The Reckoning Read Free Page A

the same turmoil he’d been in when he’d made the decision to leave. Time and distance hadn’t changed anything except allowing him to temporarily forget.
    And all of that took a backseat to the one thing that had nothing to do with his past with Alex—Sarah’s missing daughter. He couldn’t argue with the logic. Everything he’d found backed up his uncle’s idea that Bobby had kidnapped his daughter and fled to Brazil, but something didn’t feel right to Holt.
    Things in Mystere Parish never did.
    Something about the stretch of dense swamp that comprised most of the parish was unlike anywhere he’d ever been before, and he’d seen plenty of conflicted places during his military service. Not that Mystere was conflicted. In fact, it appeared to be comprised of small, peaceful towns filled with down-to-earth, law-abiding people. But under that surface of pleasant normalcy, Mystere hid secrets. Some of those secrets eventually rose to the surface.
    It was the ones that hadn’t yet that concerned Holt.
    Hoping his uncle was right for a change, Holt decided to take another look at Bobby and directed his truck toward the fourplex where Bobby had lived. Bobby taking Erica was the simple answer—the good answer. Holt didn’t want to think about the options until he’d eliminated the most obvious and the safest for the child.
    The deputy had taken statements from the people occupying the two front units this afternoon, but the woman who lived directly across from Bobby in the other rear unit hadn’t been home. Maybe she was available now and could fill in some of the gaps.
    He was about to pull up in back of the fourplex when his cell phone rang. He checked the display and frowned. His uncle.
    Holt’s grandfather had married Lorraine after the death of his first wife, Holt’s paternal grandmother. After several miscarriages, Jasper Conroy had been a surprise baby for Lorraine. He was only two years older than Holt, but he wore the “Uncle” title as proudly as he did his sheriff’s badge. The man’s body might be restricted to bed rest, but it hadn’t stopped his mouth from traveling far and often.
    “Uncle Conroy, what can I do for you?”
    “Why aren’t you back at the sheriff’s office?”
    “I’ve been looking into the Rhonaldo case.”
    “There is no Rhonaldo case. Bobby Rhonaldo took that kid from that screaming shrew of a wife and skipped the country. Since we don’t have the time, the manpower or the jurisdiction to chase him to South America, I expect you to be back in the office in ten minutes.”
    “To do what, exactly?”
    “Whatever I say you need to do. Don’t get belligerent with me, boy. I’m still in charge.”
    Holt struggled to control his tongue. His mother had asked this favor of him so that Jasper could continue to draw his salary and not worry about someone poaching his job. Holt figured it was a heck of a lot of aggravation to take for a favor, but he supposed it was a nice thing to do.
    Thanks to the business acumen of his late and mostly absentee father, Holt had enough money to last a lifetime, so working for free didn’t bother him at all. But a little consideration wouldn’t be out of line, since Jasper was the only one benefiting from Holt’s time.
    “I figured I needed to be thorough on this one, given your history with Sarah,” Holt said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to find a gap in my investigation and use that against you in the next election. If this ends badly, the last thing you need is people saying that if you’d done your job, you could have prevented the death of a six-year-old girl.”
    There was dead silence for several seconds and Holt knew his uncle recognized the legitimacy of his words and at the same time was mentally cursing nine ways to Sunday that he had to spend even a moment of time on Sarah Rhonaldo. His mother’s complete and utter disdain for Sarah went far deeper than a long-standing family feud, but Holt had never been able to determine