Reyes’s brother walking into the office was one such moment. Not that brother. Not the godly one. The other one. The one that could have been his brother by kidnapping had the people who kidnapped him as a child not handed him over to a monster. That was my suspicion, anyway.
I’d been investigating the Fosters before my world got turned upside down, before I’d ended up, first, living in an abandoned convent for eight months while the bun I’d popped in the oven baked to simple perfection, and after, living in upstate New York for a month under the throes of amnesia because of having to give up said perfect bun.
As far as I could tell, the Fosters panicked when their families got suspicious. That was my best guess, anyway. Why else kidnap a child and then get rid of him weeks later? So, instead of handing Reyes back to his birth family, they sold him to Earl Walker. Or just handed him over. Either way, they gave Reyes to a monster. And not in the supernatural way, either. Earl was a man so evil, so vile, it wafted off him like a toxin.
Cookie and I had yet to figure out if Shawn Foster, the man standing in my office waiting for me to speak to him, was a legitimate adoption or if he, too, had been kidnapped.
“Are you Ms. Davidson?” he asked, his voice low and smooth.
When Cookie had first described Shawn Foster to me, she’d commented on how opposite he was in looks to Reyes. But that applied only to his coloring. Where Reyes was dark, Shawn was light. Literally and celestially. His aura was stunning. Brighter than most. More pure. He had blond hair cropped short and pale skin. But his features were bizarrely similar. Beautiful. Angelic. Very much like Rey’aziel’s. Which would explain why my suspicions shifted into overdrive.
“Yes.” I stepped forward and took his outstretched hand. “Sorry, you just look really familiar.”
“I should,” he said with a grin. “You’ve been investigating me for a while now.”
*
We stood in an awkward silence, mostly because it took me a moment to recover from his statement. He knew I’d been investigating him. His parents. Did he know about Reyes? He was younger than Reyes. My age, actually. And from what we found out earlier about him, he was living with his parents again while he went to graduate school at UNM. He was in engineering. And he was still gazing at me, waiting for his statement to sink in.
“Oh, right. Well”—I shot a save me expression to Cookie, who was still busy trying to reset her jaw—“not so much you as … your parents.” I realized too late that investigating his parents could seem worse than investigating him.
“Good,” he said, dropping my hand and acknowledging Cookie with a nod. “Then you’ll have a jump start on my case, should you choose to accept it.”
“Your case?” I asked, gesturing toward my office, which was just past Cookie’s, a.k.a. our reception area.
“Yes. I’d like you to find my real parents.”
I almost tripped, then closed the door, giving Cookie one last holy crap look before it closed completely.
“Please, have a seat.” I offered him the chair across from my desk, then went straight for the Bunn. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He was still standing, checking out the digs. “This is nice.”
“Thanks. My husband recently had it redecorated.”
“Right.” He sat down at last and put a folder he’d been carrying on my desk. “He owns the bar and grill downstairs.”
Was that all he knew? I could only hope at this point. “Yes, he does.”
I’d been having strange encounters with both the living and the dead, with both demons and angels, with poltergeists and the mentally unstable, my entire life, but I could honestly say this rated really close to the top.
I sat across from him and took a sip of liquid courage. “How did you know about the investigation?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. But when I saw you drive by my parents’ house the other day, I remembered seeing you parked down the street about a year ago.”
“You have a great memory.”
“You were there for quite a while.”
Try days. “And that’s unusual because…?”
“You parked. You never got out. You didn’t live in the neighborhood, but you sat down the street for some time.”
“Of course.” Wasn’t he the perceptive one.
“So, the next time you did a drive-by, I took down your license plate and had a friend run it.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Very.”
“And resourceful,” I added.
He lifted a shoulder in modesty.
“What have your parents told you?”
“That my mother was in labor for thirty-six hours. That she eventually had to have a C-section. That she nursed me until I was two.”
“I see.” When we’d looked into the case before, we were almost certain Shawn Foster had been abducted by the Fosters as well, and that they’d gone through a shady adoption agency, one that had only been open a few months and had facilitated only three adoptions, Shawn Foster being one of them. “But you don’t believe them?” I asked. Why would he be here if he did?
“I don’t. For several reasons. And I don’t think you do, either.”
I still had to wonder if he knew anything about Reyes. I gestured toward the file. “May I?”