At her pause, Joshua’s eyes narrowed. “And?”
“Cip’s looking into his background. Right now, we know his name came up in a smuggling investigation down there. He disappeared about a month ago.”
“That’s when he took the job as your doorman?”
She nodded.
“What kind of smuggling?”
“South American artifacts and gems—primarily emeralds. Presumably drugs, too. I don’t think Wendy needs to know these details, but that’s your call.”
“This son of a bitch Perez asked Wendy about you and jewels. Hell, Juliet—” He swore, kicking a loose rock, winging it against the barn. “Don’t tell me this goddamn mess is about stolen emeralds.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “I wish it were.”
He inhaled through his nose, reining in his emotions, then sighed at her. “Go on.”
“Ethan Brooker led some kind of black op mission to rescue an American Bobby Tatro was holding in Colombia. I don’t have all the details.”
“Brooker?” Joshua exhaled, shaking his head. “Damn, Juliet. I thought you were finished with him.”
“Well—it’s tough if some friend of his gets snatched by an ex-con who threatened to kill me.”
“That’s who was kidnapped? One of Brooker’s Special Forces buddies?”
Juliet didn’t answer right away. Cip had produced a name for her. The Carhills of west Texas. Ultrarich, ultraprivate. A young, brilliant son reportedly into adventures in South America. She immediately thought of George’s Texan in the black cowboy hat, but the information wasn’t solid enough for her to share with her brother.
“I don’t think it was a Special Forces type,” she said. “Anyway, when Ethan and his rescue team showed up for their guy, Tatro had already taken off.”
“He knew Brooker was on his way?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m trying—” She reined in her own scattered emotions. “I can’t get my head around how and why Tatro got involved in this business in Colombia in the first place.”
Joshua nodded in agreement. “It sounds like a big operation to pull off fresh out of prison.”
“Then there’s what he and Perez—‘Juan’—wanted with me. Tatro’s had it in for me since Syracuse. He thinks I cheated to find him at the Wal-Mart parking lot.”
“You didn’t just happen to run into him?”
Juliet shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Not to me.”
She took a breath, then plunged in with the rest of what she had to say. “There’s a picture.” She paused, debating how much to tell her brother about the picture Ethan had found in Tatro’s Colombian hut. But she told him everything.
“The sick fuck,” Joshua said when she finished. “If the doorman, not Tatro, took the picture, then why did Tatro up and kill him? Complicates things, doesn’t it?” He rubbed the back of his neck, sighed at the sky, then returned his hard gaze to his sister. “Wendy picked a hell of a day to sneak off to New York.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Yeah. Me, too. What are you going to do now?”
She tried to smile. “Take a walk down to the lake.”
“Don’t be too long.” He almost managed to smile back at her. “Wendy’s apple crisp will be out of the oven soon.”
Nate Winter waited for Ethan on the small dock on the wide, slow Cumberland River. Ethan had called from the Nashville airport. Winter, a senior deputy U.S. marshal, and his new bride, Sarah Dunnemore Winter, were spending a long weekend in Night’s Landing, where the Dunnemores had lived for generations. Sarah’s parents had finally retired and were living there more or less full-time. But they were traveling now—India. Her father, a retired diplomat, had a touch of wanderlust.
The Dunnemores had been in the Netherlands in the spring while Ethan was posing as their property manager, after a tentative lead had taken him to Night’s Landing. After months of no answers, no suspects in Char’s murder, he’d decided to shake some trees on his own and see if her killers fell out.
Generous, decent people, surprisingly down-to-earth, the Dunnemores had never questioned his story about being a good ol’ boy from Texas who was working as a gardener until he got his break as a songwriter.
Ethan had written a few songs during his weeks in Night’s Landing. He’d given one to Sarah and Nate as a wedding present, intending it as a bit of a joke—but Sarah had told him she really liked it. And she wasn’t one for polite lies. She’d meant it.
He passed the tiny cottage where he’d lived, where he’d almost given up on finding the answers to Char’s death—where he’d almost given up on himself. But Sarah’s push for answers of her own—who’d shot her brother in Central Park, what did it have to do with her and her family—and her trust, her essential kindness, had helped Ethan to pull himself back from the precipice, from the point of no return.