“Leanna?” He made a huffing sound. “Not hardly. Not that I would deny my kid a mother, but just not Leanna. She walked out and made it very clear she didn’t want anything to do with either of us.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I took her at her word.”
“You have to find her,” she said suddenly. Maybe Leanna O’Halleran was the missing link, the person who knew what was going on. She could be key.
“If she can be found. Trust me, I’ve been giving it my best shot.” He took a long swallow from his beer, and Kacey decid
ed it was time to give him some more bad news.
“Leanna and Jocelyn, they’re not the only women missing, or possibly killed, who look like me.”
“We don’t know that Leanna’s dead,” he reminded. “She’s . . . too mean to die.” Kacey tried to keep her expression neutral, but he must have seen something in her expression, because he asked, “There were others?”
Could she trust him? Confide in him her half-baked theory? He was right; he was involved with one missing woman and one who was murdered, but in her heart of hearts she couldn’t believe that he was dangerous. Not to her. Not when she’d seen how he cared for his son.
Decision time.
Trace was staring at her intently, and she decided to make a leap of faith. “Let me get my purse.” She hurried from the kitchen, located her bag, and dragged out the pictures she’d shown her mother only hours before. Carefully, she placed each image on the table where her grandmother had served so many meals.
“This is Shelly Bonaventure,” she said.
“That actress who died recently. I know she looks a little like Jocelyn, and you. Suicide, wasn’t it?”
“That’s the official version.”
“You think she’s part of this? Seriously?” he asked, obviously skeptical. “Other than her looks, what kind of connection is there to the others?”
“She was born in Helena, Montana, as were Jocelyn Wallis and myself.” Kacey pointed to the picture she’d printed off of Elle’s Facebook page. “This is Elle Alexander—”
“The woman in the one-car accident last night.”
“Yes, and this woman is still alive and works at a local gym.” She slid the brochure from Fit Forever. “A trainer named Gloria Sanders-O’Malley.”
“She from Helena, too?” He picked up the brochure, squinting as he studied her features.
“Don’t know,” Kacey admitted. “But I’m going to talk to her or check one of her social network sites. Lots of people list their hometown or where they’ve lived on Facebook or the like. If she’s not there, I’ll just talk to her.”
“And say what?”
“I haven’t completely figured that out yet,” Kacey admitted.
“Huh. Yeah. How do you tell someone you think she’s next on the list of some psychopath, especially when there’s no real link established yet?”
“I’m working on that, along with finding out if Elle gave me false information or really didn’t know where she was born.”
“I don’t know about this,” Trace said after a long, silent moment.
“You came here,” she reminded him. “With pictures of Jocelyn and Leanna. Don’t you think it’s damned odd that so many women who look so much alike, who are in their early thirties, are dying?”
“Yes . . . I do . . . but what are you really saying? You think a serial killer is searching for a type? And that the victims aren’t random targets? That he stalks them? That maybe he knew these people while they were in Helena?”
“That’s probably unlikely,” she admitted, as frustrated as ever. “Shelly left Helena when she was really young, and if Elle was there, she didn’t know it. Her birth certificate’s from Idaho.”
He slid the picture away from the others that were clustered together. “So she’s different.”
“In that respect. But she’s in the region. I don’t know.” Again she looked at the picture of the woman to whom Trace had once been married. “What about Leanna?”
He made a face. “She said she’d once lived around Helena, but she didn’t remember any of it, either. I think her parents split, but the truth is, I don’t know much about her. She liked it that way. Didn’t want to talk about her childhood.”
“You don’t know where she went to school? Or her friends?”