Page 5 of Frozen Secrets

“They want to make sure I don’t take his office supplies?” Winnie’s hand brushed his as she moved to catch a paperweight that had toppled from the top of the stack, and a surge of heat flared into Adrial’s veins. “What are they going to do? Arrest me for taking his stapler?”

A chain reaction streamlined into his chest and spiked his heart rate higher. Adrial sucked in a sharp breath to counter the visceral change in his body. There’d been times he wondered if he was still capable of feeling anything past the numbness he’d let take control, resigned to spending the rest of his life detached, disassociated and disconnected from the kind of physical touch he hadn’t let himself have these past few years. That simple brush felt like an explosion rather than an innocuous shock, and Adrial couldn’t get himself back in control. He cleared his throat, reality coming back in slow increments. “BHPD is severely underfunded. Those office supplies are like gold.”

“Good to know.” Her hair fell over one shoulder as they worked through the box side by side, each careful to keep their distance. Seconds stretched into minutes, into what must’ve been an hour, before they came up for air and had reorganized a small portion of the box. Some documents had come from the Lila Mercer investigation. Others were clearly the ravings of a man who couldn’t let things go. Dates neither of them recognized, interview questions jotted down but possibly unanswered. Arthur Hutton had not been well in his final days. That much was clear, and Adrial’s stomach twisted at the thought of Winnie dealing with her dad alone. But she seemed to manage well enough. She had her husband—some lawyer from Seattle—to help her through. “I got your wedding invitation.”

That…was not what he expected. The media reports he held became indiscernible as his heart thundered at the base of his throat.

She didn’t look up, didn’t break her focus on the impossible task in front of them. “My dad sent it to me.”

What the hell? Pain shot through Adrial’s jaw as he locked his back teeth. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

Winnie shuffled through the next stack in the box. Expense sheets submitted by detectives working the case. Had Arthur saved every sheet of paper connected to the investigation? “He’d been trying to convince me to move home and join the department at the time. I think he thought if I came back to Black Hollow to stop the wedding, I would stay. Sometimes I think he was just lonely.”

“He did it to himself.” Adrial hadn’t meant the harshness that lined his words, but there was nothing for her to deny. Her father had given up on raising her the moment his wife had passed away. Adrial had done his best to pick up the pieces and hold her together, but she’d only been sixteen. She’d needed her parent, and Arthur hadn’t been that for a long time. “You would’ve found out about the wedding sooner or later, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to be invited considering how we—how I—left things.”

“You’re not wrong.” Another one of those humorless laughs struggled into existence. “What better way of telling a woman you wanted to be married, you just didn’t want to marry her, then sending her a wedding invitation?”

Damn it. Adrial tossed the papers he’d been going through back into the box, leveraging his weight on the edge. “Winnie, that wasn’t—”

“No. I’m sorry.” She waved her hand as though to erase the past couple of minutes. “That’s not why I brought it up. I just… I wanted to tell you I’m happy for you. Getting married, starting your agency.” She offered a slim smile. “It’s everything you wanted. You deserve it. Really.”

Adrial didn’t have a response to that. Everything? It had been. For a couple of years. He forced himself to review the carbon-copy evidence list dedicated to the Lila Mercer case. Confusion branded him for only a moment. “This list is wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Winnie pressed into him, her shoulder tucking against his chest, but he wouldn’t give into that heat again. Couldn’t.

“This is one of the first evidence catalogs from the scene, but these items aren’t what made it into the official investigation file.” He flipped over the thin paper, searching for another list. And came up empty. “Evidence is missing from the investigation file.”

Chapter Five

Evidence had gone missing?

Had her father known? Was that why twenty years had gone by without any leads or answers? Winnie had gone through a fair amount of the boxes connected to the Lila Mercer investigation, but she felt compelled to review the evidence list Adrial had recovered. There were the big-ticket items, of course. The bright blue tarp the twenty-year-old had been wrapped in, the chains used to secure the body to the cinder blocks. Neither had produced much in the way of a lead, as far as she knew, but the expert on the case had passed away. There was no one for them to consult. “Where is the evidence now? Can we compare this list to the official file and see the difference?”

“Evidence collected during homicide investigations is kept in a secure location. Sometimes the station, other times a storage facility.” Adrial set aside the list on the very same coffee table he’d sat at the night he’d asked her father for permission to marry her. “Either way, neither of us is getting close to it. We’re not law enforcement, and we don’t have clearance.”

That wasn’t good enough. There had to be something—anything—in these boxes that would help. And, look, they’d already found a gaping hole in the case. Evidence had gone missing, but none of the papers or media coverage reported it, and the notes her dad had made all seemed to contradict each other.

“You used to work for BHPD, and you work cold cases for a living.” That all-too-familiar weightlessness that accompanied not having something to do, something to focus on, was creeping through her like sludge. This couldn’t be it. She hadn’t gone through all these boxes and memorized investigation details to only come this far. “Don’t you have a contact in the department who can help?”

“Listen, I agreed to bring you the information I have concerning this particular case. Not play detective. And, honestly, I’d be happy never to get involved in this case again.” His knuckles looked as though they’d burst through the skin as he clutched the box. “Your dad spent the last twenty years trying to get a lead and ended up nowhere. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life chasing dead ends. Believe me. No good can come of it. Just…grieve for your dad and move on, Red. Clean out the house, put it up for sale and go back to Seattle, where you belong.”

Where she belonged? The words struck harder than he would ever know. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She wasn’t sure where she belonged anymore. Seattle had been everything she’d dreamed about as a kid, when she’d fantasized about escaping this messed-up town, but not even the lawyer husband, professionally decorated town house and nights out with college friends had seemed to fit right. She’d come home out of duty—to take care of her dad’s belongings and arrange the funeral—but there wasn’t an acre of Black Hollow that’d welcomed her with open arms. Least of all the man who’d ripped her heart in half and made her run in the first place. And she got it. She did. She hadn’t been the right fit for him, either. She hadn’t been the right fit for her ex-husband. She hadn’t been the right fit for her dad or for her classmates, who made sure she knew about every single flaw every single day of her miserable childhood. No one seemed to know what to do with her, and the only person who’d ever accepted her—unconditionally and with a smile—had been taken from her as a teen.

She’d hoped time and circumstances would have gifted her some kind of reset.

Turned out, she still didn’t fit. Not in Seattle, and not in Black Hollow.

But solving this case could change that. She’d gone through enough of her father’s files and listened to him talk about his cases over the years to know that motive was everything. If she managed to learn who in Lila Mercer’s life had reason to want her dead, Winnie might be able to create a new suspect pool the police hadn’t considered all those years ago.

The medical examiner’s report. It had to be somewhere in this house. Her father’s entire case rested on it, and he would’ve made sure to keep a copy. Bits and pieces from news coverage all those years ago—the few times her dad hadn’t turned off the TV and sent her out of the living room—trickled in from the box of memories she didn’t open too often. Just a few details. The memory of the eighty-year-old, hacking-up-a-lung newscaster she bet had passed away by now had explained that physical evidence on the body had been preserved due to the below freezing temperatures in Hollow Lake. To the point it was hard for investigators to tell how long Lila Mercer had been chained below the surface. There was something else, though. Something that felt important.

Winnie collected the delicate papers from the table and stacked them back into the box. A gnawing pain pulsed through her right eye. Damn it. Not now. Not in front of him. If she didn’t catch it in time, she wouldn’t be able to see in the next thirty minutes, but her survival instincts weren’t strong enough to fight her temper. “Why come here if you weren’t planning on helping me, Adrial? Was it out of pity? Your way of apologizing for the way we left things?”

“I don’t pity you.” Adrial moved to grab the box, but she dragged it out of his reach. “I just don’t want you getting involved in something where you end up hurt.”

He almost made it convincing, didn’t he? His concern for her.

“In case you weren’t aware, I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for a while now.” She hauled the box into her chest and turned. Pain drilled into her temple. She wanted to press her thumb into the thin skin there to relieve the pressure, but experience and history told her nothing short of caffeine and a dark room would help. Now. Her grip slipped from the box’s handles a mere foot before she got to the edge of the table.