All of the brightness drained from Caroline’s face, leaving her looking drawn, almost pained. “You asked the man you described as having a dangerous vibe if he kidnapped your cousin right off the street and never returned her?”
Now Emery understood the look. The senator might have been there for the initial talk, but she wouldn’t always be there. That left a lot of wiggle room for Wren to do something very bad. Emery didn’t think he would. It was just a feeling, one with no basis in reality because she knew absolutely nothing about him other than his love for black business suits and sentences with too many words, and both of those struck her as over the top.
Maybe she trusted the senator’s instincts. Emery couldn’t really explain it, but part of her did worry that this is how men like Wren got what they wanted. They won women over. Unlucky for him, she possessed more than the usual amount of distrust when it came to strangers insisting they were safe. “I was more subtle than that.”
“Are you sure?”
Emery pretended Caroline didn’t look horrified and two seconds away from calling 9–1–1. “He said he didn’t do it and left,” Emery explained.
Silence descended in the cubicle. Phones rang in the office. The sounds of conversation floated around and people laughed over by the kitchenette. But in that cubicle for those few seconds everything stopped.
After some rapid blinking Caroline spoke again. “There had to be more than that.”
“I talk with law enforcement people all day. Have conversations with people who have lost loved ones. When it came to this guy I got three questions out, he blew off two of them and walked out.” Thinking back Emery wasn’t even sure she got to ask three full questions. She certainly didn’t get much in the way of answers.
“Was he angry?”
Emery swiveled her chair back and forth and searched for the right way to describe it. The words didn’t come. Probably because Wren was sort of hard to decipher. You kind of had to experience him to believe it. “I don’t even know how to tell.”
“But you have somewhere to start, right?” Someone called out to Caroline, but she shook her head and kept her focus on Emery. “Now we have a name and we know the senator has some background intel. You can investigate from there.”
“As if what I’ve said isn’t weird enough, try this: no.”
“What are you answering?”
Emery couldn’t blame her boss for the confusion. She guessed she wore the same sort of pinched look, wrinkled brown expression in the senator’s office. “We have a name—Brian Jacobs.”
“Who is that?”
Good freaking question. “Wren.”
Caroline shook her head. It looked like she was trying to figure out what was happening. “You lost me. Again.”
That made two of them. “That’s the name Wren uses. And on the subject of Wren, I don’t know his name.”
Caroline sputtered a few times before getting any words out. “I don’t—”
“It could be a first name or a last name. I have no clue.”
“I wish I knew what question to ask next.”
“Now you know how it feels to have a conversation with Wren. It’s like wading through peanut butter.” That didn’t really nail it, but Emery didn’t have anything else. She feared she’d spend a good part of the evening thinking about Wren and trying to come up with another description.
Some of the color rushed back into Caroline’s face. “Interesting metaphor.”
“You didn’t see him. You didn’t try to understand his sentences.”
When another person called out Caroline’s name, she held up a finger and nodded. “Someone clearly wants to talk to me, but I’m intrigued with your visit. I want to know more.”
“He’s probably a kidnapper and a killer.” Emery could almost imagine him sitting in his house alone, tapping his fingers together as he plotted his next crime.
“Right, you don’t believe that.” Caroline stood up. “Doesn’t matter. Figure it out.”
Not exactly the you can’t do this . . . be careful response Emery expected. “What?”
“This is what you do for other people. Do it here. Call the detective who was on the case. Talk to your dad and to . . .” Caroline drifted off for a second. “What’s with that look?”
Emery hadn’t even tried to hide the wince. “I forgot I have dinner with Dad tonight.”
“You sound thrilled.”
Her father tended to lapse into full-on professor mode every Monday night, just as she arrived. He talked philosophy and got all haughty. He reiterated how much he despised her job and her reluctance to get a master’s degree.
He didn’t exactly hide that she was a complete embarrassment to him. Emery hated to think how he described her when he got together with his professor friends. She bet he frowned a lot. “He hates it when I talk about Tiffany.”
Caroline snorted. “Tough shit.”