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“Sucks not to know everything, doesn’t it?” I asked in a snide tone. “To know you’ve been played by someone who’s supposed to be your partner.”

He turned to face me, his dark eyes glittering. “I never said we were partners.”

“Yeah, my mistake,” I said. “Call me naïve. I knew you had your own agenda, but I never thought you’d…” I shook my head. I couldn’t do this. Sure, I didn’t trust him, but I never thought he’d play me like he had. But that made me a fool. He’d never promised to be on the up and up, and I’d gone into this knowing exactly who I was dealing with.

I headed for the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

I paused with my hand on the doorknob. I was burning a bridge here. Malcolm had resources and information I didn’t. Did I really want to end this almost-partnership? Maybe, maybe not, but I wasn’t in any frame of mind to make that decision right now.

“Home.” I opened the door and stalked out of the office and through the back door, not stopping until I was in my car.

I half-expected Malcolm to come after me, but then again, he didn’t seem the type to chase someone.

That was fine. I didn’t need him. I should have never asked Carter Hale for help. I didn’t need either one of them. I could finish this on my own.

Chapter 23

I’d intended to go home, but I still had questions for my father. I drove to his house, hoping he’d talk to me after Malcolm’s interruption, but his driveway was empty. Although the front porch light was on, the interior was dark. Still, I walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell multiple times, not surprised when he didn’t answer.

Where had he gone?

I pulled out my phone and called him, but it went straight to voicemail.

Had my father gone to meet someone after our dinner? If so, whom?

I went back to my car and turned it on to warm the interior while I figured out what to do next. I went over everything he’d said before the interruption. Dad had admitted to being one of the original investors and to creating the contracts for the LLC in his home office.

Were they still stored there?

Was Dad heading over to the house now to get them? Dammit. He had a good ten- to fifteen-minute head start.

I headed home, but my father’s car wasn’t out front. The lights were all off, too, confirming my mother really wasn’t here.

Where was she? She wasn’t the kind of woman to take a vacation on a whim, and she had no family and only superficial friends. I pulled out my phone and reluctantly called her, expecting her to either screen my call or give me a tongue lashing, but the call went straight to voicemail.

That was weird.

Then again, if she was being manipulative like my father suggested, it stood to reason she’d turn off her phone. Still, I was starting to worry about her. After I looked for the contracts, I planned to go through her address book and start calling people. Sure, my father thought she was doing this for attention, but the seasoned detective in me needed to know she was safe.

I walked through the still-unlocked back door and flipped on the overhead light. The room was just as I’d seen it last. Impeccably clean. Nothing out of place. It almost felt wrong to set my purse on the kitchen table, but no one stepped out to yell at me. Trying to ignore the cold shiver that coursed through me, I headed straight to my father’s home office.

I flipped on the overhead light, and surveyed the space, looking for any signs that my father might have beaten me here. A partially open drawer. A paperclip on the floor. Instead, I saw a whole lot of nothing. The desktop was clear except for a lamp and a leather-edged desk blotter. The books on the shelves were all perfectly aligned, the work of my mother. But if Dad had hidden something on the shelves and removed it before I’d arrived, he’d been careful to hide his tracks.

I searched the desk drawers, but he must have cleaned them out when he moved. All I found was a few pens, some bent paperclips, and scotch tape. If he’d kept the documents here at home, he must have taken them when he’d moved out.

Or maybe not.

My parents’ house didn’t have a basement, but there was an attic. The documents were probably ten years old, and after Hugo disappeared, Dad probably hadn’t wanted to leave them lying around. The attic, accessed by a fold-down staircase in the closet of my old bedroom, would have been the perfect place to store them. If he’d stored them there, they were in all likelihood still there. I doubted he would have seen any reason to take them. The case was dead. He had nothing to worry about.

Until I started asking questions.

I turned off the light in the office and walked into my room. I flipped on the wall switch, but the overhead light didn’t turn on. After I flicked it a couple more times for good measure, I pushed out a breath.

Great.

I was already creeped out by the thought of going up into the attic, and now I had to figure out how to do it in the dark. As a little girl, I’d hated that my closet had an opening to the attic. I’d had more than a kid’s fair share of insomnia, especially after my sister had suggested that an army of bugs was going to descend from the staircase in the middle of the night and eat me alive in my bed.

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