InSight

Gentry and the woman he was falling in love with. In spite of the sharp pang of insecurity, he couldn’t resist watching her words.
    “Did they have friends, someone he might stay with?” Luke asked.
    “If they did, I never knew them,” she said, rolling the water glass across her cheek. “I lived in Texas at the time and came back before she left him.”
    “What about his family?”
    “Stewart had little to do with his family because of the way they treated Abigael. His mother made no secret she thought her daughter-in-law was beneath a Gentry. She thought less of me.” Lucy snorted. “When he got sick, they never publicly acknowledged it. That would be a curse on them. The Gentrys couldn’t carry a defective gene. No, not them.”
    Without hearing Lucy’s tone, Luke saw her words form, the curl of her lip when she spoke of Stewart Gentry and his mother. He saw anger in every twitch of her cheek as she relived the nightmare of her daughter’s tragedy.
    “Then Abigael came here with Macy.” Lucy focused on Luke. “He found her. Begged her to come back to him, but he was out of control. Nothing worked; in fact, he was worse. He’d have violent rants. Scared Macy to death. I begged him to leave, but he wouldn’t go without them. He said he’d never let them go. Abigael feared for Macy.” Lucy fell back into the sofa. “You know the rest.”
    But you forgot to mention the most important part, didn’t you, Lucy? That Stewart Gentry is alive.
    “We thought we did,” Luke said under his breath, and hated himself for saying it. He avoided Pete’s eyes.

Chapter Sixteen
    Bad Timing

    “C an you pick up anything on the phone?” Pete asked Larry Chandler, the department communications expert.
    “We’ve pinpointed it somewhere around Tryon. It’s off now. I’m not getting a signal. I’ll try to get the cell phone company on it.”
    “Good idea. Let me know if you get anywhere.” Pete turned to one of the detectives.
    Luke lost a good part of the conversation, but he put enough together. Pete wanted a list of realtors and apartment complexes from Tryon to Asheville and to see if the Gentry family owned any property. That was a start.
    Pete faced him directly. “Stewart Gentry has to park his ass somewhere. I’m putting his picture out over the wires. I don’t care whether this is supposed to be a secret or not. I’m putting Abby’s picture out too.”
    Luke nodded. He worried Abby’s picture might cause Gentry to do something drastic, but they might never find her otherwise. “Contact Charleston P.D. See what they know.”
    “Will do,” Pete replied.
    Being on the outside, unable to give orders, frustrated the hell out of Luke. If Gentry took Abby, he could keep her indefinitely, or kill her, and Luke was nothing more than a worthless fly on the department’s wall.
    Abby had become an important part of his life. She guarded her emotions as closely as he did, and getting to this point in their relationship required a constant chipping away at the protective coating under which they both sought refuge. Attracting women had never been a problem for him, even since his accident, even deaf. The women who approached him did so because they liked what they saw on the outside, without considering the character that lay beneath the surface. Including his ex-wife.
    Abby was different. Proud and serenely beautiful to his eye, independent and vulnerable—a menu of contrasts—looks mattered nothing to her. Though blind, she saw deeper into him than anyone had ever cared to. He found it frightening and exhilarating and profoundly internal. The thought of anything happening to her stopped his heart, yet he felt powerless to prevent it.
    “Pete, unless you need me for a crime scene, I’m on my own time. I’m trained to do research, and that’s what I’m going to do. Maybe I can find something we’ve overlooked.”
    “Go to it, man.”
    Damn right! I don’t need to hear to search the computer. He’d even picked up some hacking techniques, which he’d kept to himself. He settled in, and after a couple of hours, he’d unearthed nothing but conjecture on his part. If the police conducted interviews after Stewart walked out of the hospital—a private facility controlled by the Gentry family—Luke found no evidence of it. He concluded that Carlotta Serrano Gentry used her political capital to keep the escape from the media and her son from being pursued like any other murderer. The discovery