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“Now…” Stempy let out a long, drained sigh. “Now, we hope your hallucination wasn’t really a hallucination, and that there really is a rainbow-haired girl floating around Granton University somewhere.”
Chapter 8
BAILEY
I wound a strand of my new blonde hair around my finger and eyed the Granton Police Station from the outside. It was a square, two-story building made of light brick with a glassed entrance. The place had been built about fifteen years ago and looked modern-ish, so it didn’t have an intimidating vibe to it at all.
So why the hell was I too scared to march up that front walk and go inside?
Because I was a big ol’ pansy, that’s why.
Tess had offered to go with me. Hell, Paige had offered to go with me. Jonah had mostly just snickered and leered while Logan had blushed and refused to make direct eye contact. But I had declined the offers, flipped off Jonah and sent him a dirty scowl, and then arrived at the police station by myself, my palms sweaty and knees knocking.
I stood there another minute before bolstering myself, drawing in a deep breath and holding it, then placing one foot in front of the other. Twenty-eight steps later, I exhaled and reached out to open the door.
When I pushed through the entrance, I stopped just inside, braced for the finger-pointing and name-calling. But no one screamed voyeur or pervert, and I was able to take another shaky breath before looking around the fairly empty vestibule before spotting a cubicle with a single person sitting inside, typing at a computer.
I walked to her slowly and discreetly cleared my throat before she looked up at me.
“Hey, um, hi.” I cleared my throat again. “I need to talk to someone about some information I have on the Beckett Hilliard rape case.”
“Oh!” The woman seemed surprised by my offer, but she quickly said, “Okay, sure. Let me see if I can get a detective for you. Go ahead and take a seat. Someone will be with you in a minute.”
It felt as if I was at a freaking doctor’s appointment. I glanced behind me, and what do you know, there was even a few chairs with a table and magazines on them to thumb through. How surreal. Trying to convince myself I was really here for a root canal and not to confess I was a dirty awful voyeur, I sat in the stiff blue chair and picked up a Highlights magazine, then flipped through it until I found the Hidden Pictures page.
They needed some elevator music up in this place to really complete the waiting-room mood.
I’d just found a birthday cake hidden in a wall next to a swimming pool when I heard footsteps approaching. When I looked up from the page, a man in slacks and a polo shirt but a gun and badge strapped to his waist nodded to me.
“Ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m Detective Rice. Someone said you were here about the Hilliard case?”
“Yes, I—” Flushing, I tossed the Highlights down, hoping he didn’t think I was an idiot for browsing through a kid’s magazine.
Oh, who was I kidding? I was an idiot. A complete and utter nitwit. This was a big, huge, important deal, and I was just a stupid little college girl who’d watched two people have sex. Detective Rice looked so professional and authoritative with his salt-and-pepper hair and shrewd pale eyes that looked as if they saw everything as he ushered me down a hall to his office, while I wore polka dot leggings with an oversized long-sleeved shirt bearing a picture of a Grumpy Cat that said I had fun once; it was awful.
“I don’t think I got your name,” Detective Rice said as he motioned me into the windowless room toward a chair by a messy desk and shut us inside alone.
“Oh! Sorry. I’m Bailey. Bailey Prescott. I’m nervous. I don’t know how to do this. I—”
With a placating smile, he lifted a hand, and I instantly fell quiet, swallowing down my blubbering, moronic words.
“It’s okay, Miss Prescott. I understand how difficult this must be for you. And I appreciate the courage you have to come forward. We’ll take this as slow as you need to.”
“Okay.” I nodded gratefully and eased out a settled breath as I sank into the chair and then clutched the seat under me with both hands, so very glad he was being nice and accommodating about this. Maybe I could confess my sins after all.
Until he sat in his chair and picked up a notebook, saying, “Now you’re claiming Beckett Hilliard raped you too, right?”
My mouth fell open. “What? No! Not at all.”
Detective Rice’s face lifted, filling with surprise, “But the secretary said—”
“I have information about the case,” I butted in, staring at him as if he’d lost his mind, “Information that
he didn’t rape Melody What’s-her-face. Not that I’d been raped too. Good Lord, no! He didn’t rape me. He didn’t rape anyone. I was there that night. I saw them. He didn’t lay a single malicious hand on her, and she was willing, the whole time. She instigated it.”
The older man stared at me a good five seconds longer before he murmured, “You witnessed the entire event?”
Hey, the way he said it actually didn’t sound so bad. Witnessing an event seemed so much better than ogling a couple doing the horizontal tango. So, yeah, I’d witnessed. I loved that word.
