Ashlyn turned her head against the pillow, taking in Chloe next to her. “Who…?”
“I’m Sawyer’s friend, Chloe.” Determination filled her eyes. “I’m the one who’s going to find the asshole who did this to you.”
—
An hour later, and still feeling sadness for Ashlyn, Chloe stood in the middle of four large condominium complexes that created a mini-community with manicured lawns. “Is this Travis’s condo?” she asked Sawyer as she followed him up the cement stairs.
“No, it’s Ash’s place.” Sawyer reached the top of the stairs, then headed toward apartment 103. “My parents helped her purchase the condo when she finished college.”
“Nice parents,” Chloe said with a smile.
Sawyer opened the screen door and
used a key on his keychain to unlock the door. “Ash is a good kid. She works hard and deserves a break now and again.”
Chloe’s heart squeezed against the hint of sorrow in his voice. Having heard the way Sawyer spoke to his sister in the hospital before she fell asleep again, it had become clear to Chloe that they had a close relationship. That looked cute on such a tough guy.
“Expect a mess in here.” Sawyer opened the door and stepped inside. “A fellow cop and friend of ours, Kyler”—a name Chloe had heard before, from Porter—“told me that investigators have been here to gather as much evidence as they could.”
Chloe crossed the threshold and frowned, taking a quick look around. Mess might’ve been an understatement. Everything looked turned upside down. “You’d think cops would clean up after themselves,” she muttered.
Sawyer snorted, shutting the door behind her. “They don’t get paid to put things back.” He moved toward the papers on the kitchen floor, but when Chloe went to help him, he shook his head at her. “I can clean up before Ash comes home. I’ll take the kitchen and see if anything stands out. You take the living room.”
“Okay.”
Chloe had just turned to go into the living room when she heard Sawyer growl, “Fucking hell.”
She ran into the small kitchen, and when she saw what was there, she didn’t need him to explain. Blood drenched the laminate floor, the countertops, and even the refrigerator door. “Sawyer?”
He stood with his back to her, stiff.
“I’m fine,” he said after a few tense seconds, and turned to look at Chloe. A muscle in his jaw twitched, a telling sign that he wasn’t fine at all. “Let’s get what we can and find him. A cleaning crew can handle this once the cops have given the okay.”
Chloe stood there in silence, desperate to reach out and comfort him. But she also knew that the best way to help Sawyer was to catch Travis. Confident she could do exactly that, she turned and headed back into the living room.
The furnishings in Ashlyn’s small condo were typical of a twenty-two-year-old. The furniture didn’t match. A brown microfiber couch sat against the wall, an old television rested upon an antique stand, and a bookshelf holding movies rested along the other wall.
Chloe looked under the couch cushions, then squeezed them back into place. There were no papers on the glass coffee table, but there was a laptop. She wondered why the police hadn’t taken it, but thought maybe the forensic team had checked it out on-site and decided that it didn’t hold any important information.
She grabbed the laptop, opened it up, and dropped down onto the couch, pleased to find it was not password protected. Doing her best to find something, she went through Ashlyn’s emails; nothing of interest stood out there.
“I’m not seeing anything of Travis’s in the kitchen,” Sawyer said as he entered the living room. “I checked out her bedroom. It doesn’t look like Travis lived here at all.”
Chloe paused, her finger over the trackpad. “Did he live with her at some point?”
Sawyer shrugged. “That I don’t know. Ash never said they’d moved in together. Besides, she’s got a good head on her shoulders—I can’t see her jumping into something so heavy like that. She’d only been seeing Travis for three months.”
That statement reinforced Chloe’s worries about herself when it came to Sawyer. She, too, had a great head on her shoulders, and she prided herself on that. She didn’t want to be seen as stupid for jumping into bed with Sawyer after just breaking up with Josh, no matter that her body wanted to do exactly that.
Chloe turned her attention back to the computer and opened up the Internet browser. She went through the Internet history for each day, but nothing stood out as a red flag. By all appearances, Ashlyn was a normal twenty-two-year-old.
How in the hell did she get mixed up with Travis?
Curious, she clicked the My Pictures folder. The first picture showed a guy with his arm wrapped around Ashlyn. “I’m guessing this is Travis?” She spun the laptop screen to Sawyer.
He glared. “Yeah, that’s him.”
Chloe turned the laptop back, beginning to understand Travis’s appeal. Blond, built like a brick house, with baby blue eyes, Travis was drop-dead gorgeous. His arm around Ashlyn seemed to be protective and loving. How could that have changed? Chloe wondered. All too often, people didn’t make sense.