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“Twenty years old,” Hayden finished for me, staring at it harshly as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“What?” I took in his expression before asking, “Do you recognize them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He squinted in concentration. “Lana dated this guy when I was younger. This was after my biological father—Charles—died but before she met Arthur. I remember he showed me his new phone once when he came to pick her up for a date. It was brand new and maybe I’m not remembering this right, but I swear it looked an awful lot like this one.”
“You think one of these was his phone?” I shook my head, confused. “Why would she have kept his phone, though?”
And why were there two of them?
The stalker guy in the movie Papá and Miguel had been watching had only kept the phones of people he’d stalked or killed.
Whoa. Not a reassuring thought.
Hayden could only squint at the phones, not able to make sense of their presence in Lana’s box either. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She and that guy didn’t date long. She found out he was married, so she dumped him and then took me and Brick away for a vacation in Monte Carlo. When we got home, the police stopped by our house to ask her questions because that guy and his wife had gone missing, but…” Glancing at me, he seemed confused. “She couldn’t have anything to do with their disappearance. She was out of the country when that happened.”
I nodded, even as I said, “Unless she hired someone else to take care of them and made sure she had an airtight alibi thousands of miles away while it happened.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head. “But we don’t have time to figure that out now.” Pulling his phone from his pocket he turned it on with his thumb and snapped off a photo of the two phones, then snatched a slip of paper from the top of the pile. “There’s too much here to go through now. Can you help me take pictures of everything? We can go to my place afterward to sort through them all.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan.” I dug through my purse and tugged out my own phone.
Without reading to see what it was about, I removed the next sheet of folded paper from the pile and unfolded it, then flattened it with my hand and focused my phone in. It took me about two pictures to zoom in and capture the entire handwritten page. Once that was done, I reached for the next bundle.
Next to me, Hayden was busy photographing something else.
I’d just gotten my hand on the second item in the box when his phone dinged with an incoming text message. Hayden read the notification and cursed fluidly.
“Shit. She’s on her way back to the apartment.”
“What? Now?!” I shrieked. “I thought you said ten minutes?! That wasn’t even five.”
“What can I say? Brick’s power of irritating Lana is far larger than his will to distract her.” He grabbed the folded bundle from my hand and shoved it back into the box. “We need to get this back above the tiles. Now.”
He slammed the lid shut and hopped back onto the counter.
“Make sure the tile falls back perfectly in place,” I instructed, remembering the movie. “That’s how the killer in the show I was watching realized she’d found his kill box.”
He sent me a harassed glance but did as I ordered, arranging everything neatly before hopping back down onto the floor next to me.
“I’m seriously concerned about the things you watch,” he panted as he grabbed my hand to flee, but I resisted.
“The countertop,” I hissed. “You left a scuff mark.”
When I started to rub it clean with my fingers, he hissed, “What are you doing? She’s going to come through the front door any—”
“And if she sees that scuff, she’ll know someone was up there. Then she’ll move it.”
“Dammit,” he muttered, pausing impatiently beside me and watching the entrance of the kitchen as I worked.
From the front of the apartment, we heard the front door open.
“That’ll have to do,” he whispered, taking my arm and jerking me along behind him. I tried to get a glance over my shoulder as we went, but I could barely make out the countertop. I didn’t spot any black smudges any longer from across the room, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.
Crap.
Fingers crossed that I’d cleaned it good enough, I turned to watch where Hayden was taking us.
In front of me, he guided the way, pausing just out of sight of the doorway as Lana passed by inches away in the hall. Once we heard her enter her bedroom, he tightened his grip on my fingers and yanked me into the hall. We darted toward the front of the apartment, where he slipped the door open without a sound.
