Page 143 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

He gestured with his chin. “It was probably right around there.”

She followed his gaze to a break in the trees. Boulders had been positioned between the land and the drop-off, but they were spaced far enough apart that anybody could get past them. Assuming they’d even been there back then.

“This was their overlook?” Aspen asked.

“My dad had a friend in the city looking for a summer home. He bought this property not long after Jane died. I’ve been coming up here for cookouts for years. My son takes care of the place when they’re not around. That’s why I have the garage door code. I’ve never once been here that I didn’t think of her.”

“Sure. You obviously loved her so much, what with how you blackmailed my father so you wouldn’t have to face what you did.”

“You think I’m proud of that?”

“I think you’re a coward.”

He let those words settle. “So was your father, I guess.”

“My father did what he did to protect me. Not himself.”

Poor Dad. Aspen’s heart broke for him. He’d faced an impossible choice.

He would have known it wouldn’t be easy to take on the town’s richest family. It would have been him, a widower and single parent who poured cement for a living, against the son of the county prosecutor and the former mayor.

Maybe he’d have been cleared. Maybe he wouldn’t have.

Daddy had agreed to Brent’s crazy scheme to protect her.

Of that, she had no doubt.

And she knew something else too. Whatever he’d meant to say before he’d been intubated a year before, she’d misunderstood. He never would have sent her back here to face all of this. He never would have put her in this danger.

He’d wanted to do himself what he hadn’t before had the courage to do.

He certainly hadn’t meant for Aspen to do it.

If only she’d realized that. But she’d needed to know what happened to her mother. Or she’d thought she had, anyway.

Now she knew. How would her life be better for the knowledge?

Brent shifted beside her, reminding her that her life wouldn’t be all that affected by what she knew because it wasn’t going to last that much longer.

“Now you know the story,” he said. “Where is she?”

“Your plan is to dig her up, I guess. Destroy the evidence linking her to you?”

“My plan is irrelevant to you. Where is she?”

“It’s not going to work. Even if I tell you where she is, you won’t be able to get to her.”

“You let me deal with that. Wherever she is, I can get her.”

Not if Mom was buried under cement. “I don’t know for sure. It’s just a guess. Even if I don’t tell Cote, he’s going to find her. The plan has already been set in motion.”

“What plan?”

She wasn’t going to tell him about the ground-penetrating radar Cote had arranged. That kind of radar could see through cement. He knew what Dad had done for a living. He’d figure it out.

“When they find her body,” Aspen said, “and they will, you can tell them what happened, that you acted in self-defense and then panicked and buried her. Maybe they’ll believe you. But if you kill me”—she turned and leveled her gaze at him—“that’ll be the crime you burn for.”

He swallowed hard. “They’ll have to prove it. But you’re going to disappear.”

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