Page 28 of Rebels and Roses

“It was,” Tate agreed. “Of course, my dad had already paid off every private investigation firm within five hundred miles. I had to go out of state to hire someone. You came highly recommended.”

“That’s what makes us uniquely qualified for this,” Linc said. “We don’t need your father’s money, and the local power that he may hold can’t touch us in Seattle. We’re not beholden to him. He’s going to become a problem, I’m sure. But we’ve dealt with this before. It’s not anything new.”

“Dad is going to have to learn that he can’t have everything he wants,” Frankie declared. “It’s never too late to find out that you don’t control the world.”

“Do you honestly think that at this stage in his life, Dad is going to change in any way?” Cooper asked. “I don’t see it happening. He’s set in his ways.”

“I’m an optimist,” Frankie sniffed. “So, what lines of investigation are going to look at, Mr. Davis?”

“Call me Linc. The first thing we want to do is, of course, recreate your mother’s last known day. Walk through it. Talk to everyone she came into contact with that day. Yes, I know that was done, but I think it’s worth doing again. We might find a sliver of something that we can follow up on.”

“Second, we’ve analyzed the known facts of Mrs. Winslow’s disappearance against crime files at that time in the Midwest. There was a serial kidnapping of women from malls. He’d keep them for a few days before dumping their bodies. Several bodies have already been found. There might be more. I think we should follow that line. I’ll go interview him, plus search out possible other dumping spots.”

Frankie’s face had turned a slightly green shade of white hearing the investigator talk aboutdumping sitesandserial killers.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Winslow,” Linc immediately apologized when he recognized the distress. “I don’t mean to be?—”

“It’s fine,” Frankie said, waving away his apology even as Cooper reached out to place his hand over hers. “I need to toughen up, I think, if we’re going to do this. I’m sure there will be far more unsavory details that won’t be pleasant to hear.”

She gave Cooper a grateful look, however, turning her fingers so that she could hold his hand back. Frankie didn’t like showing any sort of weakness. World class tournament tennis had brought out her ultra-competitiveness. It was a trait that all the Winslow siblings had, but it manifested itself in different ways. Instead of fighting back at their father, Frankie had knocked the hell out of a yellow tennis ball.

It wasn’t therapy - which they all probably should look into - but it had worked for Frankie.

The PI wasn’t an opponent, but Frankie didn’t discriminate. It was rather surprising that she’d allowed Cooper to reach out to her at all. Maybe she was softening now that her career was over.

They hadn’t talked much about that, if at all. Cooper had mentioned it once, and Frankie had admitted that the knee injury wasn’t going to heal the way she needed. She was off the tour, her career ended. She’d acted as if it wasn’t a huge deal, saying that she was thirty and she’d only had a few years left anyway. She was happy to leave at the top of her game, not hanging around trying to hold onto her former glories.

“I don’t care how graphic the details are as long as we’re hearing the truth,” Tate said. “That’s what I want from this investigation. The truth. Even if it’s terrible, and it probably is, I want to know what really happened to Mom.”

Frankie nodded in agreement with Tate’s statement. Finn’s expression throughout this meeting had been neutral, never slipping from professional mode.

“That’s what we all want,” Cooper replied. “I’m done listening to Dad’s version of the story.”

“Joel Winslow wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up to him and slapped him in the face,” Frankie said between gritted teeth. “I think he even believes his own lies.”

Cooper wasn’t so sure about that. Joel was an asshole, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew what was real and what was fantasy.

And this time? This time they were going to get the truth. Joel Winslow couldn’t stop or control this investigation.

His dad better start getting his story straight.

“He’s goingto hang out here all day, isn’t he?”

Lucy’s whispered question was for Jane’s ears only. Even if she had spoken at a normal volume, it was doubtful Tom Kemp would have heard. He was currently too busy telling them an animated story about how he and his sister had once let all the horses on their parents’ property out of the barn so they could be free like in the bookMisty of Chincoteague.

He’d been regaling them with tales of his childhood for over an hour while drinking a latte and eating pastries. He’d wandered in after Cooper had left, apparently bored in the apartment after he’d woken around lunchtime.

I don’t think this story is the flex that you think it is, Tom.

With each story that he’d told, Jane had become more disturbed by the narrative. Perhaps she was being a bit too tough on the younger man, but it sounded like he and his sister had been nightmare children who were spoiled and bratty.

He and Fiona had basically tortured their nanny and the household staff, playing practical jokes and generally being destructive. Apparently, he thought it was hilarious when other people had to go behind him and clean up the chaos he’d wrought.

Jane’s own parents had been fairly permissive, but they would have grounded her for life if she’d pulled even a fraction of these shenanigans. She’d still be sitting in her room with no television or electronics.

“That’s when Dad sent me to a different school,” Tom said. “He thought that I was falling in with the wrong crowd. They were a bad influence.”

Who was influencing who? Jane wasn’t so sure.

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