Page 69 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

The gap ahead widened. Summerly and Baby rocked back and forth in their seats as he surged and braked, surged and braked. “If we can get through this mess I can make it in an hour. Jesus.” He held his head.

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe there’s a chance. What if it’s someone from one of those missing-person volunteer groups? The families agree to see them. They have a meeting in the home, look at the victim’s room, nab an item to put in the box. Maybe we’re looking at someone from a church group? What about a journalist? Maybe a reporter visited every single family — ”

“Dave.” Baby put a hand on his leg. “Your desperate hope that the world isn’t stuffed full of evil cops is seriously cute, but it’s wrong. It had to be a cop who snuck into Troy’s house and placed the note saying where Daisy’s body was. Only a cop would know they didn’t have the back of the house covered. And only a cop could have taken it from him at the crime scene.”

“I just can’t get my head around the fact that it’s a cop who’s done this,” he said. “This is ... it always makes me sick, this stuff. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not an idiot. I’ve been through a lot of corruption sweeps in my time. Guys I have known and trusted were picked up. I just never get used to it. Feels worse to me when it’s a cop.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Baby said. Her phone rang. Men’s Central Jail. She picked both phones up and handed Summerly his.

“Troy.” Baby drew in a deep breath. “I’ve got a lot of things to run by you.”

“Before you start, I have something that might help,” Troy Hansen said. Baby put a finger in her ear to block the sound of Summerly making another call beside her. “I spoke to Rhonda earlier. She asked me about a girl named Chelsea Hupp. Asked me if I killed her.”

“Right?”

“I’ve never heard of Chelsea Hupp,” Troy said. Somewhere in the background, a prison door buzzed and slammed. “I’ve been racking my brain about it. I’m certain that I’ve never heard that name before. But Rhonda said the girl died when I was a kid.”

“Okay?”

Troy struggled. His voice came out thin, shaken. “I did something when I was seven or eight. My parents told me that nobody got hurt, but ... but maybe they were just trying to protect me. Or themselves.”

CHAPTER79

“HEAR ME OUT,”Will Brogan said.

“Hear you out?”I snapped. My senses were returning; the numbness was fading. I was coming to the knife-edge of jittery, uncontrollable fury now, my flight reflex subsiding and my fight reflex taking over. My instincts were telling me to punch Brogan in the side of the skull. I could see myself doing it. But I tamped the urge down. We were going eighty miles an hour down the highway, and he had his gun in the cup holder by his left knee, out of my reach. I already had a bullet hole in my calf that was slowly filling my right shoe with blood. I didn’t need another one in the stomach or the chest.

“Imagine my life back then,” he said. The urge to punch him sizzled in me again. “I’ve been demoted at the precinct and we’re struggling for money. My wife tells me she’s leaving me. My second wife. Not the one I told you about before. I’d literally just walked out of our last marriage-counseling session in Burbank. She paid for a bunch of sessions and wanted to use them all, even though our marriage was in the toilet. The last one was supposed to be about us figuring out a way to stay friends. But she decided at the end that she didn’t want to do that.”

“Brogan,” I said, seething. “Are you really trying to tell me about your fucking divor — ”

“Shut up,” he said. He spoke the words calmly. Quietly. With a deadly finality. The eyes that cut toward me were hollow.

“She said that what had happened to me when I was a kid had killed all the feeling between us. And it was systematically destroying everything I touched,” Brogan said. “According to her, until I dealt with it, I was just going to continue on in one job after another, one marriage after another, one friendship after another. On and on and on, never finding an escape from the anger.”

I said nothing. The car slowed. Brogan turned off the highway onto a dirt road.

“I left the therapy session with that idea on my mind,” he said.“Deal with what happened, or you’ll keep destroying everything.”

“What happened?”

“Troy Hansen happened,” Brogan said.

Now we were climbing through rocky forest, the car kicking up dust. I could hear cicadas in the trees and the distant wail of emergency vehicle sirens. Someone must have called in the scene on the highway: Jarrod’s body on the road. My car standing there with the door open and the wheel off.

“I was five,” Brogan said. “Chelsea was six. She was a Hupp, and so was her mother. Me and my dad were Brogans. Both my mom and Chelsea’s dad had died, and our parents met when the two of us were just toddlers. They never got married. Not officially. But Chelsea was my sister, you know? I thought of her that way. We were just smitten with each other. We did everything together. I couldn’t remember my life before Chelsea and my stepmother. We lived in a farmhouse outside Ukiah. Same town as Troy. We were happy.”

A rabbit was startled out of the forest, froze in the middle of the dirt road. Brogan didn’t slow. I winced, waiting for the wet thump. It didn’t come. I turned in my seat and saw the rabbit rise from the huddled shape it had frozen into and skitter away.

I also spied the clothes in the back of the car, the leather belt lying coiled on the seat like a snake.

CHAPTER80

“I LIT A FIRE,”Troy said.

Baby gripped the phone, listening. The traffic had cleared and Summerly was talking on his phone and driving one-handed, sailing past cars on the freeway like they were standing still.

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