The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

His beard quirked, his throat bobbed with his swallow, he put down his fork and picked up a piece of bacon.

And then he said, “It was Betty,” and he gnawed off some bacon.

Holy cow.

“Pull some stools around this way, lovely,” I ordered Celeste.

She did as asked, sat beside me, and we gave Bohannan all our attention.

He didn’t make us wait.

“I was right and wrong. He was military. An army sniper. Info’s still coming in, but what we know is, he’s pegged a lot of kill shots. He was decorated. He got out a while ago and was making a mint taking weekend warriors from whatever city they lived in on hunting and camping trips, teaching them to shoot, the whole survival-in-a-luxury-tent thing. Lots of four-star Yelp ratings. He expanded, took corporate types and millionaires out on excursions they paid a fortune for, including hunting big game in Africa. Big man expert lording it over a lot of important men who were not real men, but they played that on vacation.”

And the puzzle pieces started falling.

I nodded when he paused.

“He had that setup in Wyoming but moved it here about two years ago.”

What was left unsaid was because of me.

“He hooked up with Betty, my guess is, because he somehow figured out that Betty’s husband Ed had also had an affair with Audrey. Or maybe he targeted her because he sensed that wound, he pulled it out of her, and the rest of it came from there. She was nursing this hurt, he tapped that vein, became her lover, groomed her, and even now, under Robertson and McGill’s interrogation, she was unfazed. At first, including about Alice, who according to her, was a spoiled brat.”

I winced.

“Though, after she said that, McGill told her what he did to Alice. She clearly had no idea, and that shook her. But it was the only thing that shook her.”

Good God.

That took “woman scorned” to a whole new level.

“Who figured out the Betty angle?” I asked.

“That’d be Robertson. Though it’s Robertson because we talked shit out, I mentioned Ray, and Betty, and he got a hunch. He had her pulled in first thing. When she found out what happened, she spilled. She’s beside herself, because he saw no way out, which was probably why he retreated to his own cabin. Though honest to Christ, don’t know why he stayed local and didn’t bolt, but I suspect something was in that cabin he didn’t want us to see.”

He paused to throw back a hit of coffee.

And then he went back to it.

“Even though, in the brief shootout, he also tagged one of the agents who’d been brought in for the hunt. Everyone was all geared up, and we’d been willing to run him to ground, so we were ready to wait him out, even if it meant starving him out and that took a year. So he was going to get no joy. He went to his cabin because he’d rigged that cabin. It was an inferno before anyone could spit. He died inside. She loved him, or convinced herself she did, because she convinced herself he loved her, when he didn’t.”

Bohannan’s look on me intensified.

“He dominated her.”

“Good Lord,” I murmured, not missing what he was saying.

He gave her her kink, and that spilled into life.

“It’s still hot, but they already found his body.”

“Audrey was best friends with a woman whose husband she slept with?” I asked.

Bohannan shrugged and forked up more eggs. “I guess you take ’em as you can get ’em. Though, he set that up. What we missed was, Alice wasn’t part of her afternoon kid club until this school year. Betty recruited her at the end of last year. What we also missed, but only because he wouldn’t let on and she made sure she didn’t, Ed’s one serious dick. And that ‘pin money’ was all she had to play with, because he holds the purse strings, and he’s not stingy with playing golf and taking scuba diving trips, but he is with her. She was tired of a lot of the other moms, especially ‘the ones who work,’ having Louis Vuitton when she was carrying Target. She charged twenty bucks a day per girl, five girls, she shared pretty proud that she’d earned herself a Louis Vuitton, a Valentino and a Fendi.”

“Sounds like Betty had a lot to get off her chest,” I noted.

“Betty lost her psychopath boyfriend and sang like a canary,” Jace muttered.

I shot him a smile and looked back to Bohannan.

“And Malorie?” I asked after he swallowed his eggs. “Like you thought, just a pawn?”

“Malorie was because Betty was ticked that Lana didn’t invite her into her crew. Malorie also was because Malorie drove Betty crazy. Lana was caught powerless to get out of a situation that harmed her. This meant she taught her daughter to be sure to be able to make her own way. Malorie was an overachiever, and a bossy one. She was apparently always organizing things or setting up things or making suggestions about how people could do things better, which Betty wasn’t big on. Because this included Betty, who Malorie apparently told should open up her own daycare and shared she thought she was making a big mistake when Betty declined that option.”