Page 53 of Eros
Knox nodded. “You got it, Prez.”
“That’s my boy,” my father said with pride. “Now go to your woman, she’s gonna need you.”
I headed out of the room. While Thorne and the girl were dead, this was far from over. Janea had to deal with the aftermath of what came with his death. So, there was more planning that had to be done before we could say all this was behind us.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Janea
Isteppedinsidethepolice station, trudging toward the receptionist’s desk. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sheen across the scuffed white tiled floor. I looked like someone who had been crying in private and was barely holding it together in public. While I knew what happened to my father, that didn’t take away the pain I felt at the loss of the man I once knew.
Behind the front desk, a phone rang followed by another one. The cop sitting at the receptionist’s desk answered one with urgency. “Officer Ruiz, your wife is on line one,”he said.
“I need to file a missing person’s report,” I said, my voice steady but low enough to invite concern.
The officer glanced at me the same time he hung up the phone. “Name?” he asked, as he rolled to the desk behind him, then pulled papers from the printer before he rolled back to the desk he was sitting at, knocking over a cup of coffee in the process.
“Shit!” He grabbed a bunch of white napkins as he tried to soak up the brown liquid now staining the papers.
“Roger Thorne,” I said. “The Lieutenant Governor.”
That got his attention as he stopped trying to clean up the spilled coffee. “Did you just say the Lieutenant Governor? That Roger Thorne?”
“Yes. He’s my father.”
“Oh, fuck. Okay.”
His fingers danced across the keys of the keyboard. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed shut, and I slightly jumped. I was so nervous, but hopefully everyone believed I was a little out of sorts because he was missing.
“When did you last see him?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Then why do you think he’s missing?”
“He always answers my phone calls even if it’s just to check in. I’ve heard nothing, and that’s not like him. I called my brother too, and he said he hasn’t heard from him either.”
“Was he acting unusual the last time you spoke with him?” the officer asked.
Janea nodded. “Yeah, he hasn’t been himself as of late. Paranoid. Agitated. But that’s not unusual around this time of the year.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s around the time my mother died.”
Eros and I had sat down with Axe to come up with the best story to feed to the police. I was against going to them at all, but they convinced me it would be odd if I didn’t. I made several phone calls to his phone to match up with the storyline as well. Eros assured me if I stuck to my story, everything would be fine. Even the Governor could back up my story that I was concerned about his behavior if they asked.
The officer scribbled notes, the scratch of pen against paper oddly loud in the moment. “I didn’t want to believe he’d disappear. But now… I’m scared.”
“You’ll need to sign this statement and write your phone number down under your signature,” the officer said, handing me the paper. “It’s just a written account of what you just told me. The detectives will call you to follow up once they are assigned.”
I signed the paper as calmly as I could. If we got caught in this lie, we would all be up shit’s creek.
“How long does that usually take?”
“With it being a high-profile missing person, I would say around an hour.”
“Okay.”
