“What the hell is going on in your relationship, Mayet? Because Malone is pissed about something big.”
“Nothing.” Reading the temperature on the thermometer, I work the math back in my mind until I come to my answer. “Approximate time of death, eleven o’clock last night.”
“That puts him at…” Aubree counts too. “Five hours post.”
“Yeah. Rigor is advanced and almost complete. Though it’s, uh…” I touch the dismembered limbs and wrinkle my nose. “Difficult to say for sure, in this case. And don’t talk about my relationship on record. Ever.”
“No one listens to it but us. Can I just ask you one question?”
The answer is probably no. I don’t want to discuss this with her. I don’t want to discuss this with anyone except Archer.
But if I can’t speak to Archer, then maybe I’ll speak to Tim and a bottle of tequila.
“Are you okay?” Her tone softens. Her voice lowers. “Because you’ve been pretty down for a week now, and it bothers me to see you like this.”
“I’m fine. And now we’re back to not discussing it.”
Cleaning my thermometer and setting it back in its case, I drag my gloves off and bundle them in my pocket.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this guy died. It was brutal, it was bloody, it was anger personified, and now it’s done. The onus won’t be on the M.E.’s office to find a special, secret shred of evidence that will close this case. This crime will be solved when the homicide detectives find a blood-soaked guy carrying a machete of some sort through the streets.
“Let’s move him in-house and start screening. We’ll do full tox, blood, and stomach. Start there and work our way out.” I drop my hands in my pockets and switch off the recording with a simple press of my finger. “Call transport and have McGregor moved. Then you can go home and catch a few hours of sleep before coming back on.”
Frowning, her brows pinching close together, Aubree studies me over the top of her camera. “Are you going home?”
Crossing the room and opening the bedroom door, I exhale a sigh of relief when the uniform hands me the coffee I passed off to him on the way in. Cupping it between my hands, I inhale the rich scent and hold myself together by the thinnest thread of sanity.
Because a man forced me to love him. He refused to stop wrapping me in his embrace until my heart went and did something monumentally stupid. And now…
Now, he no longer wants me.
“I’m going to the office,” I tell her. “I have time, and I’m not tired. So I’ll get started.”
Stepping out of the main bedroom inside a massive home made for a family but occupied by one, I stride past the uniform and start back down the hall while Aubree takes out her phone to call transport. Stopping at the top of the stairs, I glance down to find Archer and Fletch on the ground floor, heads together, their brains working to solve a vicious murder.
Though, like a magnet rests inside me and another resides inside Archer, as I stand in silence, his burning gaze swings up and stops on me.
He’s not the man I know anymore. Not the caring, sometimes silly, sometimes obsessed man my heart was fooled into loving. Now, he’s just angry.
But it’s not the type of anger I can go toe to toe with. Instead, he leaves me with cold and silence.
“Let’s go.” Dragging his glare away from me and back to Fletch, Archer claps his partner on the shoulder and walks through the front door of the house and into the darkness outside.
He’s gone, stealing his presence from me just as surely as McGregor’s murderers stole a life from him.
I want to find my anger. My ability to discard what no longer serves me. I want to not care about the man who is done with me… but alas, Archer stole all that too.