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Another visit so soon. Lucky me. Detective Conway was sitting on the porch swing in a black suit with a dark purple shirt and matching tie, looking sharp as a double-edged razor. His hat was a Panama with a black band and tilted jauntily over one eye. Logan stood waiting for me on the edge of the steps, his legs encased in dark wash jeans with another black sport coat, but this one was leather. He was wearing the same hat as before. He frowned at me, looking disapproving as I came up the sidewalk, his gaze raking over me.
He looked at me all judgy and a little angry. I sighed at his obvious disapproval and came up beside him, wondering what he wanted this time.
****
Logan
Jace walked towards us wearing a too tight T-shirt with what looked like chili stains on the front. His tanned bare legs looked good in those shorts he was wearing and were covered by a light fuzz of blond hair. He was sweaty and disheveled and out of breath. And I couldn’t keep my fucking eyes off him.
Since Tyler, his little brother, had shown up a minute before he did and had run past us to get inside, I figured Jace had been running to catch up to him.
Tyler had clearly been a boy on a mission. I’d looked after him as he disappeared into the house and then back to see his disheveled brother coming up the steps.
“Something wrong?”
“No, it’s just time for his favorite show. He’s afraid he might miss the introduction of the families onFamily Feud. He can’t miss that.”
“Yeah,” Conway said. “A lot of kids have shows they don’t like to miss.”
“With my brother it’s even more serious. If he misses the intro, it’ll be like World War Tyler, where he’s the bomb and we’re all Hiroshima.”
I gazed down at him as Conway stepped up beside me. “We have a few more questions we’d like to ask you, Jace. Should we talk out here then?”
“We can go to the kitchen if you like. It’ll be cooler.” Jace O’Neal was on the bottom step by this time and stopped, looking up at me like he expected me to move aside, but I just kept staring at him. I gazed into those bright blue eyes of his. Then I stepped aside and let him pass.
His mother, a pretty woman with soft blonde hair and tired eyes the same color as Jace’s behind her wire-framed glasses, was hovering in the entry hall as we came in. Jace made introductions. She gave us a nervous smile. “Can I get you officers anything? Some iced tea?”
“No, ma’am,” Conway replied, taking off his hat. “Thank you, though.”
She smiled again and nodded. “I’ll be in my room if you need me, Jacey.”
“Yeah, thanks, Mama. It’s fine.”
We followed him into the kitchen and stood by the kitchen table, because he didn’t ask us to sit down. Conway and I pulled out our notebooks.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Jace asked, standing by the fridge. “Maybe a Coke?”
“No thanks, Jacey,” I said, trying to rattle him a little. I was feeling unreasonably irritated at him because of the way he looked in those shorts.
He gave me his best eat shit look and got himself a can of soda before turning to look back at me. He popped the top and took a thirsty sip as I watched his strong, brown throat. I noticed the mark on his jaw was beginning to fade a little, though he still had that nasty bite. He finished and looked directly back at me.
“Has Dylan shown up yet?”
“No, but the police did find something in the dumpster outside the room he’d been staying in.” I watched him carefully for any sign of panic. “A machete with some markings on it. Looks like initials.” I took out my phone and pulled up an image, then held the phone out to him. We had already checked with our informant at the department and found out about the Halloween costume Jace had worn to work. Our sources in the police department had also told us what police found in the dumpster. It was only a matter of time now before real detectives showed up to interviewJace, as soon as they found out he was a close associate, so we needed to get all the information from him that we could, while he still thought we were official.
The machete was an old one, with initials carved into the handle—HO, but written in a distinctive way, with the letters intertwined so that the last line of the “H” was in the middle of the “O”.
Jace leaned over the table and studied the image on my phone for a few seconds, glancing back up at me with a blank look on his face.
“This is a machete found in a dumpster near the room Malone had been staying in. It has traces of his blood on it.”
He carefully set his can down on the table, but his hand had started shaking, and it looked like he was having trouble breathing. He couldn’t meet my gaze. He reached out a hand blindly and then everything started happening in slow motion.
“Catch him,” I said, because his eyes had rolled up toward the back of his head, and he was falling forward. Conway, who was closer than I was, grabbed him around the waist and shoved him in a chair. I took the back of his neck and pushed his head down between his legs.
“I-I’m okay,” he squeaked out, struggling to sit up. I lifted my hand off his neck and he sat up, looking bleary-eyed and wrung out.
“What-what are you saying? Are you s-saying he’s dead? That this is the—murder weapon?” A deep shudder wracked his body.
