“Go interview Lily again,” I tell Alex, forcing my voice to remain steady.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it,” I all but scream at him. There’s no need to interview her again, but I have to get him out of here. I need to follow up on something I might have missed years ago, and I need to do it without anyone breathing down my neck. “Take Lucy with you. She needs the experience.” I manage to find some conviction when I tell him, “Lily might know something that will help us close this. She’s the only good witness we have.” That part isn’t untrue. Richard Soffett doesn’t have any family nearby, Chase is missing, and Max’s lawyer won’t let us come within a thousand feet of him. Lily is the only one with a connection we can try and follow.
“Ask her again about the days leading up to her husband’s disappearance.” We’ve already been through it, and though dredging it up again might put Alex on a path I don’t want him anywhere near, it’s the only thing I can think to say to get him to leave. He pulls out his phone and rings Lucy, telling her he’ll pick her up from the lab down the street on his way toLily’s. When his suspicious glare fades and he finally leaves the conference room, I feel like I can finally fucking breathe.
I snatch the photo of Lily off the table and exit into the hallway, striding in the direction of Micah’s office.
He glances over at me when I appear in his doorway. “How’s it going, detective?”
Continuing into his space, I set the photo down on his desk and watch his gaze lower to it and then rise back up to me.
“How far back can we access street cam footage?” I ask him.
Micah smiles, so wide and cheesy it makes me want to slap him becausecan’t he tell how urgent this is?“We or me?”
“Micah. How far back?”
His smile disappears, sensing my patience is so thin it’s practically non-existent.
“I can go as far back as you need me to go.” He turns from me and faces his computer, typing a couple of things before turning to me again. “What do you want to see?”
“First, I want to see the photos of Chloe that cleared her. The stills of the video footage from town.”
That’s something I have access to in the case files, but I’m already here and I don’t think I could steady my hands enough to manage a mouse and keyboard.
Micah eyes me for a beat that goes on just a tad too long to be comfortable. He finally faces his computer screen and clicks a couple of times until the printer on the desk beside him kicks to life and spits out a couple of pictures the size of a full sheet of paper.
Spinning in his chair, he grabs them from the tray and extends them in my direction.
These stills of the video footage are supposed to be Chloe Stark. It’s supposed to be what kept her out of prison and put her mother away, proofthat Chloe was not at home during the time of her third stepdad’s murder. I stared at these stills for months, before, during, and after the trial.
I squinted, held them under different types of lights to get better views and angles. Brought them close to my face and held them at arm’s length. I’m not doing any of those things now. These shots are practically burned into my brain.
Micah sits silently in his chair, watching me as I arrange the pictures on his desk and then put the photo of Lily next to them. They are similar in their backgrounds. In Chloe’s photos, there are hedges that match the ones in Lily’s photo. The stills show Chloe’s movement, her legs in various degrees of stride as she moves forward. And the photos are the same in that Chloe is moving toward the same bus Lily was getting on that would take her and her children to Hope House.
There is faint bruising on her chest that I never noticed before. A bloom of purple and red that starts at that sweet collarbone of hers and spreads toward her neck.
I run a finger down the photo of Chloe, remembering what she said in the hotel room when we went to Sunset Peak.
“They were bad men, Colin. And if you would have continued your investigation into them instead of taking an easy arrest, you would have known that.”
She was running from her abuser. Her stepdad was hurting her, and her mother…killed him to protect her? That’s why Caroline confessed. She protected Chloe by killing her husbands and protected her again by making the arrest easy. By making sure Chloe was never under any suspicion.
“What are you thinking?” Micah asks, like he can see into my mind and he wants to join in the conversation.
I lift my gaze from the desk, keeping my hands planted on the surface on either side of the sloppy pile of photos. “Chloe’s stepdads were abusing her. That’s why Caroline Stark killed them.”
Micah doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react much at all, just leans his body back in his chair and sets his elbows on the arms, interlacing his fingers over his stomach. “Hmm.”
“Doesn’t that make sense?” My words remind me of the drive to Sunset Peak, when it sounded like Chloe was trying to convince me why Max and his friends might be after her and hers.
Micah lifts his shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Sort of.”
Turning my gaze back toward the photos, I keep trying to pull at a thread that feels like it’s shriveling between my fingertips the further I yank it.
I study the photos, trying to see them differently. Trying to see something else I’ve never seen in them before.
