Noah rubbed his hands over his face. “We’re running a trace on the text. So far, it’s showing up as an unregistered number.”
“Throwaway cell?” Hunter asked.
Noah lifted his brows. “Maybe. Anybody can buy one.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. “I guess I deserve that one.”
“No, you don’t,” Noah said. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
Hunter put a fluffy golden omelet in front of him. “When did you last sleep, Noah?”
“God. I don’t remember. Saturday night maybe?”
“You’re gonna crash if you don’t rest. When do you have to report in?”
“Nine.” He dug into the omelet and nearly sighed. “This is really good.”
“Thanks. When you’re done, go sleep in Eve’s bed. I’ll make sure she’s all right.”
She’d retreated to the shower, still pale, her eyes as haunted as if she’d seen a ghost. Noah guessed she had. “She needs to sleep, too.”
“She won’t,” Hunter said. “Not until she feels safe. She’ll catnap in that chair of hers.”
“You might want to hide the knives,” he said, and Hunter shot him a surprised look.
“She keeps them in a lockbox. I’ll lock them up when I’m finished cooking.”
“Okay, I’ll take the bed.” Noah blinked hard. “Who knew about the getting in a car with strangers thing? Who knew Winters said that to her?”
“We did, the family, because she told us. We never let that leak to the press.”
“Somebody knew,” Noah said darkly. He eyed Eve’s laptop. “Can I use it?”
Hunter hesitated. “Use mine. She’s a little… you know, about her computer.”
When Hunter returned with his laptop, Noah was practically scraping the plate clean.
“You want another?” Hunter asked, and Noah nodded.
“If you don’t mind.” He opened the laptop. “You’re a good cook.”
“I get a lot of practice. I do most of the cooking for my firehouse.”
“They’re lucky. I eat out of a microwave except on Sundays when I go to my cousin and his wife’s for dinner. If you’re still here on Sunday, you’re welcome.”
Hunter’s lips twitched. “Thanks, but you’ll be happy to know I’ll be gone by Friday.”
Noah didn’t smile. “Eve will miss you.”
“I’m hoping she’ll be too busy to miss any of us back home,” Hunter said dryly.
“Point taken.” Noah frowned at the search results on the screen. “Rob Winters gets me too many hits, most about serial killers. How many people did this guy kill?”
“At least six that we knew of. Evie would have been seven.”
Noah swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “He was killed in prison, right?”
“Yes. I believe it was Tom’s hope that once the other cons knew Winters was a dirty cop there wouldn’t be enough of him left to scrape into a baggie. There wasn’t.”
Hunter’s voice had gone hard, making Noah remember that Winters had not only traumatized Eve, he’d traumatized an entire family. “Which prison? Was it in Chicago?”
“No, North Carolina. I can’t remember which prison, but my brother, Max, will know.”
“Let’s not make him remember if we don’t have to.”
Hunter poured his omelet concoction into a skillet, a muscle twitching in his taut cheek. “When my brother found Winters, the bastard had beaten Caroline almost unrecognizable and had his hands around her throat. Max deals with the memories, with the dreams, but there’s nothing about Winters he’s forgotten.”
Noah thought of Susan and the baby, gone twelve years now. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t think or dream of them in nightmares of his own. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“No need. It was just a very bad time.”
“Well, I think we can approach this from a different direction. Buckland’s researched Eve’s past. Let’s assume he ran across Winters’s threat while he was reading up in the online archives of some paper. Did Winters give any interviews before he died?”
“Probably,” David gritted. “Asshole liked to hear himself talk.”
Noah searched for prison interviews. Luckily there weren’t that many, as Winters had not survived long behind bars. Justice, he thought fiercely. I hope it hurt. A lot.
“Here’s one,” Noah said. It was a transcript of a live interview in which Winters described his assaults in detail, including the “cars with strange men” comment. He read to himself, sparing Hunter the memory. Noah’s head pounded as he read Winters’s boasts about Eve. His jaw clenched hard, his fists harder. I hope to God it hurt a hell of a lot.
“It wouldn’t have taken Buckland long to find it,” he finally said. He remembered the look in Eve’s eyes, the utter shock. The fear. And the shame. “That he’d use it to rattle Eve says quite a lot.”
Hunter slid another omelet on his plate. “So what are you going to do about him?”
Noah forced his clenched fists to relax so he could pick up a fork. “I sent out a BOLO last night when I found he’d tampered with her gun. Today, Eve will file her complaint, and when I catch him, he’ll wish he’d never seen a newspaper.”
Hunter nodded once. “Sweet.”
“What’s sweet?” They turned to find Eve standing in the doorway. Her short hair stood in wet spikes. She’d been crying, hard. Hunter took a step toward her, but she held up one hand to fend him off. “Not now. Please. What’s sweet?”
Noah closed the interview and lowered the lid of Hunter’s laptop. “Just that you’ll file your complaint and we’ll put Buckland in a cage where he belongs.”
“I’ll drive you to the police station,” Hunter said. “Sit. You need to eat. Webster needs to sleep. If you both don’t start taking care of yourselves, you’re going to get sick.”
Unbelievably, the side of her mouth lifted in a smile. “David takes care of people when he’s stressed out,” she said to Noah and Hunter bristled. She sat, careful not to touch either of them as she did so. “I’m sitting and I’ll eat. But I’ll drive myself to the police station.” Again she raised her hand as both he and Hunter opened their mouths to protest. “You can follow me if you want, but once I’ve filed that report, I’m going to school, where I’ll be surrounded by people. I have my Abnormal seminar at ten. If I’m not expelled by the time all of this is over, I don’t want to be behind.”
Hunter turned his glare from Eve to Noah. “You’re going to let her?”
Her face was cool and calm. But her dark eyes churned with emotion and he knew she needed at least this vestige of control. “I can’t stop her,” he said to Hunter, “but we’ll all watch her. And I’m taking your gun as evidence,” he said to Eve.
“It’s okay. I have another. I have several others.”
“Of course you do,” Noah murmured. “It’s a survivor thing. I get it. Promise you’ll park out in the open and you’ll stay around people.”
She nodded. “I promise.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Hunter snarled and turned back to the counter, slicing green peppers with frustrated vengeance. “If you’re going to be stupid, at least take my truck.”
“Why?” Eve asked, still too calm.
“Buckland will be looking for you in your Mazda. Besides, your car needs a tune-up and it’ll give me something else to do while I worry about somebody else killing you.”
She rose, placed her hand on Hunter’s arm and his frantic chopping stilled. “I know you worry because you love me. And I know better than anyone that I am not invincible. But if I cower here, then he wins and I lose. I promise I will be careful. I will call you every hour and if I see Buckland, I’ll call 911 so fast. But I can’t hide. Not even for you.”
Hunter’s shoulders sagged and Noah cleared his throat. “I’ll follow her in and she can park in the police garage. If he follows her, we’ll grab him.”
“And when she leaves?”
“I’ll find a way to get coverage.”