“How long will it take to get that fixed?”
She ignored the concern in his voice, wasn’t sure she could trust him. “The telephone company will get to it as soon as they can.” Due to recent layoffs, they had a backlog of work orders and couldn’t send someone out right away. But she didn’t add that.
“That must be a relief. Well, just so you know, Adriana’s been trying to reach you. You should give her a call. She’s worried about you getting your purse back. She even offered to drive over here and pick it up.”
So why had Dean refused? Francesca was curious about that, but didn’t ask. She didn’t want to make Adriana a focal point. The last thing she needed was for the people closest to her to come to the attention of someone like Butch or his odd brother-in-law. “No reason to drag my friends into this. We’ve got it covered, right?”
“Now we do. I’ll let you go. But please tell Heather I hope her son sleeps through the night.”
He knew where she was staying! She got the feeling he’d been following her, but it was more likely that he’d spoken to Heather just before she’d left the office to pack Francesca’s overnight bag while Francesca was at the Apple store. Regardless, like Butch—maybe because of Butch—he was trying to frighten her.
“Quit it,” she said flatly.
“Quit what?”
“Mentioning my friends. They have nothing to do with you or Butch or whatever’s going on here, so just leave them out of it.”
“What do you mean ‘going on’? I was only trying to be nice.”
If that was true, why did she have alarm bells going off in her head? “It’s Butch I’m worried about,” she said.
“He’s not what you think he is, Francesca. Really.”
The way he used her first name, as if they knew each other, grated on her, too. “Tell April Bonner that.”
“Who?”
“The woman your brother-in-law met last Saturday at the Pour House. Her body turned up this morning outside the Skull Valley Chocolate and Handmade Gifts shop, less than fifteen minutes from your house.”
Another voice came on the line, this one louder and blatantly taunting. “You sure it wasn’t a mannequin?”
Francesca recognized Butch’s laugh. “You think it’s funny?”
“I think you’re funny,” he said, still laughing.
“Why’d you move her, Butch? Don’t tell me you went to all that trouble just for me.”
The laughter suddenly stopped. “Nothing’s too much trouble for you.”
Swallowing hard, she gripped the phone more tightly. “Good. Because the forensic evidence you provided will come in handy when the investigation moves into the prosecution phase.”
She hadn’t said if; she’d said when. And she’d been bluffing. She couldn’t say for sure that the police or the M.E. had been able to glean any forensic evidence. They’d taken samples. Now they had to wait for the lab results. But she wasn’t all that hopeful. It wouldn’t be easy to get foreign DNA from a body that’d been buried, disinterred and dumped elsewhere, especially a body that was in such an advanced stage of decomposition.
Still, she’d succeeded in turning the tables on him. Tension came across the line as palpably as if he’d started swearing at her.
“You don’t scare me,” he ground out.
“You don’t scare me, either,” she lied. “See you in the morning.”
As soon as she disconnected, Francesca dropped her phone on the table and laid her head on her arms. As much as she wanted the whole situation to go away, it was far from over.
Francesca felt Jonah glance in her direction every few seconds while he drove. When she’d called to tell him about the conversation with Dean and Butch, he’d already left Chandler, but he’d insisted on coming back to get her. He said she’d be safer with him than staying anywhere Butch might look. But as far as Francesca was concerned, safe was a relative term. Being around Jonah risked things besides physical injury or death.
They needed to get to Prescott with plenty of time to prepare for tomorrow, however. She had no idea how long it would take the police to get her set up with a wire and put the proper surveillance in place.
Besides, despite an abundance of restless energy, she didn’t feel like driving two hours on her own. They’d taken her car because they hadn’t wanted a change to alert Butch that the police might be involved, but Jonah had the wheel. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been quite so exhausted or upset, and couldn’t say whether she’d been right to stand up to Butch or not. But after talking to Dean, she wasn’t as worried about herself as much as her friends. Her iPhone contained everyone’s address, everyone who was remotely important to her. That meant Butch and Dean knew where Adriana lived with her husband and two kids, where Josephine lived—alone since her husband had died three years ago—and where Heather and Sean resided in that subsistence-level apartment. He even had her parents’ phone number and address, here in Arizona and where they were staying in Montana, should he care to take advantage of it.
Would he try to hurt someone she loved? Should she warn everyone immediately? Or wait and see if a threat really materialized?
She didn’t want to throw her entire circle of family and friends into a panic. But by the time she knew whether the threat was real, it could be too late….
Jonah broke into her thoughts. “How’s April’s sister holding up?”
“Not well.” Francesca would never forget the quiet sobs that’d come across the line. What had happened to April made no sense. She’d been such an unlikely victim. She hadn’t been living on the fringes of society as a hooker or a crack addict. She’d been a straight-A student who’d become a third-grade teacher—Teacher of the Year, two years prior. She volunteered at the library and was kind and helpful to children at school who didn’t have a nurturing family. “Jill feels guilty on top of her grief, which makes it worse,” she explained.
He slung an arm over the steering wheel. He was wearing a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt and had showered and shaved since she’d last seen him, but even with his cheeks smooth and his hair combed, he wasn’t the polished type. He was a “take me as I am” kind of guy who didn’t bother with tattoos, earrings, cologne. Fortunately for him, he had more than enough assets to pull off his minimalist approach.