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“A woman was murdered.” Eloise forced the word through stiff lips. It was true, but it was no easier to say now than it had been the day before. Not just gone, taken from them. Stripped from the world and people who loved her years before her time and there was only one person who could possibly know why. Surely a judge would do anything necessary to see that her killer was brought to justice.
“Yeah, but there’s no hard evidence that it had anything to do with her job, just our suspicions. A judge isn’t going to hand out a warrant based on speculation.” His tone was patient enough to rub her just the wrong way, like he was talking to a child with too much optimism and not enough experience to temper it.
The warm feelings she’d had toward him a moment before vanished on a thin twist of resentment. “How would you know what a judge does?” she asked, though she knew the answer already. She knew how important it was for those who broke the law to understand everything they could about how to avoid getting caught in it, and the momentary meanness that surged in her wanted him to admit it. It wasn’t fair to blame him for telling her the truth but there was no one else to blame. Lashing out at him wasn’t going to improve their situation, of course it wasn’t, but it made her feel better in the moment to see his eyes narrow at the bitter edge in her question.
“Sometimes it pays to know how the system works.” He threw it down between them, a deliberate challenge that she recognized even as his voice stayed level. He’d sensed the change in her, the anger shifting aimlessly below the surface, and had given her the opening he knew she was looking for.
“I know you feel like you owe Dylan, but he’s going to end up ruining your life,” she said, layering sweetness into her voice as she returned his bitter truth with one of her own.
He absorbed it with nothing more than a flicker of his gaze. “Let’s worry about saving your life first, then we can worry about who’s ruining mine.”
Eloise hissed a breath between her teeth, the anger she couldn’t unleash writhing inside her. “I hate this.”
“Me, too.” He ran a tired hand over his face and some of her anger abated as she noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the small tremor in his fingers. “I don’t want anything to happen to you and I feel like we’re running in circles today with no clear way to keep you safe. “
“We’ve done everything we can.” It was a weak attempt at providing solace, but there was nothing else she could think of that might help. “We’ll give the list to Detective Chen and let her do her job.”
“I’m on board with giving her the list but I don’t like the idea of relying on her entirely. No offense to her, I’m sure she’s as good of a cop as the next one—” his voice was strained as he said it “—but I don’t have a lot of faith in them as a whole.” He glanced out the window, toward the house he’d lived in with his grandfather and she wondered what memories he was reliving. “What I’d really like is to get into Kim’s office and see what kind of dirt we could dig up.”
Eloise laughed softly and held up a hand to stop him before he could get too carried away with that line of thought. “There’s no way you’re getting into that office. You’re not even getting into the building. And even if you somehow did manage to get in there, your face would be all over the security footage.”
“Maybe you could?—”
“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”
Ethan was determined but even the thought of trying something like that made her nauseous and lightheaded. “If I got caught, I’d lose my job.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t happy about it, and the little tick in his cheek told her he was working his jaw as he thought it over. Ethan wasn’t the kind to let things go without a fight, but she was relieved when he seemed to decide not to push it for the moment. “We’ll do it your way for now.”
Twenty
Eloise and her grief were afloat on an endless sea of black. She had been dreading Kim’s funeral since the details had been announced but after a week of dragging herself into the office and being forced to behave like nothing had changed, it was a welcome relief to find herself surrounded by other people with tear-stained faces and broken hearts.
She’d come alone, not wanting to drag Ethan to a place of mourning for someone he barely knew, but Sarah and Chloe had waved her over to a seat beside them as soon as she’d finished giving her condolences to Kim’s family.
Eloise sat beside her friends and watched Kim’s inconsolable parents as they cried through the service. She had never met them before today, but it was immediately apparent that apart from the slope of her nose, which she had gotten from her father, Kim had been the spitting image of her mother. The same green eyes. The same red hair. The same gentle smile.
It had been disconcerting, looking at Kim’s mother and seeing the ghost of her friend looking back at her. Laugh lines Kim would never have. Gray hairs she would never get the chance to complain about.
It was a stark contrast to the pictures they showed of her as a smiling little girl with a gap-toothed grin and her hair in pigtails. Her parents had held her as a baby, eyes tired and hearts full of hope. They had seen her off to her first day of school and prom and then to her first apartment. Each step on the road to a full and happy life. Had they worried about her? Feared that she might never get the chance to chase the dreams she’d told them about?
The coffin at the front of the church must have been the culmination of every nightmare they’d ever had as parents and Eloise shuddered as she looked at it. It was shut and draped in white and pink flowers, but she knew what was enclosed within it.
She saw Kim’s blank stare every time she closed her eyes.
The last speaker finished talking and people began to mill about as they prepared to move from the church to the burial site.
“Are you okay?” Sarah whispered and Eloise nodded, wiping the tears from her cheeks with a little more force than was necessary.
She was tired of crying. Tired of aching and feeling broken, split open and vulnerable with every breath. The fear had only grown as the days passed, even though there had been no more attempts to break into her house, because there had also not been any steps taken closer to finding Kim’s killer.
Her phone call to Detective Chen had been met with polite gratitude but nothing more—there was physical evidence at the scene but it would take months to process—and as far as she and Ethan could tell, no search warrants had been executed on Kim’s office at work.
“Do you want to ride with us?” Chloe was hesitant as she stood at the end of the church pew. “We can bring you back here afterward to pick up your car.”
“I’ll be okay.” Eloise sniffed and tried to smile. “I could use a few minutes of quiet.”
“We’ll see you there, then, if you’re sure you don’t want to go together.” Sarah was less hesitant and Eloise thought she heard a note of relief in her voice. It had been this way since the day Kim was killed. The two of them together, standing just outside her own circle of loss and shock.
