She shrugged, the movement screaming of just how tired she was. “No one in the family, none of our friends, ever had a slip of the tongue. How could none of them have known? Or been so careful that it never came up accidentally? I guess that’s what makes the whole situation so unbelievable. It’s too clean...too perfectly executed. You see this shit in the movies, but this is real.”

  Wyatt wished Irene had come forward and privately given him the information about the Prescott woman. He wasn’t entirely sure it would have made any difference, but it would have provided another angle to investigate. Then he could have prepared Addy for this. On some level he understood why Irene hadn’t. His gaze lingered on Addy. There were some things a person just didn’t want to lose.

  Get your head on straight, Wyatt.

  “I suppose,” he offered, “we’ll understand how this all happened eventually.”

  “I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Sheriff Henley’s waiting for us.” She reached for her door.

  Wyatt did the same. He hopped out of his SUV and started around it. At the rear bumper he stalled. From the moment Addy had come home, he’d been entirely focused on her and this investigation. He’d let everything else slide. Hadn’t paid any attention to the routine things like the fact that his SUV needed a good wash.

  He’d promised himself he wouldn’t let this happen. And look at him, he’d spent scarcely three days in her presence and already she’d become the center of his universe. He considered the grime veiling his vehicle and shook his head. This was going to be like nine years ago all over—

  The thought derailed as his gaze zeroed in on the rear windshield. “What the hell is this?” The well-lit parking lot allowed him to read the words scrawled across the skim of road grunge.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Addy wandered back to where he stood. “I forgot to tell you about that.”

  If Henley hadn’t been waiting for their arrival, Wyatt felt confident he would have raked Addy over the coals right there in the parking lot when she told him about the incident at the cemetery. But Henley was waiting and Addy had been through enough for one day.

  He didn’t even bother rubbing in the fact that he’d warned her that going anywhere alone wasn’t a good idea.

  She knew.

  Instead, he settled a hand at the small of her back and guided her to the front entrance. Fear of what could have happened ripped at his insides. It was a flat-out miracle she was here with him right now instead of out there somewhere with this psycho.

  Sheriff Vicki Henley waited for them in the small lobby. “Come on in.” She looked almost as weary as Wyatt felt. “I see you already have coffee, so let’s go to my office and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

  Henley was a petite woman but her bearing was strong and confident; she looked to be about fifty. He doubted there was a deputy in her department, female or male, who didn’t walk the line for this by-the-book lady. Though Wyatt had never had the pleasure of coordinating an investigation with her, he knew her reputation.

  When he and Addy had taken seats in front of Henley’s desk, she launched right into the briefing. “I don’t know how much you already know about Daniel Jamison, but whatever you’ve heard, everything has changed. We have a situation.”

  Wyatt had a feeling they should have checked the state database or at least Googled the man before coming. But Henley had insisted he come to her office ASAP. Three hours of hard driving had gotten them here. And it sounded very much like things were about to get exponentially more complicated.

  Just what they needed.

  “At this point,” Wyatt explained, “we know nothing at all about Jamison. I made the call to you and we drove straight here.”

  Henley nodded. “It’s all bad. One of my deputies is dead and a nurse at Forrest General was also killed by this man earlier today.”

  “Does Jamison have a history of violence?” This question came from Addy.

  “No. That’s the crazy part.” Henley opened a folder on her desk. “Ten days ago we received a domestic disturbance call through the 911 dispatch for the Jamison residence. The place is off Highway 29, basically in the middle of nowhere. The address was wrong in the system.

  My two deputies had a hell of a time finding it. They showed up at the residence forty-five minutes after the initial call. Apparently Jamison either saw the vehicles turn into his drive or figured out his wife had made the call. He was nowhere to be found, but he hadn’t been gone long.”

  “The wife?” Addy inquired, her voice somber.

  “Nearly dead.” Henley shook her head. “During the struggle he rammed her head through a set of French doors. There was bruising on her throat. We figure he thought he’d killed her. For whatever reason he just didn’t choke her long enough.” The lady sheriff shrugged. “Or maybe he just didn’t care. He’d intended for her to be dead in the end. The bastard had been in the process of burying her in the basement when my men arrived on the scene and he cut and ran.”

  Wyatt kept a watch on Addy from the corner of his eye. This horror just kept piling up. “But she’s alive?”

  “She’s hanging on.” Henley stared at the file on her desk. “We believe he’d been planning to kill her for several days. The floor of the basement is rock. He’d removed enough to prepare a grave. My guess is he intended to bury her, then replace the rocks and suggest that she had gone missing.”

  “Anyone else in the family have any ideas on the reason he did this?” Addy rubbed at her forehead as if a headache had begun there.

  “The wife’s mother and father have never cared too much for Jamison,” Henley related. “But he’d eventually grown on them. He’d been married to their daughter for ten years. Good job with the postal service. No financial troubles. No marital problems that anyone was aware of. The couple has a son, Danny. He’s with his grandparents.”

  “The boy was unharmed?” Wyatt hoped like hell that was the case.

  Henley nodded. “My deputies found him hiding in the closet under the stairs. According to his grandparents he’s smart as a whip. Has been reading since he was four years old. An exceptionally bright student. But if he saw or heard anything, he isn’t talking.”

  Addy’s gaze collided with Wyatt’s. This story was sounding all too familiar.

  “Lydia, the wife,” Henley went on, “had advised her mother that there was some tension related to her pregnancy. She was terrified of telling her husband that she’d learned the baby was a girl.”

  “She was pregnant...” Addy’s face paled.

  “About seven months,” Henley confirmed. “It’s a miracle, but the baby seems to be okay. If we can keep the mother alive, that’ll truly be a miracle.”

  Wyatt’s cop instincts were roaring. “Did the wife’s parents mention anything else that the daughter related regarding this tension in her marriage?”

  “Jamison didn’t want any more children. She’d already defied him once and ended up having a miscarriage. Fell down those same basement stairs. We don’t know yet if he had anything to do with that. The wife never mentioned to her parents that she suspected anything along those lines.” Henley slid the file she’d opened across the desk in their direction. “Two days after he almost killed her, the wife’s parents hired a private investigator to find out if their initial suspicions about him had been right.”

  As Wyatt and Addy reviewed the findings, much of which they had already heard from Father Grayson, Henley continued. “He spent almost eleven years in a mental institution, then another four and a half in a supervised living situation. His biological father killed his wife and would have killed the children, ironically, if Jamison hadn’t stopped him.”

  Wyatt didn’t mention that they already knew that part. There was no need to bring Father Grayson into this investigation—at least not at this point. “Was he taking any medications? Antipsychotics?”

  Henley laughed but the sound held no humor. “When he and Lydia married he stopped taking his mood stabilizers as well as the medication for the bipolar diagnosis. Apparently, they interfered with the sex life.”

  “You said he worked for the postal service,” Addy noted. “They do background investigations on their employees. How did a guy with his medical history get the job?”

  “According to his supervisor,” Henley explained, “his record came back as clean as a whistle. Nothing about his medical condition popped up. Evidently this guy knows how to work the system. That’s not all,” she added, “he worked at the supervised living facility as a nurse’s assistant the last year he was a resident there.”

  Wyatt wasn’t sure where she was going with that point but judging by the fury in her eyes he was about to find out.

  “That’s how he got into his wife’s room at the hospital so easily.”

  “He made another attempt on her life?” Wyatt understood now. Henley had mentioned that a nurse and a police officer were dead.

  Henley nodded, the movement visibly weary. “He dressed like a nurse’s assistant, conducted himself as one. He killed a nurse to access the drugs. Then killed one of my deputies with the same drug he partially unloaded in his wife’s IV. Potassium chloride. Stops the heart. It was too late for my deputy, but the code staff managed to resuscitate her. I’m here to tell you, that woman does not intend to go down without a fight.”

  God have mercy. When would this end? “I take it he wasn’t apprehended.” Wyatt felt fairly certain of the answer before he asked.

  “He got away.” Henley’s lips flattened with fury. “But we’ll get him.”

  “I’d like to see any photos you have of Daniel Jamison.”

  Wyatt glanced at Addy. This man was her brother. As horrific as he found the whole thing, she had to be reeling. He kept forgetting that nightmarish fact.

  Henley shuffled through the file, tapped an eight-by-ten photo of a man, his wife, and son. “That’s him.”

  Addy’s hand shook as she picked up the photo and stared at it. Not only was her brother in that photo, but a nephew. Wyatt’s gut twisted.

  “The wife,” Henley nodded to the photo, “I don’t know if she suspected her husband really intended to hurt her or not, but she’s one smart cookie. When she made the 911 call, instead of hanging up when she heard her husband coming back into the room, she left the line open and slid the receiver under the sofa so he wouldn’t see it. The dispatcher couldn’t make out all that was said and we’ve listened to the tape twenty times. Most of the verbal exchanges are inaudible. But there’s one that’s loud and clear. It’s his voice, the in-laws have already identified it. So, if he gets his wish and his wife dies, he can’t show up claiming to have been kidnapped and say it was an intruder. It’s him.”

  “Can we hear the tape?” Addy had dropped her hands into her lap, clasped them together so tightly her fingers were white.

  Wyatt wished he could take her hands in his and at least try to console her just a little.

  “Of course.” Henley reached into a desk drawer and removed a handheld recording device. “By the way, when he entered the hospital and killed a nurse and one of my men,” Henley met Wyatt’s gaze, then Addy’s, unadulterated rage in her own, “he had changed his appearance. He wore glasses and he’d shaved his head.”

  “Jamison is bald?” Addy echoed, her eyes suddenly wide with fear.

  “According to the nurse who survived his attack and two other members of the hospital staff,” Henley explained, “his head was as smooth as a baby’s butt.”

  Addy turned to him. “Put Womack on my mother’s room,” she demanded, her expression, her voice, frantic. “Now!”

  Wyatt reached into his pocket for his phone. “You think he knows your mother is in the hospital and might show up?”

  Her face went even paler. “He’s already been there. I saw him. He was mopping the floor. He bumped into me...” Her breath hitched. “He asked me if she—Irene—was my mother.”

  Wyatt made the call. Addy didn’t stop twisting her fingers together until he’d closed his phone and confirmed that it was done. “He’s filling in hospital security on our concerns en route. If Jamison is there or shows up, he’s not going to get near your mother.”

  Addy breathed an audible sigh of relief. She turned back to Sheriff Henley. “Can we hear the call now?”

  Henley pushed play on the recorder.

  A new tension simmered through Wyatt as he watched the kaleidoscope of changing reactions play out on Addy’s face. She flinched at the crashes and screams. The inaudible rants and snarls by Daniel Jamison had her leaning forward in an attempt to make out the words. His intent was unmistakable. He wanted his wife dead.

  “Here it comes,” Henley warned.

  The screams and the sobs abruptly stopped.

  A moment of taut silence, then...

  “There will be no princess in this house!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jamison residence, 5:40 a.m.

  Adeline stood in the yard in front of Daniel Jamison’s house. Bald as a baby’s behind. Ms. Nichols’s words kept echoing amid Adeline’s other churning thoughts.

  Daniel Jamison—known in a former life as Tristan Solomon—was her brother.

  And all this time she’d thought her biggest DNA glitch was Cyrus Cooper and his shitty sons.

  She’d been wrong.

  The windows of the old turn-of-the-century bungalow were dark. Like the soul of the man who lived here. His wife was hanging on by a thread, her unborn daughter’s fate dependent to some degree on her mother’s continued survival.

  There will be no princess in this house!

  Adeline whirled around, her gaze seeking and finding Wyatt where he stood a few feet away. “You know what this means?”

  “That old Ms. Nichols was right.”

  Adeline nodded, not surprised that he was thinking along the same lines as she. “She knew he was bald. She knew about the princess thing.” Adeline turned back to the house, shivered as the nasty vibes washed over her. “He’s holding them in an old house or shack near water.”

  Not once in her career as a cop had she ever put any stock in a so-called psychic’s claims. But this was real. Nichols had nailed too many details.

  Dawn had started its slow winter climb above the tree-tops. The whole place was creepy. Deep in the woods. Jamison had settled his little family well away from town or any neighbors. The property had been searched and no dead bodies, human or otherwise, had been discovered. Nothing to indicate he’d been looking into Prescott’s, Arnold’s, or Adeline’s lives. Not a single piece of evidence.

  What had she expected? This guy was meticulous. He’d spent years in that institution. Plenty of time to formulate a perfect plan.

  But why now? More than ten years after his release? Had the news that his wife was growing a princess in her womb been enough to push him over the edge at which his existence apparently hovered?

  Sheriff Henley had jumped in with both feet as soon as Wyatt had explained the situation in Jackson County. Henley, too, was certain Jamison was their man. Both his wife and son had been assigned a security detail. That hadn’t stopped him from getting to his wife in the hospital. The wife had since been moved to ICU where security measures were stronger.

  Between his grandparents and two assigned deputies, the boy was in good hands.

  Adeline had a nephew.

  Too much to absorb. She shook it off. Now was not the time to deal with those emotions. Or the fact that her mother had withheld important information related to an ongoing case. All of that would have to wait.

  Whether Prescott and Arnold were still alive or not, they had to be found. Daniel Jamison had to be stopped.

  Adeline wanted those women to be alive. She didn’t want to fail them.

  Just something else she would have to deal with eventually. She had two sisters. Two. No way was she going to count Jamison as a brother. Clearly he was a psycho just like his damned daddy.

  Her daddy.

  No. Adeline shook her head. Carl Cooper was her father. And Irene was her mother. No one else counted.

  She settled her attention back on the house. “I’m going inside.”

  “Henley said the property had been released,” Wyatt commented, moving up beside her, “but I’m not sure going in is a good idea. On a personal level.”

  Adeline shot him a look. “Get real, Wyatt. You know how I am. I need to feel the vibe of the place.” Those she was getting out here in the yard were seriously creepy. Lots of pent-up rage. Intense secrecy.

  Jamison wasn’t the only one who’d been keeping secrets.

  “We should have asked Henley for access. Gotten a key,” Wyatt suggested.

  “Come on.” She headed for the porch. “Chances are there’s at least one window unlocked. We probably won’t even need a key.”

  “Breaking and entering, Detective Cooper,” he reminded. “Just because we represent the law doesn’t mean we’re above the law.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So arrest me.”

  The windows in front were locked. In back, too. Damn it. Front and back doors were secure. The credit card thing didn’t work. She had strong-armed Wyatt into trying when she’d failed to get the job done.

  Wait. Adeline turned to Wyatt. “She was found in the basement. That’s what Henley said, right?” A house this old likely had an exterior entrance that wasn’t a typical walk-through door. Hope resurrected.

  She hustled around to the back once more. The ground-level double doors were almost completely concealed by a thicket of shrubbery. She parted the dense greenery. Dawn’s gray gloom provided sufficient light to see that there was a big-ass lock secured to the doors.

  “Well, shit.”

  Wyatt crouched down to get a closer look. When he’d completed his assessment, he glanced up at her. “I think I can handle that.”

  “You carry bolt cutters in your SUV?” she called after him as he jogged toward the corner of the house.

  “You’ll see,” he called back.

  That was the problem. She’d already seen too much. Her biological father was literally an axe murderer. Her brother, too. How screwed up was that?