The Truth About Comfort Cove

“Lonna Baker.”

Good. Even if she left, he’d be able to find her. And find out what happened.

“Are you married, Lonna?”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

The ante had just upped. “I need to know who did this to you, Lonna.”

“I don’t want to press charges.” She spoke carefully as though the process was becoming more painful.

“A crime has been committed here. The state could press charges.”

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; Now her gaze, little slits within puffy skin, darted. Now she was afraid.

But not for herself?

“What kid beat you up, Lonna?”

Tears pooled within her swollen eyes, and eventually trickled over the edges of her bruises.

“My kid.”

He should have expected that. He hadn’t.

He wanted to puke.

R amsey called Kim and then sat with Lonna in an interrogation room until the female detective arrived. He didn’t offer her anything to drink, not certain that she should ingest anything. Instead, he called for emergency medical services. They arrived just about the same time Kim did.

Half an hour later, he was on his way to meet Randall Davenport, Jack Colton’s boss from twenty-five years ago. He took Ocean Drive across town, adding a good twenty minutes to his trip. He had to get out. To breathe fresh air. Comfort Cove wasn’t a huge city like Boston. It also wasn’t a small town like Aurora. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to Vienna, Kentucky.

Ramsey could process a dead body, male or female, without losing his appetite. Especially if it was a clean shot to the head that did the killing. He could handle guts and gore from bar fights and suicides just fine. Car accidents and even strangulations were part of the job. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to seeing women and children abused. It wasn’t death that bothered him. Suffering did.

And he had to make certain that Claire Sanderson, dead or alive, hadn’t suffered. He knew her family, had an invitation to her sister’s wedding. They needed answers—were suffering hugely without them—and it was his job to find those answers.

Randall Davenport, a portly man, invited Ramsey into his office and offered him a cup of coffee. Ramsey accepted the drink in the guise of politeness, of friendliness, not because he intended to drink a sip of it.

“I was not quite thirty when my old man hired Jack Colton,” Randall said, leaning back in the chair behind his desk. “Not all that much older than Jack was, which is why I remember him.”

Ramsey, with his portfolio resting on his thigh, settled back into the armchair on the opposite side of Davenport’s desk.

The room was clean. Organized. With family photos and local awards on the walls.

“You service all of eastern Massachusetts,” Ramsey said, reading a sign on the wall.

“That’s right.”

“Have you always?”

“Yes. My father bought the business from East Coast Meats. They’d started with two brothers. One who processed meat and the other who delivered it. When the one brother died, the one who processed the meat sold off that part of the business. My father bought it—I was ten at the time—and we’ve distributed for them, exclusively, since day one.”

He’d heard of East Coast Meats. They provided beef to all of the restaurants in the tourist district of Comfort Cove. And to places in Boston and surrounding cities, as well. He’d also already known what Davenport had just told him.