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Another nod.
He jumped off the stool so fast it tipped over. “Did she tell you what she saw?”
“I’m sorry.” Veronica shook her head and retreated to the door. “I don’t know what good this information does now, but Chrissy was deeply sorry for hurting you by not speaking up back then. I just thought you should know.”
chapter eighteen
“This is really good,” Sasha said and took another bite of the teriyaki bowl. “Like, Michelin-starred restaurant good. Where did you learn to cook?”
Donovan raised a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Mostly Mom. She loved her kitchen.”
She speared a piece of broccoli. “That was one of the first things Anna said to me after the fire—how much she’d loved her kitchen. I’ve never had an attachment to mine, but if you keep cooking meals like this in it, I might—” She broke off and poked him with the handle of her fork. “Earth to Donovan.”
“Sorry.” He put the lid back on his bowl and returned it to the bag. As much as he loved their lunches together, his stomach was too tied up in knots to eat.
Her smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
All right. No putting it off any longer. “Ash wants me to go in for questioning regarding Darcy.”
Sasha sucked in a deep breath, then pushed back her shoulders like she was preparing for a fight. “We knew this was coming.”
“There’s more.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I was over at the Mad Dog for group when Ash came in to request an interview. After he left, Veronica approached me and said something that...” He trailed off because he still couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“Okay, Donovan. Now you’re scaring me.”
“Sorry, angel. I don’t mean to. The news just knocked me for a loop and I’m still processing it.”
“News about Darcy?”
“And Chrissy Jimenez.”
“What?”
“Chrissy was at the party that night. I think she witnessed what happened to Darcy, but she was too afraid to say anything at the time. She was going to, though. That’s what Veronica told me. Chrissy was at the making amends part of the 12-step program and she was going to come forward.”
“And then she died.”
He nodded. “All this time, we’ve been thinking it was a tragic accident. That her addiction got the best of her. But her death is too convenient to be a coincidence.”
Sasha’s eyes widened, and she set down her fork with a clatter. “Donovan, this is huge. Are you saying that someone killed Chrissy to keep her from talking about what she saw?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s a possibility. And now Ash wants me to come in for questioning about it all. Do I tell him all this? I don’t have any evidence other than Veronica’s hear-say. Can I trust him to look into this?”
“Ash is a good man, and I know he’ll listen. But,” she added after a beat, “I also know you think my opinion is clouded by the crush I had on him. So, what does your intuition say?”
Donovan turned his gaze inward and took stock. His intuition told him that Ash was a good cop, but it also said there was something deeply wrong with the whole situation. The web of lies surrounding Darcy’s—and now Chrissy’s—deaths kept getting more tangled and he was starting to suspect a cover-up.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to believe that Ash is on the level, that he’ll do the right thing. But I can’t take any chances. This is too important and it’s all too murky, too... complicated. Ash does not like gray areas.”
And he couldn’t bring himself to trust Ash completely—not when the stakes were this high. He needed to find proof before he could come forward with any of this information. “I feel like we’re missing something big, something important.
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Donovan said. “But I do know one thing. I need to find out what happened to Chrissy. If she was killed because she was going to talk, then we need to find out who did it—because that person will clear me of Darcy’s murder.”
