Page 6 of Lone Star Secrets

“He was bleeding,” she verified. “Not a lot, but he seemed dazed for a couple of seconds. Then, the anger came, and I thought he was going to try to punch us or something. He didn’t, probably because Melanie was holding up that vacuum cleaner as if it were a billy club.”

Mia was thankful for that. Thankful, too, that Melanie hadn’t been larger than her. Melanie was closer to Kenton’s own size so he might have thought twice about going up against someone he couldn’t overpower.

“After a little while, maybe a half hour, I went up the street to the library,” she went on. “And I stayed there in the cookbook section until it was closing time. That would have been about four hours after the attack.” Mia paused and needed another deep breath. “I nearly called you. But I knew when I told you what’d happen that you would confront Kenton.”

“Damn right I would have,” he snarled.

And that anger proved her point.

“I was afraid you’d kill Kenton and then be arrested for murder,” Mia explained. “So, after the library closed, I went back to the foster house. Birdie was there, and she told me you’d gotten back from football practice and that’d you had gone to kick Kenton’s ass.”

At the mention of the woman’s name, her photo popped on the dash screen. Birdie Cowan. Once they’d been foster sisters and good friends, but Mia realized she hadn’t seen or heard from Birdie in nearly eighteen years, since they’d left foster care when they had both graduated from high school.

“I went looking for you but couldn’t find you,” Mia said, going back to her account of that night. “You were gone. No one knew where you were.”

“I was looking for you,” he muttered, adding some profanity to that. But she didn’t think he was cursing her but rather their current situation. “The first place I checked was Kenton’s room, thinking that he might have…taken you.” The muscles stirred in his jaw. “He wasn’t there. No one was. And at that time, there was no blood.”

She nodded and watched as other photos began to appear on the dash. Their foster parents, RJ and Melanie. A picture of Presley Nolan, Angel’s best friend and now a fellow operative at Maverick Ops. Another picture of his other foster brother, Jace Malley, who’d already turned eighteen and left the foster home by the time of the incident.

And then the picture of Kenton popped up.

Even now, seeing his face filled her with a sense of dread and snapped her back into a nightmare that she wished she could forget.

“So, what did you do after you saw I wasn’t in Kenton’s room?” she asked. “You went looking for him?”

“No,” he was quick to say. “I continued searching for you.”

He, too, was glancing at the screen, and when a report started to load, Angel pulled into the parking lot of a donut shop. He didn’t say anything else until he’d stopped.

“During the course of the time I was searching for you, I went into Kenton’s room twice,” Angel spelled out. “The first time, there was blood and your knife. The second time, it had been cleaned up. In between all of those two visits, I continued to search for you.”

She took a moment to process that and wished she had the timeline all written out. The foster house was big, one of those old Victorian mansions with lots of halls and more than a dozen small rooms. Still, it seemed like really bad luck that she hadn’t literally run into Angel that night.

Or into Kenton’s killer.

But maybe she had. Because it really sank in then. And she shifted her attention back to the dash.

“Someone in the foster house killed Kenton and disposed of his body,” she muttered.

Angel murmured in agreement. “And since we can rule out the two of us, that leaves them.” He pointed to the now thumbnail photos. RJ, Melanie, Birdie. “And him.”

He flicked his finger across the dash, bringing up the picture that Danno had just loaded. Dwight Barker, Kenton’s father. She remembered him visiting the foster home several times, and the man had given her the creeps, though she couldn’t say exactly why. And she had no idea why Kenton wasn’t living with him but had instead ended up in foster care.

While she was still studying Dwight’s photo and trying to figure out if he played into this, Angel’s phone rang, and she saw a familiar name on the screen.

Presley.

“Did you let him know about the body?” Angel asked her.

“God, no,” she was quick to say. “It was hard enough telling you.”

He muttered something she didn’t catch and answered the call. “Mia’s with me,” Angel said. “And you’re on speaker.”

“Mia’s with you,” Presley said, and then he sighed. “She told you they found the body.”

“Yeah,” Angel muttered. “How did you learn about it?”

“Blind luck. I was having lunch with one of the CSIs from my latest mission, and he got a call when I was about to dig into my fully loaded nachos. Gotta say, hearing about it and seeing the pictures didn’t help my appetite.”

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