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“All right,” I said, my stance tense, and motioned toward the guy tied up on the floor. “What about him?”
Logan glanced at his friends. “Keep up the interrogation. He’ll break and cough up something eventually… or he’ll wish he had. We’ll take her car—you can take mine.” He strode forward and grabbed me by the elbow to usher me out of the warehouse.
Slade caught my eyes for just an instant, his jaw clenching. Was he worried about me going off with Logan alone after the insults my stepbrother had hurled at me just a couple of hours ago? I’d rather it was him explaining all this, but Logan seemed determined to handle the situation. Slade offered us both a quick nod, and then Logan was hustling me through the doorway into the cooling evening.
Logan went to his car first, opening the trunk, tearing off his blood-smeared shirt, and pulling on a clean tee from inside—that he kept there for situations like this? As he ducked back into the warehouse to toss his fob to the other guys, I couldn’t help thinking of the night two years ago when he’d come by our house, cut up and bruised.
Had he come from another fight that’d nearly led tohismurder? Had he killed his attacker that night too?
I walked to my car in a daze. As I opened the driver’s side door, Logan jogged over to get in beside me. I stared at the steering wheel for a few seconds before I got my brain in gear enough to stick the key in the ignition.
“I can drive if you’re too distracted,” Logan said.
I shot him a quick glare. “It’s my car. I can handle it.”
The engine rumbled, and I pulled away from the curb. The familiar feel of the vehicle I’d temporarily lost settled my nerves a little even with the very discomforting presence sitting next to me. The last time I’d spoke to Logan, he’d accused me of screwing up Slade’s future and called me a slut.
It was easier to focus on the new subject at hand. “When did you decide my dad had been murdered?”
“It’ll be easier for me to explain everything when I can show you what we have.”
“Seriously? You can’t even tell me how long this has been going on? How long you’ve been hiding it from me?”
Logan fixed his bright brown eyes on me with penetrating intensity. “I’m not going to apologize for doing what I needed to do to protect you.”
Another jab of irritation shot through me. “Is that what you’d call what you’ve been doing? Was laying into me for hooking up with your friend and throwing around horrible names all part of ‘protecting’ me?”
To my surprise, Logan winced. He pulled his gaze away, studying the road moodily.
“No,” he said finally. “I went over the line today. I—It’s complicated. But I can say I’m sorry I came down so harshly on you. Now can you wait until we get to the office for any more questions?”
His apology and his plea sounded genuine enough that I shut my mouth, swallowing down all the other questions niggling at me. It would be better to wait until I had his supposed evidence in front of me anyway. I couldn’t evaluate his story properly until I saw all the pieces.
Silence hung over us for the rest of the drive back, gradually suffocating me. The second we pulled into the parking lot near the law library, I shoved the door open and sucked in the fresh air. Then I scrambled out and crossed my arms impatiently as I waited for Logan to follow.
The room beyond the glass doors was dark. Of course—it’d already been nearly closing time when I’d left. But Logan marched right up to it, pulling a key ring from his pocket, and opened the main door without hesitation. I hurried inside after him, my jaw dropping.
“The librarians gave you a key to the whole library?”
He shrugged with a hint of a cocky smile. “We might have done one of them a favor she was very grateful for.”
I could only imagine what that favor might have been now that I’d seen what a wide range of criminal concerns the Vigil tackled. We strode through the darkened room to the Vigil’s office at the back. Logan opened that door and flicked on the light switch, flooding the space with an artificial glow.
He went straight to the filing cabinet that’d caught my curiosity when I’d first poked around in here. I sank into one of the chairs at the table in the middle of the room, my heart thumping fast.
What the hell could he possibly be going to show me? What if he wasright?
Logan came to the table with a stack of manilla files and set them down with a thud. My gaze darted to the identifying tabs—they were all labeled with the initialsE.S.
Evan Silver—my dad. A chill trickled through my veins.
Logan opened the first folder in front of me. It was full of papers of various sizes, some of them torn, many of them crumpled. They were all marked with handwriting I recognized as my dad’s.
“I came across a box of his stuff in the basement at your house before I left for college, when I was looking for some things of mine I hadn’t unpacked after the move,” Logan said. “I’m not sure whether your dad stashed them all away to sort through later or your mom packed them up when cleaning up his home office afterward.”
I sifted through the papers, peeking at one and then another. The jotted notes were brief and full of abbreviations, some of which I didn’t recognize. I could tell a few of them had to do with research projects he’d been working on—there were multiple references to the hospital back home that he’d mainly worked at, and to medications and things like that.
“This all looks like normal work notes,” I said. “He was always writing things down on whatever paper he could grab—he was constantly thinking of things and wanting to make sure he didn’t forget.”
