The way Lily avoids making eye contact with us as she picks at her nail bed, her posture, her demeanor, it all screams hesitancy, but there is something else I sense in the way her shoulders loosen with each breath that passes. Something that looks like the promise of safety finally being within reach.
I slide the manilla folder across the coffee table in her direction, the pictures of her husband at the hardware store on display. She lets out a whimper when they come into focus, and I’m assuming it’s because something else has come into focus for her: the fact that he may have been planning to murder her and the children.
“Do you know why your husband would have been gathering these types of supplies?” Alex asks, even though at this point it’s fairly obvious. Lily swallows hard, reaching out and gingerly moving the pictures aroundto see them from every angle, each one another confirmation of the fate she didn’t have to succumb to, because her husband’s now dead.
She shakes her head, but we all know.
“You said you guys are homicide detectives?”
We both nod, letting her quietly absorb what we’re laying out in front of her.
“Then why are you investigating an animal attack?” She lifts her eyes to us, trying to understand something we haven’t told her yet.
“We have reason to believe the attack wasn’t…accidental.”
Her brows pull together in confusion. “You think he…intentionally got attacked?”
“We think maybe someone set him up to be attacked.”
Lily inhales a sharp breath at the same time my phone pings with an unknown notification. I pull my phone out, watching the little dot that represents Chloe’s phone move around an unknown location. I have a few other missed notifications, it seems. Chloe’s Bug remains parked outside the police department, but her phone left her house thirty minutes ago, and for fifteen minutes, she’s been stationary at some house about twenty minutes from Lily Tyler’s home.
“That sounds…hard to coordinate,” Lily says, drawing my attention back to her. She’s not wrong, and I’ll admit our theory seems far-fetched. But with evidence that Grayson may have been bound in the hours and minutes leading up to his death, it’s a theory we’re running with, especially when we know there was another seemingly accidental death within the last month.
The forensics team was able to locate the cliff’s edge where the history teacher may have gone into the water. It’s not a particularly high traffic area that far up the mountain, and they found a partial shoeprint that matched the shoes he was wearing when he washed up. According to them, theshoeprint indicated he may haveflewfrom the cliff, as if he’d been pushed, instead of accidentally stumbled over.
Once we confirm Lily was at Hope House during her husband’s disappearance, we can officially strike her name off the suspect list, though I already don’t consider her one. She definitely doesn’t look strong enough to overpower the history teacher, either. Even though he was older, he was a big guy. And we still haven’t figured out what the connection between him and Grayson might be.
“We realize this is all a little much,” Alex says. “And we understand you and your kids are dealing with a lot right now.” His eyes trail toward the staircase at Lily’s back, his mind probably following a similar train of thought as mine.Was Lily the only person Grayson was abusing under this roof?
“If you remember anything about the days or weeks leading up to his disappearance, anything that stands out at all or you think we should know,” he slides a card across the coffee table in her direction, closing the folder of pictures and pulling them back to him, “don’t hesitate to give us a call.”
She nods, pinching Alex’s card between her fingers. She lets out a sob as we rise from the couch, and I note that the sob sounds a lot more like a sob of relief than a sob of distress. I leave Lily’s house with a vague feeling I can’t place.
“This is fucking bizarre,” Alex mutters beside me when we make it back to our cars parked by the curb. “Tell me again why the captain thinks this is a homicide?”
“It’s Commissioner Lane who thinks that.”
“Right.” He sighs heavily, clapping me on the back. “Do you think he deserved it?” he asks, surprising me.
“What kind of question is that?”
He shrugs, walking backward toward his vehicle. “I was just thinking, you know, maybe that cougar saved her life.”
He turns and continues to his vehicle without giving me a chance to respond, climbing inside and driving away as I consider his statement.
I glance up at the night sky, at the bright stars twinkling like they’re all in on some secret I’m not privy to.
Grayson abused his wife. Potentially his children. He appeared to be rolling out a plan to murder the three of them. Did hedeserve to die?
My commitment to the work I do won’t let me explore how I feel about answering that question.
But am I glad that cougar got to him before he got to his family? Yeah, I guess I am.
There’s something else that winds through me as I stare up at the black sky. Something Chloe said aboutwondering whywhen people die. Is Grayson’s death-by-cougar coincidental, or was someone protecting his family—and who?Why?
I get in my truck, checking Chloe’s location one last time before heading in her direction.
***
