“John thrives on the power he gets from drawing people into arguments and then twisting things around to be their fault. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.” Nikki wished she believed her own reasoning.
“Is that what he was like when you two dated?”
“Yes, and it appears he hasn’t changed all that much.”
“You do realize he’s scared of you, right?” Liam asked as the doors opened. “Maybe he used to manipulate you out of insecurity or whatever, but he’s scared of you. He knows you have the power to make his life miserable.”
“Only if he’s done something.” Nikki changed the subject before her emotions overwhelmed her. “You sent the security videos to the geeks at the office, right?”
“They’ll be finished by tomorrow afternoon.”
John’s proclivity for strip clubs and possible adultery still didn’t give him a motive to hurt Madison and Kaylee. Kaylee had tried to blackmail Ricky; would she do the same thing to her friend’s father? What if John had gone after Kaylee and Madison had been collateral damage?
And where did Janelle Gomez fit into the picture, if she even fit at all? Maybe she really had been killed by someone else who’d been smart enough to use the current interest in Frost to cover his tracks.
John claimed he’d started hitting the strip club after the disappearance, but Nikki had her doubts. The Stillwater-Hudson area had at least ten so-called gentlemen’s clubs. Janelle working at John’s strip club of choice couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Dig into John’s extracurricular activity. Find out if he’s a frequent flyer anywhere else and if he’s really as hands-off as he says. Check public record and see if he and Amy have ever been legally separated or a motion filed. I want to know how good his marriage actually is, and neither one of them is going to be honest.”
“Any suggestions on where to start?”
“The strippers,” Nikki said. “He came to them for comfort and to get his ego fed. If he talked shit about Amy, he said it to them.”
Twenty-Six
Nikki reset the house alarm and headed to her bedroom. She’d decided to swing by the house after the visit to Roan Pharmaceuticals to get some clean clothes and then stop at Tyler’s to surprise Lacey.
Nikki wished she didn’t have to drive back to Stillwater. She’d kill for a night in her own bed. She sifted through her closet and chose two pairs of jeans, but all of her tops seemed frumpy. Not that her usual attire made her look sloppy, but the jeans hugged her curves. She might as well find tops that did the same thing.
“Who am I trying to impress?” she muttered. Before she allowed herself to think of the answer, the house plunged into darkness.
Nikki shuffled across the room until her knees hit the bed. She felt around for her phone and then turned on the flashlight feature. The house seemed eerily quiet as she hurried down the hall to the front window. The neighbor’s lights were on.
“So are my driveway lights.” She spoke to the empty space as she peered out of the front window. The lights were motion-sensored, but Tyler’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. Her garage only had one stall.
Alarm bells were screeching in her head. The neighbors still had power, but she couldn’t see all of the houses on her side of the street. Maybe it was a partial outage and she just couldn’t see who else was affected.
The circuit breaker was outside, protected by a padlocked cover. The padlock was key coded, so picking it was impossible. Nikki didn’t even know the code by heart.
Her security system had a backup battery that would supposedly last at least twelve hours in an outage. The panel by the front door indicated the alarm was still on. Nikki had no idea if the security cameras were still recording.
She peeked around the window, searching for signs of an intruder. No fresh footprints in the snow, but the breaker was on the side of the house, just a few inches to the left of the dining room window.
Nikki slipped around the table, dread settling into the pit of her stomach. Something wasn’t right.
The window suddenly exploded, glass flying like shrapnel. Nikki raised her arms in front of her face, but pain burst across the side of her head. Her knees hit the floor hard.
Twenty-Seven
“So much for unbreakable glass.” Nikki pressed the ice pack against her head. The bleeding had stopped, but the wound still burned. Someone had broken into the protective cover on her house’s circuit breaker to cut the electricity. Her security cameras covered the front and back doors, along with the garage, but the shooter had avoided all of them. “It looks like whoever did this parked down the road and climbed over the fence and headed straight for the circuit breaker.”
“Thank God it was only an air gun.” Tyler had been furious when he found out she had a head wound and still drove to his house to surprise Lacey. “How did they know you were even home?”
“They didn’t,” Nikki said. “I didn’t even know I would be home until I was halfway to Roan Pharmaceuticals. And I didn’t tell anyone but Liam.” Knowing that someone had cut the power and then waited to see her moving through the house was bad enough, but what if Lacey had been home?
Nikki had accepted the dangers of her job years ago, but the idea that her daughter could be in danger sent a wave of fear through her. The sight of her mother’s bandaged head had scared her, but Nikki distracted her with pizza. By the time they’d finished eating, Lacey seemed to have forgotten about the injury. She’d spent the rest of the evening snuggled in Nikki’s lap until her bath.
“I suppose people use air guns for target practice.” Tyler leaned against the kitchen counter, arms across his chest.
