Page 72 of Say Yes to the Death

“Symbol? What symbol?” She looked down at herself.

Jack reached for her, and Claire flinched. Something flashed in his eyes, but the shadow had passed before she could interpret it.

He brushed her hair aside, revealing her shoulders and collarbone.

“That’s not a symbol, it’s a stab wound.” Idiot.

“Not that one.” He gripped her shoulders and marched her over to the mirror next to the front door. “That one.”

She squinted in the half-light.A one-inch strip of skin that was normally covered up by a bra strap shone bare. Ah, of course. The shallow mystery scratch Barney had thoughtfully left her. It didn’t look like much at first. Claire had simply written it off as another ghastly physical reminder of the horror she had gone through. But, as she leaned into the mirror, she made out some minute details.

She gasped, immediately transported back to the dingy parking garage where the fluorescent lights hummed like a swarm of wasps. The air smelled like the basement of a new house, but the acoustics didn’t match. Her hands were bound behind her back, and Barney had taken his knife and carved something into her skin. At the time, she had thought it was his initials. But this didn’t look like initials. What the hell was it? A person?

She touched the mark on her neck. “Barney’s other victims. Did they—?” How did she finish this sentence? Did he brand them too? Were they also gifted with temporary tattoos?

“We don’t know, but we suspect they will if we can find them before they’re decomposed beyond recognition.”

Jack pulled a manila folder out of his nondescript black briefcase, which he had stashed on the bar. He laid a stack of pictures down. Claire approached hesitantly.

“These are some of the victims that have been recovered across the country,” he said, flashing through photo after photo. Claire’s stomach lurched. Even though the pictures were mostly close-ups of the symbol, the blood-spattered flesh and first-hand knowledge of the horror these women had faced in their last hours weighed on her like an anvil. The symbol was large in some, and barely decipherable in others. There were minor differences in each, but the general shape was undeniable. Vaguely humanoid with a strange protrusion. What was it?

Claire shuddered and covered the mark with her hair, willing it to disappear. If her sleepwalking was stress-induced, as she was beginning to suspect, she definitely needed to zip-tie herself to the bed frame tonight. It was that or end up pants-less on a roof with an emergency churro clenched between her butt cheeks.

Mindy had moved to the couch in the living room, staring warily at Claire’s father and yammering away on her cell phone. She had called Sawyer and cancelled the emergency call when Claire had calmed down.

“There are two reasons why I’m here, Claire.” Jack sat down on the very edge of one of the barstools, leaning forward and staring intently into her eyes.

Great. The guy left for twenty years and then only reappeared to ask her for something. Classic deadbeat dad. Was he going to ask for money next? “You said you needed my help. With what?”

He shuffled the pictures back into a neat stack and tucked the envelope in his briefcase.

“First, the locations of Barney’s missing victims. Their families deserve closure.”

Claire crossed her arms. A headache was forming. “I already told the police everything Barney said to me that night. He didn’t tell me where the bodies were.”

Jack nodded. “We also need information on this group, organization, cult, whatever it is they’re calling it.”

“How do you expect me to get all this information?” And why was this her responsibility? Surely an agent could torture the information out of him just as easily.

He pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Our agents have visited Barney in prison, tried to interrogate him. He refuses to speak to us. We even asked his ex-fiancée to go on local TV and make an appeal to him directly, but it didn’t work.”

Aha! So that was why Victoria looked so shifty during her interview with Marnie.

“He says he’ll only speak to you,” he said slowly. “We need you to go to the prison and talk to Barney. And while you’re there, we’re hoping you can get some information on this group.”

“No.”

The word had been on the tip of her tongue, but Claire wasn’t the one who said it. She turned. Mindy stood in the living room with her fists clenched at her sides, manicured nails biting into her palms.

“This is your daughter, Mr. Hartley. Your little girl. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything to you now because it certainly didn’t mean anything to you when you walked out on her and Alice and Charlie twenty years ago.”

Jack was pale again, except for his ears, which had started to burn red. “Claire, I would be happy to talk to you?—”

Mindy held up a single finger.

“But now we know, you left because you were scum. You ran out on your family when you accidentally started a new one with the cashier from the health food store. You have no idea what horrors Claire faced that night, and what’s even worse is the fact that you obviously don’t care. You’re only here because of what Claire could do for you. Like so many others, you want to use her.”

Mindy walked closer to him and jabbed him in the lapel.

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