Page 40 of Broken
I slide my fingers over the spine. Then, curiosity tugs at me and I pull the book off the shelf—
“What the f—”
Something clicks, and the bookshelf moves toward me, like a door.
I gape at the revealed space, my jaw dropped.
My father has a fucking secret room.
15
AVERY
“You get a match?”Jarvis asks.
I scan the computer screen, tapping on keys. “Just a minute. I need to get to the right place.”
I continue to move through screens until—
“Damn.” I smile, an invisible weight lifting from my shoulders. “I got something.”
“Jonathan or Chance?” For all of our investigating, it’s been one or the other. That’s what’s been swirling in my head. While I trust Chance, I still have–had–a nagging doubt because of the letter. He didn’t write it, but I’ve had fifteen years of thinking he did.
“Neither.” I send a silent thanks upward that I didn’t take that name from Hayes. I don’t need to bother with Grady’s hair sample now. And Chance is in the clear. Thank God!
“It’s some person named Eugene Markus Chubb,” I continue. “His DNA is on file for”—I scan through the information as quickly as I can—”looks like he was a suspect in an armed robbery outside of Helena about ten years ago, but his DNA cleared him.” I shake my head. “Too damned bad for him that it’s still on file because it’s a fucking match, Jarvis. A fucking match!”
“Chubb.” Jarvis narrows his eyes at me, tapping his finger on the table. “That sounds vaguely familiar to me.”
“Yeah, to me too.” I pull up the files on the case and do a search for the name. “Here it is. Someone by the name of Gene Chubb answered a phone when Miles Bridger dialed a number he found in a journal that presumably belonged to Joey Hopkins. I’ll be damned. I think we found our killer.”
My heart dances. I don’t need to use the hair Mom got from Grady. It’s not Chance! Not that I thought it was. Not really. But I’m elated that I can clear him now. That my trust in him wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t doubt him. I doubted me.
“You got an address for Chubb?” Jarvis asks.
I scan the screen. “Shit. No physical address is listed. But there’s a PO Box in Billings.”
“He was a suspect in an armed robbery and there’s no physical address listed?”
I shrug. “I guess no one cared enough to get one after he was cleared. But we’ll find him, Jarvis. And then we can put this baby to bed.”
“Yeehaw!” Jarvis hoots at me.
I roll my eyes. “Did you just sayyeehaw? Didn’t you learn anything from the cowboy hat nonsense?”
But I can’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. It’s infectious, although there’s no way I’m making that sound.
“I’m going to do a quick search through government files.” Jarvis taps on his computer. “I found an address for Eugene M. Chubb in Billings.” He stands, grabs his keys off the table. “Let’s go get him and bring him in.”
The address Jarvisfound for Gene Chubb turns out to be a prefabricated home standing alone on a plot of a couple acres. Weeds have overtaken what there is of a lawn, and a few stray cats roam around outside the house. The wind’s blowing and I expect out here it never stops. I can only imagine how it is in the winter. Depressing as hell.
Jarvis parks the car on the dirt driveway, and we head to the doorway. A tattered doormat that saysBeware of Dogsits on the spalling concrete stoop.
No doorbell, so I knock on the door, expecting to hear a dog bark.
No dog.
