“I’ve been thinking,” she said, giving herself the soft introduction that she needed for the topic.
Nate groaned immediately.
“No, Laura,” he said. “I don’t like it when you think. Not about things like this. What’s going on now?”
“I don’t think it’s him,” Laura admitted, letting it pour out of her in a rush. “I think we have the wrong guy. Which means someone is still out there, and while we can’t question him anyway, I think we ought to be looking for them.”
Nate stared at her, shaking his head minutely from side to side, his wide eyes seemingly fixed in place. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “You’re the one who was so sure he was the right guy in the first place!”
“I know, I know,” Laura said, putting a hand to her head. “I get why you might think I’m messing around, or just following a whim. But I was working on the evidence I had when I went after him. On paper, he looks great.”
“Right,” Nate said. “He does. So, what evidence do you have now that contradicts that? All you did was go pick up the files!”
“It’s…” Laura hesitated. She could barely meet Nate’s eyes, but she had to. What good was getting it all out in the open between them if she still couldn’t use her ability to tell him what she knew? “It’s not evidence, exactly.”
Nate’s head rolled to the side, looking at her from a tilted angle, his stare going harder. “You’re not going to tell me this right now,” he said, warningly.
“No, I am,” Laura replied. She took a breath. “I have to. Look, Nate, I saw something. Okay? And I don’t exactly know what it means or anything specific. It’s just… I don’t tend to see the same thing twice if we’ve made a difference. I shouldn’t be seeing it again, do you understand? It means we’re on the wrong track.”
“And what did you see?” Nate asked. If he didn’t already have his arms crossed tightly over his chest, Laura had the feeling he would do it now.
She swallowed. “Veronica Rowse,” she said. “Coming back to life.”
Nate narrowed his eyes. “I thought you said you saw the future,” he pointed out. “That’s not accurate, is it? She’s dead. Very dead. We both saw that.”
“I know, and it’s confusing the hell out of me too,” Laura said. She wished she had a better explanation for him. Maybe it was too much, throwing this information out there as well as everything else. Maybe she should have fudged the truth, just told him enough to make him see that it wasn’t normal. When the rules were changing and she didn’t even understand it herself, how was she supposed to convince him that they existed in the first place?
“Laura, I can’t…” Nate paused, sighing and shaking his head before continuing in a softer tone. “We’ve been here before. And I can’t keep doing this. Putting up with this… this investigational whiplash. First, you’re absolutely sure one thing is right, and then you’re absolutely sure the same thing is wrong. It’s not normal, the way you make these leaps and jumps. There’s no logic behind it.”
“There is,” Laura said, her voice quiet. “It’s just that you can’t see it. If you had the visions, you’d understand how it can be. How one thing leads you in a certain direction, and then you see something else, and you figure out another clue.”
“But I don’t have visions, Laura,” Nate said, in a tone which very much suggested that maybe she didn’t either. “And I can’t do this. I have to follow the evidence that we actually have. And that evidence shows us that Earl Regis is our most likely suspect. What do you expect me to do? Just drop everything and let him go because you’ve got a hunch? What if your hunch changes with your next ‘vision’ and you realize it was him after all?”
Laura nodded, keeping her head down. “Okay,” she said. She was blinking, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice and the water out of her eyes. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Nate relaxed very slightly. “So, you’re going to come in with me and do this interview when the lawyer gets here?”
“No,” Laura said, wishing she could give him an answer that he would like more. It didn’t matter. She knew what she had to do. Her duty was first and foremost to the victims – the ones that had already been, and the ones that were yet to come if they didn’t solve this. “No, I… I’m going to have to follow this lead. I know you can handle the interview on your own. Maybe with Captain Blackford, if you feel you need backup. But I just… I don’t feel like I can let this go.”
Nate stared at her evenly for a long moment before passing a hand over his eyes. “Fine,” he said, at last. “Fine. So long as it doesn’t get in the way of the investigation, I don’t see why you can’t keep going. I guess it’s a good idea not to be too married to one suspect anyway, just in case. Good investigatory practice.”
“You’re not mad?” Laura asked.
Nate sighed, looking away from her. “At this point, I don’t know what I am any longer,” he said. “Mad, worried, afraid, frustrated. Nonplussed. All I can tell you is that I want to solve this case. Like I said, if it doesn’t get in the way and it might help, then… you do what you think you have to do.”
“Thank you,” Laura said, even though she didn’t quite think he was doing it for her. More like he was trying to preserve his own sanity. But so long as it worked, it worked.
Laura stepped away, backwards, leaving the file in Nate’s outstretched hand as she went. He took it without looking at her and started flipping through the pages. He didn’t look up when she called the elevator, or when she stepped into it, or when the doors closed in front of her and cut them off from one another.
Laura had about a thirty-second chance to compose herself in the elevator before it reached the bullpen, and then she had to be right back to it.
She had no time to feel sorry for herself, not right now. There was a killer on the loose, and she needed to go back to the records to try and find him.
***
Laura sat at the desk, staring at the records on the screen in front of her.
The hospital administrator had given up. For all her talk of the sanctity of the records, she was clearly beyond frustrated by having to look up something new for Laura every hour of the day. She’d left her sitting at the desk and walked away, muttering something about a meeting, and Laura was on her own with the digitized files.