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My hand had been on her butt. My body turned slightly toward her. But if you could’ve seen my eyes, they were bright and soft, only for her.

“What happens now?” I asked, changing the subject.

It wasn’t that I was trying to hide what I had with Charleigh.

I would never hide her.

It was that I didn’t want to share her. I didn’t want to talk to my friends about her. She was special, and mine, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“Now, we grab what is left of the evidence and take it back to the morgue. Odin will do his autopsy, and then we’ll list this as a home invasion. With Chris’s record…”

It wouldn’t be questioned.

The stupid fuck had made himself viral.

His police chase and my pit maneuver had made it onto every news station in America, as well as every social media site there was. They had over a hundred different angles since the chase had ended in the Walmart parking lot, one of the busiest places to be at five o’clock in the afternoon.

Luckily, all anyone saw of me was the back of my head as I raced off toward Charleigh.

Everyone else had stayed focused on the driver running away, evading police.

Thankfully.

Seeing as I’d commandeered a police cruiser.

“He looked pretty rough,” I found myself saying. “In the few seconds that I took him in, he’d looked really harried. Hair askew. Face with a ton of stubble. Dirty clothes. He’s been living in the wilderness since he took off from y’all.”

“Hope his last few days were awful.” Black chuckled.

“Sir.” A woman came in with a case in her hands. “We’re done. It’s snowing, and there’s nothing else we can get. Everything is gone.”

Black nodded.

“Also, we found one other thing you’re going to want to look at,” she said. “I have Dempsey cataloging everything now.”

We all followed her out, grabbing our jackets as we went.

When we were on my porch, she led us around the house to a small exterior building that I used for feed storage. Denver had rented it out from me, and I hadn’t been in the building for a while.

When we got to the open door, she stopped in the entrance and said, “Looks like he’s been here for a while. There are bottles of pee.” She pointed to the corner. “Excrement in a pail in the very back corner. Water melted from snow.” She pointed at a small cup that’d come from my back porch. I used it to water my hanging plants in the summer. “And it looks like he’s been eating the cattle feed.”

I took everything in, and my anger almost overwhelmed me.

“Why today?” I asked.

Black crossed his arms over his chest, putting his hands underneath his arms to shield them from the cold wind.

“Did you change your routine at all today?”

I nodded. “I came home an hour and a half early. Two minutes after she was dropped off.”

“Maybe he’d just planned on doing it today, because he’d learned your routine. If you were that early, he probably expected to have time.”

Anger seared through my veins.

“Thank God you came home,” he murmured.

I closed my eyes.