Heart racing, she drove past his car as he got out. He didn’t pay any attention to her. Or her common black Honda Accord. It didn’t stand out. Just like she didn’t stand out.
Danielle went straight home. When she pulled into her garage she turned off the ignition and sat there. Her knuckles were white. Slowly, she peeled her hands off the steering wheel. They were sore from gripping so hard.
She went inside and poured a glass of wine. Drank it quickly, then poured another, and picked up her phone.
“Hello,” the familiar voice said. A voice that belonged to a man she had once loved with all her heart and soul … and now hated.
“Have you cheated on your wife yet? Because you know you will. You’re all the same. All of you. Disgusting.”
“Danielle.”
“Why did you do it? Why?”
She asked the same question every time she called him. He never had a good answer. Because there wasn’t a good answer.
“I was a fool.”
“I hate you.”
“I know. Is that why you called? To tell me how much you hate me?”
“No.” She closed her eyes. “I loved you so much. I loved you so much it hurts. And—” Her voice cracked. The pain was real. Still so very real. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Whoever said that hadn’t lost their entire world.
“I’m sorry, Danielle. I truly am sorry.”
“It should have been you. I wish you had died instead.”
“So do I, Danielle. But you can’t—”
She ended the call, unable to listen to her ex-husband anymore. She threw her half-filled wineglass across the room and screamed as it shattered against the wall. She watched the red liquid run down the plaster for several minutes, her mind blank.
Then she walked back to the kitchen, retrieved another wineglass, and poured more wine. She sat at the table and stared straight ahead as she drank.
Thinking.
Planning.
Hating.
It was so much easier to hate than it was to forgive.
Chapter Eight
THURSDAY
David left Santa Barbara at dawn for the three-hour drive to Corcoran State Prison. Rising early wasn’t a problem for him—he was up before 6:00 A.M. every morning. But he felt that this entire endeavor was an exercise in futility. While Max’s analysis was intriguing, when a man is convicted of killing his son, he is most likely guilty. Prisons are full of killers and most are there because they did the crime.
Adam Donovan had been convicted of murder without taking the stand in his own defense. There was no hard evidence against him—even the circumstantial evidence seemed thin when David read the trial transcript. The prosecution had gone for the lighter sentence—they claimed that Donovan had accidentally killed his son and in a panic buried his body only a few miles from their house. According to a conversation Max had had with the public defender who had represented Donovan, she’d urged him to take a plea deal of involuntary manslaughter and five years in prison. He refused.
Either the guy was truly innocent, or he thought he could beat the rap because the evidence was so shaky. His alibi was his mistress—the same alibi that Andrew Stanton used—but unlike the Stanton case, the police didn’t find Donovan’s mistress reliable. They completely discredited her on the stand, and while she didn’t waver from her claim that they’d been together the night that Chris Donovan had been killed, in the end, the jury hadn’t believed her.
It didn’t help Donovan’s case that he initially lied to police about where he was when his son was kidnapped. Only when the police seriously looked at him did he give up his mistress. It also didn’t help that Donovan had a prior record—he’d been arrested for assault when he was nineteen, given time served and community service, but the ding was on his record.
David didn’t think that information should have been given to the jury twelve years after the fact, because Donovan had kept his nose clean since. David had a couple of dings on his own record before he had enlisted in the army. He’d been an angry teenager, and was still angry much of the time—but he’d learned to temper his darker nature through exercise, working long hours, and his daughter. He didn’t want to give his ex-girlfriend any reason to prevent him from seeing Emma.
What seemed particularly odd to David was that the defense hadn’t even asked the judge to disallow the assault. After more than a decade? Before he was even married? It seemed like negligence or incompetence.
David didn’t have a lot of respect for the legal system. He’d had his own issues when he had to fight for the right to see his daughter. He paid child support, he wanted to be in her life, but because he’d never been married to her mother, he’d had an uphill battle and Brittney constantly held his visitation over his head like a fucking carrot.
Do what I say or you’ll never see Emma.
So he jumped through the hoops because there was nothing more important to him than his daughter.
Which is why he was having a difficult time with this investigation Max had launched. Adam Donovan had been convicted in a court of law of murdering his son. Even though the evidence was circumstantial, he had been convicted, he hadn’t filed an appeal, and statistics showed that he was most likely guilty. David wanted to punch him more than talk to him.
Not only that, but Max was far better at getting people to talk to her. Often because she irritated them so much, they couldn’t shut up. David wasn’t a reporter. He wasn’t a cop. His claim to fame had been ten years in the U.S. Army, eight of them as a Ranger. He had no college degree, and his only training outside of the military was when he went into private security.
“You’re a dad,” Max had said. “You’ll know what to say, and you’ll know if he’s guilty.”
He disagreed, but she didn’t budge. Max didn’t falter when she believed that she was right. Ever. It was enough to drive anyone crazy—especially since she was rarely wrong.
Maybe after his failed attempt to meet with the Porters yesterday, she would understand he wasn’t good at this. They wouldn’t talk to him and threatened to call the cops when he showed up at their house.
Try again, Max said. Maybe they’ll have a change of heart after sleeping on it, she said.
Right.
And that’s what Max didn’t understand. If David was in the same situation as Doug Porter, he would have done exactly the same thing. Well, not exactly. He wouldn’t have threatened to call the cops. He would have slugged the asshole wanting to talk about his dead kid.
But if anything happened to Emma like what happened to these little boys, David wouldn’t rest until the killer was dead. These dads, while they grieved, would never take the law into their own hands, which meant David didn’t completely understand them. He wasn’t like them just because he happened to be a father. Why didn’t Max see that?