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Still… The silence in the room became heavy. Like a physical force pushing down on me, making my shoulders slump. The pressure to break it was almost unbearable. I went through my mental Rolodex of basic conversation topics: weather (it was sunny and cool), sports (neither of us watched or cared), politics (both on the same page last time I checked).
I let my gaze drift out the window, taking a second to look at Matt before trying to distract myself with a view of the cloudless sky.
He hasn’t changed… except he has. Everything’s changed.
More flashes of us being together slammed into my memories. A reel playing on fast-forward, filled with heat and sweat and hard bodies and so much more, reminding me of just how much things have changed.
And how much I wish they hadn’t.
“Just got an email from the sheriff.” Matt leaned forward and read what was on his screen. “She’s compiled all the footage they could get from the scene and should be sending it over in the next few hours. Hopefully someone caught something in the background of their selfies.”
“We should be able to get something from there.” A kernel of hope dropped into the center of my chest. “I’m working on pulling surveillance footage from all the streetlights surrounding the area. If the Pegasus drove away from the scene, we might be able to get them that way.”
“Good idea.” He flipped around his laptop. “But I’ve already got it. Pulled them last night when I couldn’t sleep.”
Just like old times. We’d always brain-meld somehow, coming up with similar ideas in similar time frames. We bounced things off each other constantly, only to find out that the other had already thought of an even better idea. Teamwork really did make the dream work between us.
“Have you had a chance to look through them?”
“I did, there are a few cars that I’ve flagged around the time of the murder. One of the cars didn’t have a license plate, which immediately sent up a red flag.”
I clicked through the bookmarked sections of the video, stopping on the one car that didn’t have a plate. It was a red Honda pocked with sunspots, the windows tinted so dark that they were reflecting the surroundings like a black mirror. A man was driving it, wearing sunglasses that covered most of his face, a cap working to cover the rest. He had a large build and wore a long-sleeve navy blue shirt as he gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands.
It was just a grainy video, barely anything solid to go off, and yet my pulse started to beat harder in my neck, and the room grew warmer, smaller. My head felt light, and my mouth dried. Thump—thump—thump. My heart pounded against my rib cage, hard enough to surely bruise me.
This case wasn’t cracked. Far, far from it. All we had was a sketchy car being driven in a ten-mile radius away from the scene of the crime by someone who appeared to want to keep their identity hidden. No judge or jury would ever lock someone up over such a flimsy connection.
Yet there was no doubt in my mind, nor my gut or in my bones.
“This is the Pegasus,” I said, looking up at Matt. His eyes locked on mine, his grin spreading. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to slam him against the wall and reward him with my lips crushing against his so I could tell him how much I missed this, us, working together and solving the impossible.
Instead, I settled for simply saying, “Holy fucking shit.”
8
MATTHEW HALE
I wanted to kiss Jason. The way he smiled, the way his neck got all pink whenever he got excited, the way his eyes lit up… all of it reminded me of the days we would work together, riding the high of solving a case by riding each other for hours. I couldn’t stop the memories from flooding back, igniting a fire inside of my belly that stretched out from my core and down between my legs.
But Jason had pushed me away. He told me that we would never work, that our relationship—all iterations of it—needed to end. He never gave me a solid reason, no matter how much I asked, and that shit burned me in a different way. It made me wary, and it made me avoid long-term relationships like they were the cause of the plague. I lost trust in men, thinking that if Jason and I couldn’t ultimately work, then there was no chance in hell I’d pull it off with anyone else.
And yet here we were, back to the basics.
Back to cracking the impossible cases with our impossible connection.
“Do we know where the car ended up?” Jason asked, scrubbing through the footage.
I shook my head. “We lost him around the corner of Oakley Boulevard and North Spire avenue. The cameras didn’t work for three of those streets. I already reached out to the business around there to see if they have any security footage they can send.”
