“I ruined my life. I ruined my life for that man.”

“Maybe not,” I said, putting my thinking cap on.

“What do you mean? I’ll be arrested. I’ll definitely lose my job. Forget having any future with Lyle.” She shook her head. “He was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“So, when you tried to break up with him?”

“I was trying to keep him as far away from this as possible.”

“I figured as much. What if we go about this whole thing a little differently? How good are you at lying? And how high is your tolerance for pain?”

* * *

Two hours later, the stage was set. I nodded to her. She nodded back. And I picked up my phone. “Parker,” I said, panting and swallowing hard like I’d been running. “I was right. Get down here. Hurry! And bring an ambulance with you. She’s alive.”

I gave him a description of the general area and hung up. We waited in the dark.

“You’re sure they couldn’t really know if every single drop of that blood was yours?”

“They don’t have the time or the resources to check every strand of DNA in that car. It would take a lot of work to figure out if it were really enough blood loss to kill me.” She reached out her hand, her roped wrist scraping across the warehouse floor. “I don’t know how to thank you, Charley.”

“You can thank me by giving your dad another chance.”

“Then I won’t be thanking you anytime soon.”

“I understand,” I said sadly.

“But maybe someday. I’m going to tell Lyle, though. Not about you. I’ll tell him I set up the whole thing and called you or something. But he needs to know what he’s getting into.”

“How do you think he’ll take it?”

“I don’t know. Not well, I’m sure.”

We heard sirens in the distance.

“Just make sure he knows you did everything you could to make sure he wasn’t implicated.”

“I will.”

We waited as cars slid to a stop in front of the warehouse. “Hey,” I said before they burst through the doors with guns blazing, “want to grab a coffee sometime?”

“Hell, yeah.”

We fist-bumped, then I hooked my arms under hers and stumbled, falling to the floor with her just as the first flashlight landed on us.

“Over here!” I called, praying this worked. Orange may have been the new black, but what it did for my complexion was barbaric.

* * *

Uncle Bob showed up on scene, and I knew he could sense something awry, but he disliked Joplin just enough to not give a shit. They whisked Emery away in an ambulance immediately, but they detained and questioned me for years.

If this worked, I promised to straighten my act up. To do good things and stop making fun of other people’s choices in accessories. The one thing that could tip the scale in our favor was the fact that Emery had fallen down a ravine the day she got to the cabin. She’d already been sporting some nasty bruises and scratches and one rather garish gash across her leg where she’d been impaled by a broken branch. That would work in our favor magnificently.

I still had to rough her up a bit. Or I tried. She called me a wuss and did most of it herself.

“Tell me again,” Joplin said, “how you just happened to stumble upon my missing person?”

We’d gone over it a gazillion times, but smelling something off as well, he wanted to trip me up. To give him a reason to arrest me. Wasn’t gonna happen.

“I got a tip from a source that a lady was being held here against her will for her father’s gambling debts.”

Emery threw that last part in. She wanted to drive that nail home. And since Mr. Adams apparently had gambling debts at several locations, who was to say which bookie it was that abducted her?

“They wanted to freak out the father, so they threw her blood, along with someone else’s they’d stolen from a blood bank, all over her car. I got here, scoured the area, and finally heard a soft cry coming from inside this warehouse. I broke in and found her. It’s not rocket science, Joplin.”

“You just keep that shit up, Davidson, and—”

“Are you actually threatening my niece?” While Uncle Bob’s voice was smooth and even, his temper had busted through the roof. He was furious. “She did what you couldn’t, Joplin. She found your missing person. And you’re going to give her shit about it? Why? Because she did your job for you?” He stepped closer until they were toe-to-toe. “If you even talk to her like that again—”

“You’ll what?” he asked.

Man, that guy hated us. I wondered what I did.

The captain strode up then, his anger spiking a bit, too. “Joplin,” he barked.

Joplin practically jumped.

“Get over here,” he said from between clenched teeth, sounding a lot like Clint Eastwood. It was quite manly.

While Joplin received a thorough ass whipping, I wrapped an arm around Uncle Bob’s.

“You gonna tell me what really happened?” he asked.

How did he know? “I solve cases all the time. What makes you think this isn’t legit?”

“Because I figured out what she did, too.”

“Damn it.” I gazed up at him.

“Not all of it, but I had my suspicions.”

“Uncle Bob, she had a very good reason.”

He nodded. “I know, hon. I have complete faith in you.”

“Really? You’re not going to rat me out?”

“What the hell kind of uncle do you think I am? Also, Cook would divorce me.”

Laughter bubbled out of me. “You have complete faith in me? For reals?”

“Yes. Well, not your cooking. Other than that, absolutely.”

I gasped. “I’ve cooked for you, like, twice.”

“Two times too many, pumpkin. Two times too many.”

They finally released me just as Parker pulled up. He’d been in some really big meeting, but when he got there I didn’t know how he would react.

He didn’t say a thing. Just gave me a questioning thumbs-up. I nodded, and he scraped his fingers through his hair in relief. Lyle Fiske should be out of jail within the hour. I did not envy that conversation Emery was going to have with him.

I climbed into Misery and started out of the maze of empty warehouses I’d come across during another case a little over a year prior, having no idea they’d come in so handy someday. As I turned right, my headlights caught the reflection of a big black truck. I drove slowly. Another vehicle pulled up behind it, and the truck roared to life, did a U-turn, and drove off. It was Garrett, and the person taking over was Javier, one of his colleagues. It was time to get to the bottom of this.