ELEVEN
Decima
In the moviesI’d watched that involved the police, they pulled up at crime scenes, flashed their badges, and strutted all over the place. But those were uniformed cops, not undercover detectives. It made sense that the men who’d essentially taken me prisoner would operate differently to avoid blowing their cover.
We circled the block in their car, with me wedged in the back between Talon, who didn’t appear to care, and Garrison, who I caught flashes of irritation from, though he mostly kept quiet. They seemed to think it was better that I wasn’t squashed too closely against Blaze after my demonstration of my feelings on personal space this morning.
It’d been an involuntary reaction. I was probably lucky none of them had shot me in the heat of the moment. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him, not really; I’d only wanted to make sure he never touched me like that, with all those wheedling compliments and admiring glances, ever again. That he never stirred up the memories of a time when I hadn’t been able to enforce those boundaries, and everything… everything had been horrible.
A ghost of that old pain trailed over my thighs, and I willed it away. It’d been years. It shouldn’t have still affected me. Or maybe it made sense that it did, when it was the only real experience I had with getting close to a man when I hadn’t been focused on how to kill him or someone around him.
Still, I could tell my reaction this morning had been an error from a strategic perspective. Blaze had been by far the friendliest out of the four men who were holding me captive. He was probably my best shot of getting the information I needed and getting away from them when the time came—if I hadn’t just blown that shot.
He was sitting in the front passenger seat now, monitoring video footage of nearby streets on his laptop. From the little bit he’d said out loud to the others, I’d gathered he’d been able to hack into the city’s street cams.
Whatever he saw on them, he seemed satisfied with it. “We’re good to go,” he announced without looking back. He hadn’t met my eyes since breakfast, as if he thought I might get just as pissed off about his gaze being on me as his hands.
Julius parked a couple of blocks away. We all got out onto the sidewalk, Garrison scooting after Talon and me rather than going out the door on his side, I guessed to keep me consistently surrounded. Lovely.
The man in charge had already given us the drill before we’d arrived. We were going to walk past the mansion’s front gate and around the corner to check out one of the side walls. Any more of a circuit around the place, and we’d look suspicious. We were all wearing sunglasses and baseball caps in a variety of styles to obscure our faces, not that anyone could see much of me while I had four men who were all several inches taller than me around me.
With the June sunlight searing down over us, the dark glasses only cut down the glare, helping my ability to make out details rather than hindering my vision. As we reached the edge of the household’s property, I scanned the stone wall, the vines that clung to it here and there, and the street around us.
It looked like a totally different place from the shadowy estate I’d fled across two nights ago, but my stomach clenched as we came up beside it anyway. Images from the massacre flickered through my mind, and I closed my eyes. Julius turned to look at me when I slowed, and I almost shook myself out of it, but caught myself just in time. I was playing the part of a grieving friend. He’d be more suspicious if I didn’t seem affected.
“Sorry,” I said quietly. “It’s just hard, being back here, remembering what happened…”
“If she’s not up to the job—” Garrison started.
Julius cut him off with a sharp tone. “We’re here now.” He nodded to me. “If you see anything that sticks out to you, say the word. If not, we’re no worse off than when we started.”
I had a feeling he’d still be annoyed that they’d taken the risk of hanging out around a crime scene they were trying to keep on the down low if I didn’t come up with anything. I needed to show them I was a valuable asset so they’d share enough with me that I could use them too.
I got my first break as we came up on the gate. My gaze caught on a small, dark shape on the pole just outside the entrance, tucked against the fixture for the electric wires.
“There’s a camera there,” I said, tipping my head as subtly as I could. “I never noticed that before. It’s on city property, so it couldn’t have been put there by Anna’s family, but it wouldn’t make any sense for the city to want a view of their front drive. Maybe the murderers put it there.”
“Why would they do that?” Julius asked.
I braced myself for a snide expression, but his face showed genuine curiosity. Perfect. I shrugged. “I don’t know. If it was important to them to kill everyone in the house, maybe they’d want to monitor the entrance to be sure no one got away?” I shot another surreptitious glance at the camera as we walked right past the pole. “It looks new, too. No bird crap on it like there is on the post around it.”
Julius checked it out for as long as he could before we’d ambled by, equally careful with the angle of his head. “You have a point there. Good work. Keep going.”
I couldn’t tell whether they’d been aware of the cameras already or I’d pointed out something new, but the praise sounded as genuine as his earlier curiosity. Garrison was studying me from the corner of his eyes a little more assessingly, as if he was realizing he might have underestimated me. Yeah, I’d call that good work.
The perps had been good with their work too, but then, I’d already known that. After we rounded the corner, I almost missed the subtle telltale signs. When my attention snagged on them as I studied the wall, I peered closer for a few beats and then dropped down as if I needed to tighten the shoelace on my sneakers.
“What are you doing?” Garrison asked, but without quite as much snark as before. He couldn’t help being curious too.
I suppressed a smile. “I just wanted to give you a chance to look too without it being too obvious why we’re stopping. This works, right? I think this might be the spot where the murderers got onto the property. You can see a couple of places where the vine’s pulled off just a little—that happens sometimes when I’m climbing over, but I was on the other side last night. And there’s kind of a scrape mark on one of the stones near the top, just a small one.”
“What makes you think that had anything to do with the murderers?” Blaze asked from behind me. I couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t sound as tense as I’d have expected speaking to me.
I straightened up, and we started walking again. “I could be wrong. It just seems pretty high up for it to have been someone simply bumping into it. And the vines would have grown back unless they were disturbed pretty recently. I don’t think people were climbing into the property very often.”
The scuff had also shown the faintest hint of the tread of a shoe, but showing that much perceptiveness might make these guys suspicious rather than impressed.
And they did seem to be impressed. A trace of a smile had touched Julius’s lips. Talon let out a low chuckle. Garrison kept his mouth shut, which at this point I counted as a win. Blaze was tapping something into his phone behind me at a pace that sounded eager.