AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I remained quiet, not willing to give Luca the satisfaction of a response. Luca liked to pretend that he didn’t care, but I knew he cared too much and not just about Ingrid. We might not always do things the same way, but we were family, and that was how I knew that when I needed him, he would come help me.
“What makes you think that this tweaker had the brain cells to circumvent a boatload of security, take on Angel Moreno, kill Carla’s mother, and leave her in the house without her knowing?”
Those were all questions I’d turned over in my mind last night. Like the detectives, I knew I was missing something. I desperately wanted to ask Carla, but I knew she couldn’t remember that night completely, and I didn’t see the point in causing her unnecessary pain.
I’d always loved solving puzzles, so all of these lose ends nagged at my mind, and I was sure that Caleb was hiding parts of the larger picture.
“I don’t think he did it alone,” I admitted, my eyes never leaving Caleb. He wasn’t walking too fast, and the streets weren’t crowded, which was to our advantage. There were enough people for Luca and me to get lost, but not so much that we needed to be on Caleb’s ass.
“I don’t think you believe that Carla helped,” Luca commented. “So, who else could have done it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
Matteo had only focused the scope of his investigation on Carla and what happened to her family. He wouldn’t have even looked up Caleb if the police hadn’t mentioned his name in the report.
“You think that he’s going to just lead us to his accomplice?”
Luca’s presence was starting to drive me insane. It was clear he didn’t think following Caleb was a good use of my time, but I wanted eyes on him. Even if he wasn’t leading us to anything, I did not want him running around the city freely. No matter what he did, he wanted Carla. I knew that.
“He’s stopping,” Luca said, gesturing toward Caleb. “Oh, shocker. He’s slipping into an alley.”
I rolled my eyes but crossed the street, following as closely as I could. Luca’s hands grabbed me. “There’s no way that you can go into the alleyway without him spotting you, and if he sees you, he’s going to know we’ve been following him.”
I cursed under my breath. Luca was right.
“I’ll go.”
I tensed. “We don’t know what the hell he’s doing. I can’t let you put yourself in danger like that.”
“I’m not planning to stick around, but I’m curious as to who the fucker is meeting. Besides”—he shrugged—“I owe you for what happened in the fall.”
Before I could say anything, Luca was off. Not that he needed my permission. Luca was going to do what he wanted, that was always the case, but I would never forgive myself if something happened to him because of me.
I held my breath as I watched Luca walk past the alleyway. He didn’t stop as he pulled out his phone, no doubt snapping a picture of whatever Caleb was doing. He kept walking, and I smirked. Luca was good. I’d give him that.
There was no way that Caleb would realize that my cousin just took a picture of whoever he was meeting with.
The second my phone buzzed, I reached into my pocket, desperate to see what Caleb was doing.
“Now, we are even,” the text said. The picture wasn’t perfect, but the photo was clear. Caleb was meeting with some other guy. I couldn’t fully see his face, but there was enough of a picture that I could run it through facial recognition.
Caleb Strong was going down. One way or another, I was going to make sure that he was out of Carla’s life forever.
Unfortunately, that meant that I was going to have to involve her. Something told me that she might know who was in this photo, and maybe, the sight of it might jog her memory. Because I was almost certain that Caleb Strong had something to do with the Moreno massacre, and now, I needed to do everything I could to prove it.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-FIVE
Sophia looked shell-shocked at my words. I couldn’t blame her. Even to me, they sounded crazy.
But last night, the scent of Caleb as he pressed me into the bed enveloped me, and the scent of it brought me back to that night.
He’d been there. I was sure of it.
“How can you be sure that he was one of the guys there that night?” Sophia asked. “Plenty of people wear the same cologne.”
The cup that was in my hand was smashed as I crushed it beneath my fingers. The coldness of the ice helped to ground me as I worked through my thoughts. All night, I’d turned that moment over and over in my mind, and I just couldn’t get past the certainty that Caleb was there.
“He was there,” I assured her. “I think he convinced the killer not to strangle me to death.” Last night, the way that Caleb said my name zapped me back to that moment. “That night, he slipped me drugs.”
