And he didn’t do irrational. Two plus two always equaled four. If it didn’t, the problem was you, not the equation.
There was no future with Alexa Nash. It had been a long shot from the beginning, but now it was a lost cause. The best thing he could do was try to forget her, see this as the blessing in disguise that it was: an opportunity to neutralize the mistake he’d made that first day in Copley Square when he’d invited her to coffee.
He’d been blinded by his attraction to her, had spent too much time chasing shadows in the name of justice for an accident she’d accepted at face value a long time ago.
It was time to move on. He would follow the last lead he had, go see the woman who had accused Leland Walker of assault. Then he would put the whole thing behind him.
22
Alexa left brunch at her parent’s house on Sunday and spent the rest of the day brooding and getting ready for the week ahead. She stopped at the grocery store and picked up her dry cleaning, then returned to her apartment to clean and food prep for the week. Keeping healthy food in the fridge made it easier to stick to her eating plan when she was tired and overworked, and she rinsed lettuce and veggies, roasted chicken, and made salad dressing while she thought about her mother’s advice over lunch on Saturday.
She spent the evening reviewing the case file from her accident and making notes, then called Dave Kelly to ask some questions, most of which he’d been unable to answer. He hadn’t even been out of high school when her accident happened, and he barely knew any of the players from that era, other than Richard Delaney, and only because Delaney was now a lieutenant.
She’d hung up the phone frustrated but also relieved. Dave had been cagey about her questions, obviously worried that talking to an Assistant AG off the books could get him into trouble, but she had no reason to believe he was lying about what he knew. The discrepancies in her case were anomalies, and too much time had passed for her to run them down. She’d never know if Nick had been right, if there had been something sinister about the way her case had been closed. She would have to make peace with that the same way she’d made peace with everything else.
She was back in the gym Monday morning, happy to set aside her lingering sadness over the way things had ended with Nick to focus on her body. Working out had been like that for her since the accident: a way to focus on what her body could do instead of what it couldn’t, to savor the small accomplishments that led to the big ones, lifting more weight, moving faster, running longer.
By the time Alexa had finished thirty minutes on the treadmill and another forty minutes with Terri, she was dripping sweat, her limbs loose and tired. She showered, got ready for work, and stepped out into the cold morning.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the city in the east, the sky still mostly dark in the west. She navigated to the far reaches of the parking lot, working her way around the icy spots that remained from a sleet storm two nights before, her gym bag slung over her shoulder.
She reached her car and threw her bag in the trunk. It wasn’t until she started for the driver’s seat that she noticed her tire.
At first she thought she was imagining it, a trick of the early morning light. But when she bent down to investigate she saw that she’d been right: her rear tire was flat.
Her heart thudded in her chest as she walked around to the other back tire, guided by instinct, hoping she was wrong.
She wasn’t. The other back tire was flat too, and when she looked closer, the gash in the rubber was obvious.
She continued to the front of her car, but she already knew what she would find there. The two front tires were flat too, both marred with the same slash marks as the rear tires.
Her breath turned shallow and she straightened, her gaze sweeping the parking lot wondering if the culprit was still there, hiding in the shadows cast by the faint pre-dawn light.
She looked at the door to the gym, debating the merit of making a run for it, then decided to play it safe. Running over wet and slippery ground for fitness was one thing.
Running for her life was something else.
She hurried to the driver’s side of her car and slipped inside, then locked the doors behind her. She forced herself to breathe, giving her heart rate time to settle before reaching for her wallet, for once grateful for her parents’ overprotectiveness and their insistence on paying for her Triple A membership.
She placed the call, gave the dispatcher her information, and settled in to wait, her eyes on the rearview mirror.
She scolded herself as the sun rose higher in the sky, the parking lot washed with golden light. Now that the early morning shadows had been banished, her fear felt overblown. It was completely possible that she’d been the victim of random neighborhood violence, a few kids looking for thrills.
But something told her it wasn’t that simple. Dave Kelly’s voice came back to her. He’d definitely been nervous on the phone, and while she’d assumed it was typical rookie fear — rookies were always scared to break the rules — she couldn’t ignore the implications of the timing.
She was a prosecutor. It was her job to piece together evidence, to make connections that might not seem obvious, and this one was more obvious than most. She’d called BPD to ask for her case file, had followed up with Dave Kelly, and all of a sudden, for the first time in all the time she’d been attending the same gym, her car was vandalized?
She thought about the previous few days, the sensation that she was being watched, a sensation she’d chalked up to paranoia.
It didn’t seem so paranoid anymore.
She opened her phone, went to her texts, and started typing a message to her mom.
At the gym. Someone slashed my tires.
She stared at the words on the screen, the flashing cursor. Her mom would worry. Her dad would get involved. They would want to call the police, forcing Alexa to tell them what she’d discovered about the investigation into her accident.
What Nick had discovered.