Page 22 of Bad Blood
I turned the question over in my head.You want the Masters as badly as I do. They’d killed his daughter. But though this case had appeared related, my gut said that Judd—unlike the director and Agent Briggs—had watched Agent Sterling very carefully through the whole exchange.
He hadn’t been backing Briggs’s decision. He’d been backing hers.
“A girl was missing.” I repeated the words Agent Sterling had said the day before. “A girl that Michael knew.”
“Michael was coming back here.” Judd had never doubted that—not for a second. “And when one of my kids goes down an emotional rabbit hole like that one, he—or she—sure as hell doesn’t do it alone.”
Judd gave those words a moment to sink in, then reached into his bag and pulled out a folder.
“What’s this?” I asked when he handed it to me.
“A file someone tried very hard to bury,” he replied. “While you were off gallivanting after Miss Delacroix this morning, one of Ronnie’s contacts managed to dig it up.”
Ronniewas short for Veronica—as in Agent Veronica Sterling.
“Inmate named Robert Mills.” Judd resorted to speaking in fragments as my fingers found their way to the edge of the folder. “Convicted of murdering his ex-wife. Killed in prison not long after he was convicted.”
The man Redding talked to. My grip on the edge of the folder tightened.The one whose ex-wife’s body was never found. The one who was taken, just like my mother.
As I opened the folder, Judd caught my chin, and his weathered hands turned my face gently toward his.
“Cassie-girl, don’t go down this rabbit hole alone.”
The information in the file was bare-bones. Robert Mills had been convicted of murdering his ex-wife. Despite the fact that her body had never been found, there had been a preponderance of physical evidence. His DNA was found at the crime scene, which was soaked in his ex-wife’s blood. He had a history of violence. Mallory Mills had been living under an assumed name at the time of her murder; Robert had recently discovered her location. The police had found three blood-soaked bullets at the scene, and each had tested positive for Mallory’s DNA. Forensic analysis of a gun found in a nearby Dumpster had revealed that at least six shots had been fired, leaving police to conjecture that the other three bullets had remained embedded in the victim’s body.
The gun was registered to her ex-husband.
You were left, shot and bleeding, on the floor for more than five minutes. There were pools of blood—upwards of 42 percent of the blood in your body.
Beside me, Dean studied the crime scene photos on his phone. Back at the house, Agent Sterling was probably tacking up her copies of these pictures, one more piece of the puzzle on the basement wall. I’d chosen a different location to process what I’d read on the plane.
The cemetery.
I stared at my mother’s name, etched into the tombstone:LORELAI HOBBES. I’d known before we’d buried the body that the remains we’d laid to rest there weren’t hers. Now I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that they might belong to Mallory Mills. This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about the life my mother had snuffed out to save her own. But now I wasn’t just thinking about the body six feet beneath us; I was thinking about a living, breathing woman, holding her image in my mind as I walked back through the evidence that had been used to convict her ex-husband of murder.
Three missing bullets. I imagined lying on my back, bullets burning in my gut, my chest, my leg.You would have lost consciousness. Without immediate medical intervention, you would have died.
“But the Masters chose you,” I said, my voice so soft that I could barely hear the words. “Just like they chose my mother.”
If I was right, Mallory Mills hadn’t died of those gunshot wounds. The Masters had shot her, then saved her. They’d taken her, framed her husband, and, once she’d healed, forced her to fightherpredecessor to the death. They’d held her captive, right up until they’d taken my mother.
“What do they have in common?” Dean asked quietly.
“Mallory was in her early twenties.” I fell back on facts. “My mother was twenty-eight when she disappeared. Both of them were young, healthy. Mallory’s hair was dark. My mom’s was red.” I tried not to remember my mother’s infectious smile, the way she’d looked dancing in the snow. “Both of them had been abused.”
My mother had left home at sixteen to escape a father more monstrous than Michael’s. And Mallory Mills? There was a reason she’d been living under an alias, a reason that the district attorney was able to convict her ex without a body.
You choose women who have experienced violence firsthand. You choose fighters. You choose survivors. And then you make them do the unthinkable to survive.
I wanted to step toward Dean. I wanted to close my lips over his, to forget about Mallory Mills and my mother’s name on this tombstone and every single thing I’d read in that file.
But I couldn’t. “When I went to see your father, he quoted Shakespeare at me.The Tempest. ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’”
Dean knew his father well enough to read between the lines. “He told you that your mom might not just be their captive. He told you she might be one of them.”
“We don’t know what those monsters have done to her, Dean. We don’t know what she’s had to become to survive.” A chill settled over my body, even though I could still feel the heat from Dean’s. “We do know that she’s not just another victim. She’s the Pythia.Lady Justice—that’s what Nightshade called her.Judge and jury. Like she was one of them.”
“Not by choice.” Dean said the words I needed to hear. That didn’t make them true.
