Cookie and I had yet to figure out if Shawn Foster, the man standing in my office waiting for me to speak to him, was a legitimate adoption or if he, too, had been kidnapped.

“Are you Ms. Davidson?” he asked, his voice low and smooth.

When Cookie had first described Shawn Foster to me, she’d commented on how opposite he was in looks to Reyes. But that applied only to his coloring. Where Reyes was dark, Shawn was light. Literally and celestially. His aura was stunning. Brighter than most. More pure. He had blond hair cropped short and pale skin. But his features were bizarrely similar. Beautiful. Angelic. Very much like Rey’aziel’s. Which would explain why my suspicions shifted into overdrive.

“Yes.” I stepped forward and took his outstretched hand. “Sorry, you just look really familiar.”

“I should,” he said with a grin. “You’ve been investigating me for a while now.”

We stood in an awkward silence, mostly because it took me a moment to recover from his statement. He knew I’d been investigating him. His parents. Did he know about Reyes? He was younger than Reyes. My age, actually. And from what we found out earlier about him, he was living with his parents again while he went to graduate school at UNM. He was in engineering. And he was still gazing at me, waiting for his statement to sink in.

“Oh, right. Well” – I shot a save me expression to Cookie, who was still busy trying to reset her jaw – “not so much you as… your parents.” I realized too late that investigating his parents could seem worse than investigating him.

“Good,” he said, dropping my hand and acknowledging Cookie with a nod. “Then you’ll have a jump start on my case, should you choose to accept it.”

“Your case?” I asked, gesturing toward my office, which was just past Cookie’s, a.k.a. our reception area.

“Yes. I’d like you to find my real parents.”

I almost tripped, then closed the door, giving Cookie one last holy crap look before it closed completely.

“Please, have a seat.” I offered him the chair across from my desk, then went straight for the Bunn. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.” He was still standing, checking out the digs. “This is nice.”

“Thanks. My husband recently had it redecorated.”

“Right.” He sat down at last and put a folder he’d been carrying on my desk. “He owns the bar and grill downstairs.”

Was that all he knew? I could only hope at this point. “Yes, he does.”

I’d been having strange encounters with both the living and the dead, with both demons and angels, with poltergeists and the mentally unstable, my entire life, but I could honestly say this rated really close to the top.

I sat across from him and took a sip of liquid courage. “How did you know about the investigation?”

“I didn’t. Not at first. But when I saw you drive by my parents’ house the other day, I remembered seeing you parked down the street about a year ago.”

“You have a great memory.”

“You were there for quite a while.”

Try days. “And that’s unusual because…?”

“You parked. You never got out. You didn’t live in the neighborhood, but you sat down the street for some time.”

“Of course.” Wasn’t he the perceptive one.

“So, the next time you did a drive-by, I took down your license plate and had a friend run it.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Very.”

“And resourceful,” I added.

He lifted a shoulder in modesty.

“What have your parents told you?”

“That my mother was in labor for thirty-six hours. That she eventually had to have a C-section. That she nursed me until I was two.”

“I see.” When we’d looked into the case before, we were almost certain Shawn Foster had been abducted by the Fosters as well, and that they’d gone through a shady adoption agency, one that had only been open a few months and had facilitated only three adoptions, Shawn Foster being one of them. “But you don’t believe them?” I asked. Why would he be here if he did?

“I don’t. For several reasons. And I don’t think you do, either.”

I still had to wonder if he knew anything about Reyes. I gestured toward the file. “May I?”

“Of course.”

He leaned back while I thumbed through the folder he’d brought. It was mainly pictures, notes on inconsistencies in his parents’ stories, statements from relatives who didn’t remember Mrs. Foster ever mentioning the pregnancy to them, and one final slip of paper in the back that pretty much sealed the deal. A DNA test. The Fosters were most definitely not his parents. Not even close.

“Do your parents know you did the DNA test?”

“No.”

“So, you believe you were adopted?”

“Do you?” he challenged.

“What do you mean?”

He rubbed a hand over his mouth in thought, his blue eyes studying me. “You’ve been looking into this for quite some time. I’d like to know why. And what your thoughts are.”

“Mr. Foster —”

“Shawn, please.”

“Shawn, all I have are thoughts without a single shred of evidence to support any of them. I couldn’t possibly divulge my ramblings without proof. It would be very irresponsible.”

“Well, that answers that.”

“What?” I asked as he stood, grabbed the file, and turned to leave. “Wait. That answers what?”