Grave Secrets (Manhunters 1)

“We’ll stop just inside the county line to regroup.”

“This is insane,” she murmured. She thought she was desperate to escape Hank, Lyle, and Hazard, but now, given the opportunity with a group of strangers with some clandestine agenda, she realized she feared the unknown more than she feared Hank.

And that shook her resistance.

“Fine.” She turned toward Ian’s truck and passed him without a word.

She opened the door and flipped the passenger’s seat forward, then remembered Jamison’s car seat. Just as she opened her mouth to say she had to get it, Savannah spotted one of his two seats already belted into the center of the bench, a DVD player attached to the back of the passenger’s seat.

Ian slid behind the wheel, and she shot him a glare across the cab. “Just think of everything, don’t you?”

He jammed the keys into the ignition and turned the engine over while Jamison climbed in, oblivious to the tension between them.

Everly slid into her Jeep with her phone pressed to her ear.

Savannah climbed into the truck, and Ian pulled out of the alley as she buckled her seat belt.

While Ian explained the DVD player to Jamison, Savannah closed her eyes and rested her head back against the seat, trying to prepare herself for the immediate future. It would be a long, bumpy ride until she found stability again. Her feelings for Ian only complicated the challenge. She could only hope for distraction to keep her from falling apart.

How could she have let another man do this to her? Dupe her into trusting him. Into believing he was someone he wasn’t. At this point, Ian could be as bad or even worse than Hank. A sense of self-loathing flooded her. She had to stop trusting people.

Misty popped to mind. Savannah opened her eyes. Staring straight out the windshield, she told Ian, “I need to tell Misty.” When he didn’t respond, she added an emphatic “She’ll worry.”

Ian glanced in the rearview mirror at Jamison. Savannah checked on him over her shoulder and found him with headphones on, absorbed in a movie, dancing in his seat.

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “This isn’t the way I’d hoped things would go down.”

“That means nothing to me. What things? Go down with who? What, exactly, are you sorry for? Lying to me? Sleeping with me? Uprooting us? Running roughshod over my life?”

He exhaled and rubbed his forehead. “Very little of what I have to tell you will make you happy or make things right.”

“I’ve already figured that out. Can I please call Misty?” The thought of her worrying made Savannah sick. “She’s going to think Hank chopped us up into pieces and threw us down a mine shaft.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t call Misty.”

“Don’t call me that, and why not?”

“Because, unfortunately, Misty is at the center of the reason we’re here. God, I hate having to be the one to tell you this, but she’s involved in Hank and Lyle’s manipulation.”

More confusion tightened her already tangled thoughts. “That’s ridiculous. No, it’s insane. Misty hates Hank and Lyle. She loathes them. And she’s a good, honest, hardworking person. She would never do anything for them. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He heaved a sigh, shifting in his seat. “Yesterday, before I came into the café, I heard Hank threaten her in the parking lot while she was taking out the trash.”

“Misty’s never let Hank intimidate her, and he has nothing to threaten her with.”

“I know this is going to be hard to grasp, but Misty has been counterfeiting those passports you found in Hank’s patrol car.”

“Are you pulling this stuff out of your ass?” she yelled. “That’s crazy. That’s laughable.”

“I heard him tell her that if she didn’t get you to dump me, he was going to send the FBI to raid her barn. So my team and I went to the barn while she was at work and found a basement hidden under all the junk.”

Savannah’s mouth hung open. She was beginning to think he might actually be insane. Or on drugs. Or delusional. Or maybe this was all a nightmare, and she’d wake and have a wild tale to tell Misty and Ian in the morning.

Only she was still stuck in this car. With a very probable lunatic. A lunatic she’d slept with and thought she knew intimately up until half an hour ago.

“You’re either full of shit, certifiable, a con artist or your eyes and your brain were playing tricks on you. Her father was a hoarder. That place is rotting from the baseboards up. She works double shifts at the diner just to pay the bills. She doesn’t know anything about counterfeiting, and if she’d found that kind of equipment, she’d have sold it long ago to pay off the property’s back taxes so she didn’t have to work so hard.”

“I know that’s what she’s told you,” he said, his voice maddeningly compassionate. “And what you believe.”