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“Yeah, I remember,” and he quickly tacked onto that, “we need to talk.” He had to get his thoughts back on track.
She nodded, and any trace of her smile vanished. Mia gathered her breath, glancing around. “Your van or my car? Or do you want to go somewhere else where we won’t be monitored?” She tipped her head toward the security camera on top of the fence next to the gate. “Does the camera have audio capabilities?”
“Yes. And infrared.”
Which meant Ruby or one of the security techs could be watching and listening. Not that they would zoom in on him specifically, but they’d monitor anyone near the gate, and monitoring could mean hearing what was said.
That was the reason he motioned for Mia to get into his van, and once she had, Angel pulled to the side of the road behind her car so that if anyone else came along, he wouldn’t be blocking the entry.
Mia didn’t say another word until he’d finished parking and then turned to her. She unhooked her laptop bag from her shoulder, opened it, and took out a burner phone. Probably the one she’d used to text him.
“I didn’t use my regular phone,” she admitted. “I didn’t want there to be a record of, well, anything.”
Angel understood that. Hated it, but he understood. And there was something else he hated. For twenty years, he’d tried to protect Mia by keeping her secret. That secret though was apparently in the open now.
They found the body.
Not a body. The body. That meant the time for secrets was over and that he was going to have to do something he should have done two decades ago. He was going to have to turn her over to the cops.
For murder.
She pulled out the SIM card from the burner phone, took out a small bottle of water, and after bending the SIM, she dumped it into the bottle. That would definitely destroy it, but she went a step further by dropping the phone on the floor and stomping on it.
With that “chore” done, Mia took out a tablet, opened it in an incognito window. “I’ve got firewalls on this,” she let him know.
Of course, she did. No hacker wanted to risk being hacked.
“I didn’t use the tablet to text you,” Mia added. “Because the police could get a warrant to access everything on it.”
They could indeed, with probable cause. And they would have that with the discovery of the body.
“I’ve set up alerts to get notifications of any bodies or remains being found that could possibly be a match for…him,” she settled for saying. “This morning a hiker came across some bones on a trail about five miles outside of San Antonio,” she explained. “When the county cops arrived, they determined the remains were human. There was enough of it intact for the cops to see this.”
Mia loaded a picture.
“Shit,” Angel ground out.
His reaction hadn’t been for the bones themselves but for the silver peso coin pendant around the skeleton’s neck. In the photo, the sun was glinting off it, drawing the eye right to it. But Angel hadn’t needed the glaring sunlight for it to get his attention. He’d seen that pendant many times and knew the owner.
Kenton Barker.
Angel got a quick flash of some really bad memories. Of the bruises Kenton had put on Mia when he’d tried to sexually assault her. He’d failed because their foster mother, Melanie Matthews, had come in. Melanie had hit Kenton to stop him, and Kenton had stormed off, but not before issuing a warning to Mia that he wasn’t done with her.
Since Angel had been at football practice, he’d missed the altercation. However, several hours later when he’d gotten back home and found out what happened, he’d headed straight to Kenton’s room to have a come to Jesus meeting with him about keeping his hands off Mia. There’d been no Kenton.
Just the blood.
A tire-sized puddle of it.
And in that puddle, he’d seen Mia’s little pocket knife. The one she kept in her nightstand drawer.
He had been sixteen, stupid and in love and desperate to both find and protect Mia, so he’d picked up the knife and had gone looking for her. She hadn’t been in her room, so Angel had combed their usual spots. When he hadn’t found her by midnight, he had returned to the foster home and had once again looked in Kenton’s room.
The blood had already been cleaned up. Every speck of it. And the room had smelled of bleach. While he’d been trying to figure out what the hell had happened, Mia had shown up.
And kissed him.
And cried in his arms.
