Free Little Bird (The Tangled Series) by Liza Gaines Page B

were pictures of Cara’s parents, her sisters, her nieces and nephews, a few of her friends. But it was the picture of his own parents hanging prominently in the center of the wall that brought him up short. What. The. Fuck. Cara hadn’t even liked his parents. His Dad had died shortly before he and Cara divorced, and his Mom had died less than a year later. Why, after all this time, would Cara have a picture of them hanging up? Unless she’d meant it for him. She’d left him a key to her apartment, she must have known or hoped he would come here. What better way to get his attention than a picture of his parents? Lee reached up and grabbed the frame, pulling it from the wall and heading for the kitchen.
    Laying the frame face down on the counter, he popped open the back. Reading the note scribbled on the back of the photograph in Cara’s rushed cursive, Lee found himself laughing for the second time since he’d entered Cara’s apartment.
    Middleburg Bank, you idiot! Have you called Mike yet?
    Clever girl. He could have done without being called an idiot but then again, she wasn’t really wrong this time. He and Cara had kept a safe deposit box at Middleburg Bank with their passports, birth certificates, and other important documents in it. When they divorced, he’d taken his things out of the box but he’d never thought to actually ask Cara if she’d closed it or taken his name off of it. It appeared she hadn’t closed it and he could only hope she’d left his name on it, too, otherwise he wasn’t sure how he’d get a look inside. If the box were with a larger bank, in a larger community, he’d take Savannah with him and see if she could sweet talk her way into getting in the safe deposit box by pretending to be Cara. But there was no chance of something like that working in Middleburg where people would know and remember his ex-wife.
    Digging around on the counter Lee found a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled his phone number on it. Taking one last look around the apartment to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, Lee gathered up the diary and the picture of his parents before heading back to rejoin Cara’s neighbor.
    After locking the door behind him, Lee turned to face the old woman who was anxiously shifting her weight from one foot to the other while she waited for him to say something. She was far less argumentative now and nodded when Lee pressed the paper with his number into her hand and told her to call him if she saw anyone else hanging around Cara’s place or thought of anything that might help him find Cara.
    His next stop was the bank and he was relieved to discover Cara had in fact left his name on the safe deposit box, but he found its contents more perplexing than helpful. There was only a manila envelope with a bunch of pictures in it and another note from Cara indicating he should keep them safe.
    Flipping through the pictures, Lee realized they were all taken outside the same building, which looked like a warehouse and had a Treasury Department sign next to the door. All the pictures were of couples coming and going from the building. There were three different men featured in the photographs but the women with them varied and the same woman was rarely pictured twice. He had no idea what any of this meant, but Lee frowned when he recognized one of the men in several of the photographs was Charles Hartwell, a United States Senator from Texas.
    Lee stared at the photographs, wondering what he should do next. His first instinct was to take them with him and show them to Savannah and Mike, but Cara wanted them kept safe. Taking them back to his house, which had already been searched once, probably wasn’t the best idea. Pulling out his cell phone, Lee used it to take pictures of the photographs before returning them to the safe deposit box and leaving.
    Back in his Jeep, Lee was pulling out of the parking lot and turning for home when he changed his mind, deciding to run a few other