Page 95 of Buried Too Deep

Sage was ruthless under the charming facade, but Alan almost couldn’t blame him for it. The boy had come by it honestly. Alan knew his own charisma was his greatest skill.

Sage thought he was in charge. He’d soon find out differently.

For now, though, Sage’s information was as damaging as his blatant disobedience.

Hearing about the years of letters from her father on the recordings from the bugs Sage had planted in Cora’s purse had been a shock, but they had explained one thing.

He’d always wondered why the police had never investigated the man’s death. The man he’d known as John Robertson. The man who was really Jack Elliot.

Jack Elliot’s body hadn’t been discovered twenty-three years ago. Not by the police anyway.

Someone had discovered it, though. Someone had moved it, burying the man in the foundation of new construction.

And someone had sent Cora Winslow letters all this time so that she wouldn’t think her father was dead.

Who had found the body after Alan had killed him? Who had hidden it?

And why?

Someone had taken Jack Elliot’s body from that parking lot in Baton Rouge where Alan had killed him and had driven nearly two hours to the building in Houma to hide the body somewhere else.

And then someone had continued to take great pains to make sure that no one searched for Jack Elliot, writing letters to his daughter for more than two decades.

Were they the same someone?

If so, that person had to be freaking out right now as much as Alan was, because they’d hidden Jack’s body, thinking it would stay encased in the foundation of the Damper Building for decades to come.

But why?

Assuming it wasn’t a random stranger, that meant that whoever had hidden the body had known it was there in that parking lot. Which suggested that someone had been following Jack.

And me.

Who was that someone?

Alan had thought of little else in the two weeks since seeing Jack Elliot’s face on the news after the Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s department had ID’d him. The cops had posted Jack’s driver’s license photo, taken only a year before his death.

Seeing that face on the news had brought back all the nightmares Alan had suffered for the past twenty-three years.

He wondered if the person who’d hidden the body felt the same way.

Alan had actually thought he’d gotten away with something all those years ago. The police hadn’t come knocking on his door back then and, over the years, he’d just…let it go.

But now Cora Winslow was searching her house. Private investigators—good ones—were looking for clues. And it appeared that they’d found one.

He looked down at the document on his desk—the report from his own PI on Alice VanPatten. Usually, his PI’s sole responsibility was to keep an eye on Lexy and Sage, to make sure they didn’t fool around or do anything that might cause a scandal.

Scandals were very bad for churches. Donations tended to dry up in the face of scandal. Lexy had been a model wife. Sage’s sins had been many, but no one had discovered them.

This scandal was Alan’s. For the minister to stand accused was so much worse than if his family had created the problems. So he’d assigned his PI to investigate Alice VanPatten.

Dave Reavey had been ecstatic to do something other than following Lexy and Sage around. He’d thrown himself into a records search and had come up with facts that hadn’t made sense to Dave but made perfect sense to Alan.

Until twenty-three years ago, Alice VanPatten had been married to Jarred Bergeron, an abusive man. Her husband had beaten her senseless, then had gotten himself killed in a hunting accident. Even though he hadn’t been a hunter. The wife had been a suspect in her husband’s murder, but a neatly crafted alibi had absolved her of guilt.

She’d been in a hotel room miles away with a man whose description fit the man Alan had known as John Robertson to a T. A man who’d called himself John Winslow.

She’d then sold her dead husband’s holdings and moved to Baton Rouge.

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