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She paused. “I don’t know. I’ve never had to investigate something with my own family. I’m not sure how to navigate this.”
He rubbed his hands up and down her arms, hoping to calm her. “Let me talk to Cohen this time then. He knows Autumn better than anyone, except maybe her parents, but I’m not connected to this. I can be the bad guy asking the tough questions. You talk with Autumn’s parents. See if there’s anything they know about where she might have disappeared to.”
“I should be the one to talk to him,” she protested.
He shook his head. “You just said it. You’re too close to this. I came here to help you. Let me.”
She held his gaze for several minutes, and even in tense situations, BB never tired of seeing the bright pupils swirling with color and hypnotizing him.
“I don’t want to depend on you,” she confessed. “I’m used to doing things on my own. This is tough for me.”
He cradled her face, his thumb lightly caressing her cheekbone. “You’re not dependent on me just because you need a little support. Besides, whether you need me or not, I’m here for you. I’m not going anywhere.”
Heaven help her, she believed him. And that stirred a mixture of happiness and fear which she wasn’t ready to face.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After placing a call to Jay to update him, BB found himself in Cohen’s hospital room, wondering how to tell him about the possibility of Autumn’s involvement in his shooting.
If he didn’t handle this just right, he could cause a rift in Gennessey and Cohen’s relationship, and he was certain she would never forgive him. He’d offered to handle the questioning to save Gennessey from the turbulent task, but he hadn’t thought through what it would mean for him if this went bad.
“Hey, man. Where’s Gennessey?”
BB moved closer to the bed, trying not to react to how rough Cohen looked. Getting shot was no picnic, but Cohen’s paleness and weak voice told him the injury had taken more of a toll than he let on.
“She’s talking to Autumn’s parents.”
Cohen scowled and tried to push himself up higher in bed with his one good arm. “What’s wrong? She was supposed to be getting Autumn. Has something happened?”
“Autumn’s gone. She left the hospital a little while ago and took an Uber somewhere. We’re trying to track her down.”
“Track her down?” Cohen spat out. “You mean you’re trying to find her to make sure she’s okay, right?”
“Calm down. She’s obviously not all right, or she wouldn’t have left her fiancé’s side so soon after he was shot. What we’re trying to find out is what drove her to leave without telling anyone, including you and her parents, where she was going. How did she seem when she came in to see you after your surgery?”
“You’re interrogating me now? Does Gennessey know you’re in here?”
“I convinced her into letting me talk to you first. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and you have to admit, it’s odd that Autumn would run away.”
“She didn’t run away. She’s upset. This was supposed to be the happiest day of our lives. Instead, she was left wondering if I was going to die on the operating table. She’s overwhelmed and just needed a moment to deal with it.”
BB braced himself. If Cohen was upset now, he’d be even more agitated when BB started in with the hard questions.
“You sure? Then why didn’t she tell anyone where she was going? She wouldn’t even leave the hospital to change out of her dress when you were in surgery. Is it typical of her to just disappear?”
“She didn’t disappear. I’m telling you, she wouldn’t do that!”
BB’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He started to ignore it but pulled it from his pocket to check the caller ID. Deciding it was better to take the call and give Cohen a chance to calm down, he turned his back to the bed to answer.
“We found her.” Jay didn’t bother with pleasantries. “The Uber dropped her off at her family’s hotel. Security cameras show her going inside, but then we lost her when she went out a back door which put her in a dead spot not shown on the cameras. Owen picked her back up on a traffic cam a few minutes later, driving away in a Lexus. She traveled outside of town into a rural area, and Owen lost her because it’s not covered by cameras.”
“Where is she heading?”
“I’ve got Panther and Zane driving that way to see if they can pick up her trail. We tried tracing her cell signal, but she either left it behind or turned it off.”
“Something’s not right about this,” BB whispered, hoping Cohen wouldn’t overhear.
“There’s more. Owen finished up the background checks, and everyone came back clean. He did find out Autumn was adopted. Her case file was sealed, but Owen managed to hack into a couple of systems to find the court case. Her mother was the sixteen-year-old daughter of a single mom working two or three jobs to make ends meet. The father wasn’t listed, and there’s not much about him in the case file other than he was out of the picture. He’s not listed on Autumn’s birth certificate.”
