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She unwrapped her arms from around herself and instead clasped them in her lap. “I don’t know. I mean, I suppose it’s possible he was hiding that kind of thing from me, but I don’t see how. We’d been dating for the past two years. We didn’t have a lot of secrets.”
A very neutral, “I see,” and Henry made another note on his yellow pad. Then he said, “Did Jack Speros know you were here in Globe?”
So, that was Jack’s last name. Chloe hadn’t mentioned it in her panicked phone call, but I supposed that was one of the first things Henry had asked her after arriving at the Airbnb.
Her lips pressed together. “No. I just told him I was going to Arizona for a while to figure some things out. We’d already broken up by then, but he kept bugging me to get back together. That was when I said I was leaving California. I definitely didn’t say I was coming to Globe, though.”
Which begged the question of how Jack Speros could have tracked Chloe down here. Unless….
“Did you ever say anything about me to him?” I asked, and her shoulders lifted, something about the movement heavy, as though she’d had to exert more effort than usual for the shrug.
“I told him I had an older half-sister that I’d never met,” Chloe replied. “But when I told him that, I didn’t know where you lived, either. So it’s not like he would have been able to follow me here based on anything I said back before we broke up.”
Strange. To the casual observer, there really wasn’t anything to connect Chloe to me — we didn’t share the same last name, didn’t have a single thing in common except our biological father.
So how in the world was Jack Speros able to figure out where Chloe was staying? Yes, she’d told him she was coming to Arizona, but it was a big state…and Globe was only a very small corner of it.
Judging by the frown Henry wore, he was just as mystified by the situation as I was.
“Do you think Jack could have followed you?” Calvin put in. Even though he’d been doing his best to stay out of the conversation, it seemed obvious that he thought it necessary to ask the question.
“No,” Chloe said, and then her fingers tightened on themselves where they sat in her lap. “Or at least, I don’t see how. I mean, he drives a big black pickup truck, and I know I would have noticed if something like that was following me all the way from Northridge.”
“Maybe he rented a car,” I suggested, and a worried flicker went through her slate-colored eyes.
“Maybe,” she allowed. “But I was paying attention, and I didn’t notice any one particular car following me. If nothing else, they would’ve had to get off the freeway when I exited to get gas in Goodyear, and I didn’t see anyone tailing me to that gas station.”
Which seemed to put us back to square one…unless Chloe wasn’t telling us the entire truth. Or rather, while she thought she might have been paying strict attention to the road, I could see how she might have been distracted, worried about showing up on her long-lost sister’s doorstep, her mind somewhere other than the stretch of highway immediately surrounding her.
I wanted to accept that scenario, since otherwise, I couldn’t come up with a single plausible explanation for Jack Speros’s presence in Globe.
Clearly, the silence that followed her monologue didn’t sit well with her, because she sent me an imploring look and said, “I know he didn’t follow me!”
“And I believe you,” I said calmly.
One of Henry’s eyebrows lifted, but he didn’t bother to contradict me.
“Well, let’s leave that aside for now,” Calvin said, also in the kind of easygoing tones designed to lower the temperature in the room. “Did Jack have any enemies?”
I allowed myself the briefest glance in Chief Lewis’s direction. His lips might have tightened imperceptibly, but it didn’t seem as though he intended to tell Calvin to butt out. Right then, he was probably just glad to have someone talking to Chloe whom she seemed to trust.
Her brows lifted, not in confusion, but in something almost resembling scorn. “He was a college kid. What kind of enemies do you think he would have?”
She had a point there. Once again, I slipped a quick look from underneath my eyelashes to gauge Calvin’s reaction, but, like Henry, he’d adopted a general-purpose law enforcement stone face and wasn’t giving anything away right then.
“It depends,” Henry said, stepping in when he could tell my husband wasn’t going to respond right away. “Maybe he owed his drug dealer money. Maybe he was going after some other guy’s girl.”
Chloe’s slate-gray eyes flashed, stark against her pale face. “Jack didn’t do drugs.”
“That you know of.”
She made a disgusted noise. “We were together for two years. I would have known. He barely even drank.”
Her tone was so emphatic that even Henry seemed to think better of trying to contradict her. However, that contained reticence didn’t prevent him from saying, “But what about any romantic entanglements?”
Once again, her nostrils flared in annoyance, but she sounded measured enough as she said, “We broke up only a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t heard that he’d started seeing anyone else. In fact, he kept texting me and showing up at the house, trying to get back together with me. My dad finally had to tell him to get lost.”
Those words certainly didn’t paint a portrait of a man who was ready to move on…which again only made me circle back to why on earth anyone would have wanted Jack Speros dead, and who would have been willing to go to such lengths to make sure he was killed in the living room of the Airbnb where his ex-girlfriend was staying.
