coffee, courtesy of his housekeeper, he drove toward Phillip Ribideaux’s place. The shower had invigorated him, washing away the exhaustion that had weighed him down as he’d driven from Mariah’s house to his own.

      He hoped that, while he was hunting down leads this morning, Mariah was getting some much-needed sleep. There was nothing she could do at the moment to help bring her son home, and being exhausted would only make things worse.

      He thought of what Marquette had said about Mariah. He’d known she was a strong woman, but through the long hours of the night he’d seen flashes of intense vulnerability. If she had an Achilles’ heel it was definitely her son.

      His hands tightened on the steering wheel as her strange words to him echoed in his head. It must be terrible, to always look for the worst in the people around you. He had the distinct feeling she’d been talking about his relationship with his sister.

      But she didn’t really know Jenny. She didn’t know the fear Lucas lived with every day—the fear that his sister would turn into another version of their mother and come to the same kind of tragic end.

      Phillip Ribideaux lived in a large, attractive house on the outskirts of town. The twenty-eight-year-old had never worked a day in his life and lived off the generosity of his father, a wealthy developer in the area.

      He was a party guy with no work ethic and a sense of privilege that Lucas had seen too often in men who came from money. In fact, Lucas himself and four of his then closest friends might have come to the same end had they not made a pact in college to use their wealth to give back to the community.

      Lucas hadn’t been sad to see the relationship between Ribideaux and Jenny end. Jenny deserved better than a man like Ribideaux.

      It was just after seven when Lucas knocked on Ribideaux’s front door. Phillip’s sleek sports car was parked out front, but the knock yielded no reply. He rapped again, harder and longer this time.

      “All right, all right.” The deep male voice was full of irritation. Phil opened the door and glared at Lucas. It was obvious he’d been awakened by the knocking. His dark hair was mussed, a pillow crease indented his cheek and he wore only a pair of black silk boxers.

      “Morning, Phil,” Lucas said. “Can I come in?”

      The handsome young man frowned. “Why? What’s going on?” He scratched the center of his chest, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

      “I need to talk to you.”

      “Couldn’t it wait? Jeez, what time is it?”

      “No, it can’t wait,” Lucas replied.

      “Talk about what?” He gazed at Lucas belligerently.

      “I’d like to come in. Now, you can invite me inside and we can have a nice, friendly chat or I can come back in a little while with a search warrant and the chat won’t be quite so friendly.” Lucas kept his voice pleasant and calm, but narrowed his eyes to let Phil know he was dead serious.

      With reluctance Phil opened the door to allow Lucas to enter. “Now you want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

      Lucas ignored the question and walked through the foyer and into the living room. He stopped in surprise, noting the moving boxes lining the walls and the lack of furniture. He turned back to face Phil. “Going someplace?”

      “I’m moving, not that it’s any business of yours,” Phil replied.

      “Where to?”

      “To an apartment in town. Dad sold this place.” A flash of anger shone from the young man’s eyes. It was there only a moment, then gone. “Look, Sheriff, you want to tell me what this is about? I’ve got a lot of things to do today and I’m not in the mood for you.”

      Lucas tamped down a touch of rising anger. “When was the last time you spoke to Jenny?”

      Phil visibly relaxed. “Is that what this is about? Your sister? Whatever she told you, it’s probably a lie. I haven’t seen or talked to her for a couple of weeks.”

      “So you don’t know anything about her disappearance?”

      “Disappearance? Is she missing?”

      “Yeah, since last night.” Lucas studied Phil’s features carefully, but it was impossible for him to discern if the man was lying or not. “So, you haven’t seen or heard from her in the last couple of days?”

      “Look, your sister’s a nice girl and all that, but she was way too intense for me. We’d only been dating a couple of months and she starts talking about marriage and having kids and the whole traditional route. There’s no way I’m ready for that, especially right now with everything such a mess.”

      “Everything such a mess?”

      Phil averted his gaze from Lucas. “Private stuff. It has nothing to do with Jenny. I haven’t had anything to do with Jenny for weeks, so if we’re through here, I’ve got things to do.” His gaze still didn’t meet Lucas’s.

      Without a search warrant, there was little else Lucas could do here, and no judge in his right mind would give Lucas a warrant to search these premises on Lucas’s hunch that Phil was hiding something.

      “Where exactly is the new apartment?” Lucas asked as Phil walked him back to the front door.

      “The Lakeside Apartments for the time being. Apartment 211.” Phil grinned, the boyish, charming smile that had managed to get him into the beds of half the young women of Conja Creek. “I’m anxious to get out of this place. Owning a house is way too much responsibility for me.”

      Minutes later, as Lucas drove back to Mariah’s place, he made mental notes to himself. It was obvious that Phil Ribideaux’s life was in flux at the moment. Could that have anything to do with Jenny and Billy’s disappearance?

      Phil had seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Jenny was missing, but he was a smooth operator and Lucas knew the kid could lie without blinking an eye. And he’d definitely been hiding something. Something private, he’d said.

      Tension twisted Lucas’s gut as he drove. It had been almost twenty-four hours since anyone had spoken to Jenny and Billy, and there wasn’t a lead in sight … except for a haunting voice on his cell phone that had promised a game of hide-and-seek.

      “Jenny, if you’ve done something stupid, then please have the courage to undo it now,” he murmured aloud. He hated suspecting that his sister had somehow orchestrated all this, but the alternative was far more terrifying.

      He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Wally, his right-hand man. “Wally, I want you to do a little investigation into Phil Ribideaux. Find out from his friends what’s going on in his life, and I want a tail put on him. Get Louis to do it. I want to know everyplace he goes and everyone he talks to.”

      “Got it,” Wally replied. “Anything else?”

      “Nothing for now.” Lucas clicked off. He had no idea if Ribideaux had anything to do with this, but he definitely knew something

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