Page 115 of The Woman Left Behind

Fortunately, the Feds were all up in this, and they could get shit done a lot faster than the locals.

It was the same with Cheryl Ballard, Karl Abernathy and Roy Farrell, just without federal backup.

Cheryl had called in sick the last two days at the bookkeeping firm where she worked.

Abernathy had put out a PI shingle in a neighboring town, and he wasn’t in his office when Harry’s deputies swung around. Harry had not bumped up against him since he left, so he figured Abernathy was doing cheating spouse cases, if he was getting any casework at all considering how little he was liked, and the state of his office. It was in a strip mall, and a

Google search Harry did on it showed a façade that wasn’t anything to get excited about.

Farrell had called in sick that day.

They too had alerts on them and their vehicles, and Sean was working on warrants for Abernathy and Farrell’s bank records and cell phones.

Tomorrow, they’d dig into friends, family and co-workers.

Unfortunately, all these fucks were going to make them work for it.

Harry just hoped something came of it.

They were wrapping things up when the screen lit on his phone with a call from Jason.

He glanced at Rus, who was staring at Harry’s phone.

Then he took the call and put it on speaker.

“Hey, Jace,” he greeted. “You’re on speaker and Rus is with me.”

“I’m here with Jess and Lynda, and you’re on speaker too,” he said. “Wade left. We told him we’d brief you. He wanted to get on the road with the Rainiers.”

Harry mentally made a note to tell Polly to call Pullman’s and give them a heads up.

“You have a look at those journals?” Harry asked.

“Yeah, we fuckin’ did,” Lynda’s voice came over the line.

Harry again looked to Rus. Rus’s mouth was tight.

So was Harry’s.

He loosened it to remark, “I sense anger.”

“These were good people, guess you know,” Lynda sniped. “I wanna say I love my husband that much, but Avery Rainier loved her husband like she met him the day before and Cupid got cute. And I suspect you know she thought her daughter filled every day with rainbows.”

Harry clenched his teeth.

Jason took over.

“The entries aren’t long, not until the last few weeks. Just thoughts, feelings, things she wanted to remember, sometimes stuff she wanted to bitch about. Then she got into specifics. Apparently, Dietrich was a good client of Sonny’s. Though, how he was often annoyed Avery. She wrote in her journal they expected Sonny to be at their beck and call. She wrote she wouldn’t put it past them to call at two in the morning if they woke up cold and turned up the furnace, and the temperature didn’t rise within seconds. She also wrote that Sonny didn’t mind. He said it kept him in Coors and his two girls in sundresses.”

Harry closed his eyes.

Coors and sundresses.

Fuck.

He opened them when Jace kept talking. “Thing was, Gerald Dietrich stopped paying Sonny’s invoices.”

Again, he caught Rus’s eyes, because they knew all about that.

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