Chapter 33
Adeline stood in the yard in front of Daniel Jamison’s house. The place where he and his family had lived before he tried to kill his pregnant wife.
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 treetops.
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 already and no dead bodies, human or otherwise, had been discovered.
Inside they’d found 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?
She should call her old partner. Braddock would laugh his ass off and give her kudos for coming up with such a great joke. But it wasn’t a joke.
And Adeline wasn’t laughing.
Wyatt hustled back to where she waited. She got to her feet. He’d brought a flashlight. Good. She frowned when she recognized the tool in his hand. “So you don’t carry bolt cutters but you carry a hammer?”
He adjusted his hold on the tool. “Carrying a hammer makes getting into places considerably easier when the need arises.” He tapped the hammer at a nonexistent target. “One tap, the glass breaks.”
“And you were warning me about breaking and entering?”
“Never without reasonable cause,” he clarified.
“Whatever.” She bracketed her hands on her hips. “So what’re you going to do, beat the doors in?” That could prove time consuming.
“The doors are wood,” he said, “the lock is attached to the doors with screws. Nails and screws can be pried out of wood if one is persistent.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “Good to know.” She stepped back and let him have at it.
He passed the flashlight to her and set to the task. Ten minutes later she admitted that he’d been right about one thing, persistence was essential.
A little more splintering and groaning and the brackets holding the lock on the doors burst free. He pulled them open. “And there we go.”
“I’m impressed, Wyatt.”
He shoved the hammer between his belt and the waist of his trousers. “I’ll go first.”
Fine with her. She passed the flashlight back to him. It was dark as all get-out down there.
The basement smelled like dirt. Wyatt roved the flashlight’s beam around the room until he located a light switch. A bare bulb in the overhead fixture glowed, filling the fairly large area with dim light.
Adeline blinked to focus. Shelves lined the walls.
Lots of stuff and dust. Her attention settled on the pile of rocks at the far end of the basement floor.
A hole, about six feet in length, maybe two feet wide, had been dug where the rocks had once rested.
She walked over to the makeshift grave and squatted for a closer inspection.
The shovel he’d used had likely been tagged into evidence. The smaller piles of dirt inside the hole were probably from the shovelfuls he’d tossed in atop his unconscious wife.
What kind of piece of shit did this?