Page 125 of Riptide
"I am. She just left. She's gone, Gabe. She told me everything and then she tied me up and she left." Cara paused. "I think you need to hear what she said."
"But she didn’t hurt you?"
"No."
“How long ago?”
Cara had to think about that. It felt like seconds. And hours. But Diane hadn’t been gone more than half an hour. “She ran ten or fifteen minutes ago.”
"Is anyone else there with you?"
"Diane. She's up front."
"Okay." His voice had shifted — quieter, focused. The cop voice. "Don't touch anything. I'm on my way."
"It's not — it's not that kind of scene. She didn't hurt me." Cara looked around the kitchen. The chair. The severed zip ties on the floor. The back door still slightly ajar from where Jessica had walked out of her life. "She just talked to me. And then she left."
Another pause, shorter this time. "Seven minutes," he said. "Lock the back door."
The line went quiet.
Cara set her phone on the counter and stood very still for a moment.
She was going to tell him about Jessica. All of it — the confession, the cliffs, the six months of careful planning that had ended with Blaire going over the edge. She owed him that much, and anyway she wasn't sure she could carry it alone.
She was not going to tell him about the USB drive.
The decision settled into place with a clarity that surprised her. No agonizing. No back and forth. Just the quiet, certain knowledge that some things were hers to carry, and this was one of them.
She pressed her hand flat against her pocket.
If she handed the drive to Gabe, it became evidence. Evidence meant a chain of custody. A chain of custody meant eyes on those files — official eyes, procedural eyes, eyes that would have to follow where the information led.
Do what you think is right with it.
She would. Absolutely. The instant she was alone.
44
Gabe had beenon his back porch, watching the waves, half following the score of the Eagles game on the TV inside, when Cara called.
Sunday was supposed to be his day off. The one day he tried to unplug, decompress, remember there was more to life than police reports and crime scenes.
But his mind kept circling back to the case. To Jessica Forsythe, vanished into thin air. To the cliffs where Blaire had died. To Cara, and the way she'd looked at him that morning—exhausted, relieved, carrying something she couldn't put down.
When his phone rang and her name appeared on the screen, he was already on his feet.
The minute they hung up, he called Tyler, then ran for his SUV. The drive from his place took seven minutes. He made it in five, pushing the speed limit on the empty coastal road, his gut telling him something had shifted. Cara's voice had been steady on the phone, but troubled. The kind of calm that came from holding something together by sheer force of will. He'd heard that tone before, in witnesses who'd seen too much, in victims still processing trauma.
He pulled into the small lot behind the bakery and killed the engine. The afternoon sun was starting its descent, casting long shadows across the pavement. A quiet Sunday in Haven Cove. Families finishing late lunches. Tourists wandering the shops. Everyone oblivious to whatever had shaken Cara badly enough to call him like that.
Diane met him at the back door before he could knock. "She's inside," she said, and stepped aside without further comment. He'd always appreciated that about Diane.
Cara was standing at the kitchen window, both hands wrapped around a mug, watching the parking lot like she'd been watching it since she'd hung up. She turned when he came in.
Pale. Drawn. Her eyes holding something he couldn't quite read. Fear. Relief. Exhaustion. All of it swirling together.
"Hey." He kept his voice gentle. "I'm here."
