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None of the words made sense in her head. “What?”
“Cam is one of my men. You were supposed to meet him the other night but they—he and Shane—followed Grant back to the campground instead.”
‘I remember.”
“We need experts to sift through the clues before Sheriff Carver and his band of misfits come storming in here.” Holt didn’t even blink. “Cam and Shane qualify as experts.”
Just thinking about what could have happened to Roger and the need for more men started the world spinning. She reached out to lean against the doorway and spied a flannel shirt rolled up in a ball near her foot. “This is his—”
Holt stopped her before she could pick it up. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Evidence?”
“Or more traps. I don’t know what we’re looking at here.”
Holt managed to lose her again. Seemed obvious to her. “A crime scene.”
“Probably.” He pointed at the lamp turned on its side and the couch cushions tossed and sitting at strange angles. “I’m trying to figure out if it looks staged.”
A memory came zipping back. The car accident and the blood. How Roger siphoned off his own and saved it for weeks. “Oh.”
Holt’s gaze shot right to her. “Tell me.”
“He faked his own death to get out of New Foundations.” That was only a fraction of the weirdness. She delivered the rest. “I helped him do it. That’s the mission that binds me to this area when I really want to move as far away as possible.”
Holt being Holt, he didn’t show much emotion. A deeper frown, maybe, but nothing in the way of shock. “I figured as much.”
She’d told him this huge secret. A piece of information that should have unraveled who he thought she was and raised all sorts of questions. “That’s all you have to say?”
He nodded. “When we talk later, that will be one of the topics.”
That was starting to look like a really long future conversation. But she couldn’t think about that now. Could barely think about anything as she stood there, trying to fight off the need to double over and try to catch her breath. “What now?”
“We back out and let my men check the scene. They’ll grab anything that implicates you or points to Roger’s past, since I’m thinking you want all that hidden.”
She didn’t fight it. “Yes.”
“Then do not move.” He took one step, and an agonizing creak rang out under his heel. “I mean it.”
“I plan on listening to you from now on.”
His eyes narrowed. “I want to believe you.”
She didn’t touch that. Watched him travel around the small two-room space instead. He conducted a visual tour of each surface and snapped photos before coming back to stand next to her. “There’s no body. Plenty of signs of a struggle but no drag marks in or out.”
She had no idea how he picked all that up in a two-minute visual scan. “That’s a horrible sentence.”
“I don’t disagree.” He glanced at his watch. “Time to go.”
She didn’t question him, mostly because she didn’t want to stand in the middle of the macabre scene with the ransacked cabin and the papers strewn everywhere. And the blood. She might see that puddle every day for the rest of her life.
He made it sound easy, but retracing their steps took almost as long as getting to the cabin. It probably didn’t help that she’d turned into a shaking mess. What little she was able to hold it together back at Roger’s house abandoned her the farther away she got. A trembling started deep in her bones and moved through her entire body.
By the time she got back to her car and tried to pull out her keys, she was a mess. She dropped the set twice. The third time they jangled so loudly in her palm that Holt removed them with a gentle touch. When he suggested she ride with him and he have his men, whoever they were, return her car, she jumped at it.
The long drive back to her house passed in slow sections. She dreaded he’d start that conversation he was so desperate to have. But he didn’t. He turned on the heat, despite the time of year, and let the radio play softly in the background.
It took until they’d almost reached home for her to realize this qualified as his attempt to put her at ease. He didn’t rapid-fire questions at her or demand answers. He let her do battle with the adrenaline coursing through her.
She was about to thank him when she saw the man. Tall and almost as sturdy as Holt. This guy had light brown hair but stood in a battle position that was now so familiar to her—legs apart and hands on hips as the perfect scowl formed on his lips.
