The sweep of my house after Colin broke in was in fact, fruitful. I don’t have that gaming console in my house just as a damn dust collector. I watched his black and white, ghostly form kneel in front of my entertainment center and dig something out of his bag, and it took me zero seconds to spot it when I glanced in its direction. Wasn’t hard to spot the glint of light reflecting off a picture frame in my bedroom that had never been there before either.
And he never said it, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how he knew exactly where I was the night of the party.
It’s fine. I wanted him to watch me. To continue spiraling into his obsession with me. He needed to seethisside of me, too.
But he didn’t need tohearwhat went on behind closed doors. That remained mine.
I toss the little tracking box out of the window and start the car.
“Put your seatbelt on, Rue Rue. We’re going to fuck shit up. Again.”
30
Colin
“Where’s Micah?” Alex jumps when I enter the conference room, crossing to where I’d been zoning out last night. I grab the picture of Lily up off the desk, pausing only long enough to stare at my partner.
“Called in sick.”
“Sick?” Micah’s never been sick the entire time I’ve known him. I’d been hoping to catch him before Captain Barrett came in and run myhypotheticalspast him first, because thus far, he is the only person—besides Chloe—who has seen the other side of me. My darker side, and he has never judged me.
Say that you knew someone was a murderer. You’d been trying to find proof for years, and then you accidentally fell in love with them, but also got your confession. What would you do?
That’s the type of hypothetical I’d been planning to run by Micah. Maybe his response would be the deciding factor on whether I brought thisto my captain at all. That’s off the table now. The hypothetical scenario I feed to my captain will have to be slightly more censored.
Alex shrugs, turning his attention back to his laptop.
I glance around the room, noting the absence of two more colleagues. “Where are Daniel and Lucy?”
“Daniel’s taking a break. Lucy is apparently following a lead she is certain will take her to Chase.”
“Alone?”
Another shrug, but he lifts his gaze from his screen. “Seems like a dead-end to me. And it’s not as important as this.” He nods toward his laptop.
“Which is what?” I ask impatiently.
“I think there’s a snake in the department.” My spine goes rigid, because there is still the issue of someone planting Max’s DNA, and Chloe claims it wasn’t her. I cross the room to him and stand behind his chair, eyeing the screen that just appears to be a document with notes on it.
“Explain, Alex,” I urge him, nerves jittering throughout my body, my skin tingling with impatience and confusion.
I feel like I’m being fed pieces of a story. Like everyone knows one thing aboutsomething, but no one knows the full story. No one has all the clues to solve the mystery, and I’m the one gathering hints and trying to make it all make sense.
I take a step back when he spins in his chair to face me. “It’s just, after I found out the DNA was planted and Lucy and I interviewed Lily again, I thought the interview was a waste of time.”
Sorry.
“But there was something about the way she responded to our questions that didn’t sit right with me. You know that night you and I went over there, she was a wreck. By the time we left, I saw some of that lifting, likeher husband being gone had cleared up so many problems for her and her kids. Like she knew she was safe again.”
I raise my eyebrows. “And?”
“And she didn’t seem relieved at all when Lucy and I were there. She still seemed...” he trails off, scrubbing a hand down his face. “I don’t know. Scared? Nervous? She mentioned that in the days before Grayson’s disappearance, someone came by and rang the doorbell. Her husband answered before she could and urged her away from the door, but she’d noticed three men on the porch and a woman in the car.”
“Okay. Sounds like our guys, but who’s the woman? And why do you think this means there’s a snake on the team?” I glance toward his screen again, trying to read the little letters on the document and figure out what he’s not saying.
“I thought it was the three men at first, but Lily mentioned that one of the four people looked vaguely familiar. Said she might have seen one of them in some news article the police department had in the paper in the last month or so.”
“The Peak puts out a crime column every week.”
