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“Don’t worry about it,” I told her, moving deeper into the small office space. “I’ll be sending a clean up crew to take care of this. Cops won’t touch it.”
I noticed the safe to the side of the desk, open, papers spilling out. All Julia’s notes on the kids who called. Meticulously taken by hand in black ink, areas highlighted, circled and underlined.
I nudged the safe closed with my foot and found blood on the dial.
Whoever did this forced her to open it.
I leaned over Julia, pressing my shirt harder into my mouth and nose to find the cord of the landline phone had been ripped from the wall.
Her cell phone was left on the desk. I tapped the screen, but it was dead. I picked it up and slipped it into my jacket’s inner pocket, hoping there was something, anything on it that might lead us to the person responsible for this.
Maybe she’d started to type out a message to one of us. Or left a voice memo. Recorded the attack.Something.
Julia was smart, but was she that smart? Was she able to act that fast or had whoever did this snuck up on her?
My hand hovered over Julia’s shoulder. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.
I let the hollow sadness of her loss fill me, but only for a second. She deserved for someone to grieve for her. She was only twenty-six and she had no family left that cared for her.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. “I’ll find the person who did this and I’ll make them pay.”
I clenched my hand into a fist and lowered it.
“Make yourself useful,” I told Becca. “Grab all those notes from the safe. Whoever did this will have taken the notes she had on them to avoid being caught.”
“What?”
I forgot Becca didn’t know about our humanitarian project.
There was a lot she didn’t know.
Even more she shouldn’t.
If she knew what was good for her, she would get the fuck out of dodge the instant Ava Jade came back. Maybe her friend could convince her to.
When I didn’t answer her, she bent to her knees and began scraping the papers together, keeping as much of a distance from Julia’s corpse as she could.
Once she had them all in a neat stack, she rose to her feet shakily and tucked them under her arm.
I checked the rest of the room for any other evidence, but my gaze kept falling back on Julia.
Something about her death, the nature of it, didn’t sit right with me.
The assholes we visited vengeance on in Thorn Valley didn’t seem capable of it.
They were drunks. Assholes. And one in maybe every fifty was truly unhinged, but all of those were dead.
Whoever did this appeared to be playing with her. Fuck, they turned her into a human fucking pin cushion. Sickly, it reminded me of something Rook could’ve done, though he never would’ve served this level of pain on an innocent person.
On a monster, sure.
But not to a girl like Julia.
Not on purpose.
And this wasveryfucking purposeful.
There was something here, and I was missing it.
