Chapter Two

Bree knew she had plenty of explaining to do. No way could she just drop a bombshell like that on two cops and not tell them more.

Especially these two cops.

Slater, because he was her brother, and Luca, because of their history together. Of course, their history was playing into their present since she’d given birth to Luca’s son.

“Drive slow,” she instructed Luca since it would normally only take about five minutes to get to her house. She needed a bit more time than that. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of Coral.” Coral Saylor, the nanny. Bree trusted her, but she needed to keep this just between the three of them.

For now, anyway.

Because it was possible anyone she involved in this could end up being in danger.

She hated that. Hated that she had to bring them into this, but after today’s attack, Bree didn’t see a way around it.

“Who ran you off the road?” Slater asked. “Who tried to kill you and why?”

The first part was easy to answer. Well, the info was easy anyway. Reliving it sure as heck wasn’t.

“I didn’t see the driver,” Bree admitted. “He came flying out from the dirt turnoff by the bridge and rammed into me. It was a large silver truck with heavily tinted windows.” She shook her head and winced, which caused the fresh stitches to pull. “I didn’t get a chance to dodge him or see the license plates.”

“Had you ever seen the truck before?” Luca asked.

“I don’t think so, but, uh, for the past couple of days, I’ve had the feeling that someone was watching me.”

Both Slater and Luca cursed. “And you didn’t think to tell one of us that?” Slater demanded.

“No.” She stretched that out a few syllables, annoyed that he was using his big brother tone. “Because it was only a feeling. It happened twice when I was in town. First at the grocery store and late yesterday when I went to the post office. I glanced around, but I didn’t see any unfamiliar faces.”

Still, she should have trusted her gut. If she had, she would have been more careful. That had to stop. Careful had to be at the top of her priorities because of Gabriel.

“All right,” Slater said a few moments later. He was making a visible attempt to rein in the big brother stuff. “Tell us why you think this truck driver maybe followed you and then rammed into your car.”

Bree dragged in a long breath. Where to start? There were so many pieces to this so she decided to go back to the beginning.

“I’ve been investigating Dad’s murder,” she said, knowing that in itself wouldn’t be a bombshell. They were all investigating her father being gunned down by an unknown assailant eleven months ago.

A date that she had no trouble recalling.

Because it was also when she’d gotten pregnant with Gabriel.

She’d ended up at Luca’s that night, and they’d both been in shock and grief-stricken not just over her father’s murder but her mother’s disappearance. Her mother, Sandra, had simply vanished without a trace, and there was the worry that she, too, was dead. Or that she’d killed her husband and fled. That theory had some juice since her mother’s wallet, phone and car had gone missing as well. None of the items had yet been recovered.

Both of those possible scenarios had shaken Luca and her to the core, and with their defenses down, they’d fallen back into their old routine of landing in bed.

“What does Dad’s death have to do with what happened to you today?” Slater pressed.

“Getting there,” she muttered and returned to the beginning. “As you know, Dad called me the day before he was killed. I was a legal consultant for the state prosecuting attorney back then, and Dad wanted me to check through my resources to see if I could find any info on one of his cold cases.”

“Brighton Cooper,” Luca readily supplied. “The young woman who was murdered five and a half years ago.”

She made a sound of agreement. It didn’t surprise her that Luca would remember that. Or know how much the unsolved murder had troubled her father. Luca had been a deputy for over a decade and had been on duty when the twenty-three-year-old waitress had been found stabbed to death in her apartment in Saddle Ridge. The case had gone cold, but the sheriff’s office, and especially her father, had continued to investigate it.

Her mother, Sandra, had done some unofficial investigating as well since Brighton had been the daughter of Sandra’s late friend, and Sandra knew that Brighton was often impulsive and prone to getting into trouble. Brighton also had a track record of getting involved with the wrong men.

Something that Bree could definitely relate to.

“Dad was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to find anything new on Brighton,” Bree went on, “and he knew I had access to a lot of different databases and law enforcement resources. He wanted me to see if anything about Brighton popped. Anything ,” she emphasized.

“Did you find something?” Luca asked.

“Not then. And maybe not now, either,” she added in a mutter. “After Dad was killed, I continued to dig though.”

It was hard for her to spell out, but the digging felt as if she was helping to fulfill her father’s last wish. Added to that, diving into work temporarily helped her set aside the grief and her worries about her missing mother. Well, it had when she wasn’t using those databases to hunt for her mom. Something she did at least weekly in case anything new turned up.

“For months, I did facial recognition searches, a lot of them, looking for any sign of Brighton,” Bree went on. “And yesterday, I saw a woman I believe could be her on security camera footage of a fight outside a bar in Austin. The footage was recorded two nights before she was murdered, and the only reason it hadn’t been erased was because the footage was used in a civil lawsuit.”

“Brighton was assaulted in this bar fight?” Luca immediately wanted to know.

“No, if it was indeed her, then she was a bystander, along with about a dozen or so people who were trying to break up the fight that started inside the bar and then moved out onto the sidewalk. It was one of the men involved in the fight who filed the lawsuit.”

A lawsuit he’d lost and then had posted the footage on social media.

“I contacted the officers who were called in,” Bree continued, “but neither of them took a witness statement from anyone matching Brighton’s description so I’m guessing she left before they arrived on scene. The man who filed the lawsuit didn’t remember her either.”

Bree’s phone rang, and she groaned when she saw her sister’s name on the screen. Joelle would have almost certainly heard about the accident by now and would want to know how she was doing. And Bree would tell her. First though, she had to finish filling in Slater and Luca so she let the call go to voicemail.

“Using facial recognition, I matched another face in the bar crowd footage to a bartender and contacted her,” Bree went on, trying to hurry since they’d be at her house soon, and she had so much to tell them. “She didn’t recall seeing Brighton so I dropped by the bar and spoke to the owner to ask him to give me receipts for that night. He said it would take a while since it was years ago but that he’d get them for me.”

“We checked Brighton’s credit card,” Slater reminded her. “And she hadn’t recently charged anything at a bar.”

Bree made a sound of agreement. “I wanted to see if I recognized any names of customers who might link to Brighton.”

“Did you?” Luca asked.

“I don’t have the list yet. But this morning I got a call from the bar owner, and he said someone tried to run him off the road.”

Both Slater and Luca cursed. “I want his name,” Slater demanded.

“Manny Vickery,” she quickly provided. “He owns the Hush, Hush bar in downtown Austin. It’s one of those not-so-secret trendy gin joints. Not seedy though, and I didn’t uncover anything illegal going on there.”

“But someone tried to kill both him and you,” Slater was equally quick to point out.

Hearing it spelled out like that gave her a new jolt of fear and worry. Bree wanted to believe it was all a really bad coincidence. Or an accident. If it’d only been Manny’s incident, she could have believed that, but coupled with hers, both attempts had to be intentional.

But who had done this?

It was something she needed to find out and soon.

“What did Manny say when he called you this morning?” Slater asked.

It wasn’t hard for her to recall it since she’d mentally gone over the conversation several times. “Manny told me he was driving to the bar from his house, which is apparently in a rural area about twenty miles outside of Austin. He was on an isolated road when a silver truck rammed into his car from behind. The truck had one of those rhino bumpers and tried to push him off the road. Manny said he managed to keep control, and the driver of the truck sped off when another car came along.”

“Did he get the license plate?” Luca wanted to know.

She shook her head. “He said he was too shocked by what’d happened to even think of looking at the plate.”

“Was he hurt?” Luca pressed.

Bree shook her head again. “And his car only had some minor damage. He reported it to the local cops,” she added since Bree knew that would be Luca’s or her brother’s next question. “Manny said he’d spoken to the cops right before he called me. He wanted to know if someone was after him because he was gathering those receipts for me. I said I wasn’t sure. And I’m not,” she quickly tacked on to that. “I’m not sure of a lot of things.”

“You were on your way to see this Manny Vickery when someone tried to run you off the road?” Luca pressed.

Bree nodded. “And, yes, I’ve considered that Manny knew I was coming so he could have said something to someone who was waiting for me. Or he could have done it himself if he lied about being attacked and wants me to back off the investigation.”

They sat in silence for a moment, all of them obviously processing this. “I’ll need to check your car,” Slater finally said. “If the silver truck broadsided you, there could be some paint flecks we can use to try to trace the vehicle. I’ll need to check the bar owner’s vehicle as well.”

Luca stopped the cruiser at the end of her driveway, and he turned in the seat to face her. “I’ll also make some calls and see if anyone’s brought in a vehicle like that for repair. I could ask around, too, to see if anyone spotted it in the area.” He paused. “You didn’t want to say anything about this in front of Dr. Bagley. Why?”

She had so hoped not to get into this, but Bree doubted Luca was just going to drop it, and if she tried to stonewall him, it might make him dig for the answer on his own.

“Because Nathan has been pressuring me to go out with him, and I didn’t want to give him any excuse to...insinuate himself into my life.”

She stopped, groaned, and knew she obviously had to spell that out a little better.

“As you know, Nathan and I briefly dated a couple of years ago when I was home for the summer, and when I broke things off, he didn’t take it well. He kept calling and texting, kept sending me flowers. When I went back to Dallas, he showed up at my office there, and I had my version of a showdown with him. I made it clear he’d better back off.”

As expected, Luca and Slater cursed. It was Luca who responded though. “And you didn’t tell us he was stalking you?”

“No, because it stopped.” Bree locked gazes with Luca’s intense brown eyes and went ahead with her explanation. “Added to that, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable blabbing to you because of our history together.”

Luca’s jaw tightened. “It’s not blabbing. It’s reporting a stalker to a cop.” He stopped, muttered more profanity. “If you didn’t want to tell me, you could have gone to one of the other deputies. Or to the Dallas PD. You should have said something both back then and today. By that, I mean, you could have asked for another doctor instead of being treated by a man who stalked you.”

She’d considered doing that. Mercy, had she, but Bree had just wanted to get the stitches and get out of there. She certainly hadn’t wanted to dish up any of what’d happened since it would have ended up being juicy gossip. Even though she had no idea what was going on, Bree figured it was best to work this quietly behind the scenes.

“There’s more,” Bree went on, and this part was not going to be easy. “After I saw the woman I believe was Brighton on the video, I expanded the search to other cameras in the vicinity. Of course, most had been erased since it was over five years ago, but I found this.”

She pulled up a picture on her phone and realized her hand was shaking when she held it up for Slater and Luca to see.

“It’s footage of that same fight outside the Hush, Hush, but it was filmed by another customer who also posted it on social media.” She paused. Had to. “I examined the footage frame by frame and saw this.” She used her fingers to enlarge the still image she’d culled from the video.

“Hell,” Slater said, and he not only moved in even closer, he took the phone from her, repeated his single word of profanity and then handed it to Luca.

Luca shook his head. “That’s your mother.”

Yes, it was, and when Luca handed her back her phone, she took yet another look at it. Because she was in the mix of the other bystanders, only her face was visible, but it was enough for Bree to see the familiar short brown hair, and the eyes and mouth that were so much like Bree’s own features.

Either her mother had a doppelg?nger, or that was indeed Sandra McCullough.

“I don’t recall Mom ever mentioning going to a bar in Austin,” Slater muttered.

Nor had Bree. And their mother hadn’t seemed to be the bar-going type. Then again, maybe she hadn’t actually been in the Hush, Hush. It was possible she had just been walking by and had been filmed.

But it didn’t feel like that.

This felt like some kind of important clue. But what? This had happened five and a half years ago, long before Bree’s father had been murdered and her mother had disappeared.

“This morning, I went back through Mom’s old credit card statements,” Bree added. “No charges to the bar or anywhere else in Austin. And since Mom’s not around, I obviously can’t ask her about it.”

“You’re not thinking Mom had something to do with Brighton’s death?” Slater questioned.

“I can’t think that,” Bree admitted in a whisper.

She couldn’t wrap her head around her mother committing a crime of any kind. But then, Bree knew she wasn’t impartial about this.

“I’d like to check on Gabriel now,” she murmured.

Luca stared at her. And stared. She wasn’t immune to that look. Nor to him. And that caused her to silently curse. She couldn’t handle another on-off with Luca. No bandwidth for it. Even though she couldn’t deny that the heat would always be there between them.

“You two can go in and see Gabriel,” Slater suggested. “I’ll drive the cruiser to the crash site and look around. And I want to check out Bree’s car. After I get back, we can figure out how to handle the rest of this.”

Yes, handling was indeed required, and it wouldn’t be just the three of them for long. They’d need to brief Joelle and her husband, Sheriff Duncan Holder. And Bree’s other brother, Ruston, who was a San Antonio cop. All of them would want to know what’d happened and if it was connected to Brighton’s and her father’s murders.

Luca drove along the driveway to the house and parked near the porch. A reminder that he didn’t want her to be out in the open any longer than necessary. And that was a reminder that she could be in danger. Bree wanted to hang on to that “could be,” but she didn’t plan on taking any unnecessary risks either. That’s why she hurried into the house after she used her phone to unlock the front door.

“It’s me,” Bree immediately called out to let Coral know she was there.

As soon as Luca and she stepped in, Bree closed and relocked the door. Moments later, Bree heard footsteps coming from the laundry room.

“Didn’t figure you’d be back this soon,” Coral said, coming into the entry. She was carrying a clothes basket, and the baby monitor was on top of the folded pile of laundry.

As usual, Coral was wearing loose sweatpants and a T-shirt that was equally loose, and she’d pulled up her dark blonde hair into a messy ponytail. She had one of those faces that made her look a good decade younger than her thirty-eight years.

“Oh, hi, Luca,” Coral greeted. “Gabriel’s still napping,” she said, smiling. At least she was smiling until she saw Bree’s face.

Coral gasped. “You’re hurt.”

“A minor car accident,” Bree was quick to say. “I’m fine, really.”

But she would need to say plenty more because she wanted Coral included in that better-safe-than-sorry mode. It sickened her to think of that truck driver coming here, but it was too risky not to prepare for it. That meant locked doors and using the security system. The house was rigged with one, but normally Bree only turned it on at night. That would change.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Coral pressed.

“Yes. It’s just a few stitches.” Which were starting to sting now that the numbing meds were wearing off.

Bree glanced at the baby monitor and checked the time. Since she’d put Gabriel down for his morning nap before she’d left, that meant he’d been asleep for nearly three hours. That was slightly longer than his usual, but then his sleep pattern was nowhere near consistent.

“I was going to put this laundry away and go take a peek at him,” Coral explained, and she handed Bree the camera monitor.

Gabriel was indeed still asleep in his crib, and just seeing that precious face performed some magic. Bree felt some of her nerves start to melt away.

“He’ll probably want a bottle soon,” Coral remarked. “You want me to go ahead and fix that so Luca can feed him?”

That had more or less become their routine. Luca had been coming over daily to give Gabriel at least one bottle, sometimes two. Bree hadn’t been able to nurse because of a nasty bout of mastitis when Gabriel had only been a week old, so that meant she hadn’t needed to be in the nursery during those feedings.

A good thing.

She’d learned the hard way that too much time with Luca triggered the memories of their last night together, which in turn triggered memories of her father’s murder. It was ironic that her son didn’t have that same effect on her despite Gabriel being the spitting image of Luca.

“Yes, please make the bottle,” Bree instructed, and she was about to head to the nursery when Luca touched her.

She jolted when his fingers brushed over hers, but then she realized he wasn’t actually touching her. He was taking the monitor, and he had his attention pinned to it and not her.

Her nerves returned in full force. “Is something wrong?”

Luca shook his head, but the gesture didn’t seem very convincing. “Look,” he said, pointing to the screen. She saw a bird zoom past one of the nursery windows.

“A blue jay,” she muttered and was about to dismiss it. Then, a few seconds later, a bird flew past again.

No. Not “a” bird. It appeared to be the same bird, flying at the exact speed and angle. This wasn’t live feed but rather a recorded loop.

Bree bolted toward the nursery. Luca was right behind her, and he actually passed her before she reached the nursery door. He threw it open, and together they rushed into the room.

And her heart stopped. Just stopped.

Because the crib was empty.