“Agreed,” he said. “I’ll put Davidson and Andres on the Cavendish murder. They’re good, thorough cops. If someone has framed you, they’ll find out who.”
He rose from his seat. “I have other matters to attend to anyway. Someone abducted a girl from the university and locked her in a freezer in an abandoned house. She and her family should be coming in now to speak to me.”
I was already out the door. No idea why the guy was telling me his schedule. Since when did we chat?
Sunlight crested over the trees, telling all morning came to Bedlam, ending another night of bloodshed and chaos in the streets.
Wonder if Mayam stood in the sun the morning after, cursing it for bringing an end, when it was only the beginning.
“What good is it having a mom who’s a judge and Sheriff Daddy if we can’t get out of a night in a jail cell?” Legend leaned on the column, stretching out a kink in his neck.
“We have a problem,” I said.
“Of course, we have a fucking problem,” Arsenio snapped. “We weren’t comatose the last twelve hours.”
I let the comment slide. “I know who killed Cavendish.”
“What?” Roan turned me to face them. “Who?”
“Didn’t put it together till I saw the crime scene photos. Something flew past me before the explosion, and it came from the second-floor window.”
“What are you talking about?” Jacques demanded.
“I— We were framed by the farm girl.”
“The farm girl?” Roan repeated. “Fucking hell, Jacques. When you piss a girl off, you don’t half-ass the job.”
“This isn’t about me,” Jacques said. “You don’t set an innocent man on fire for getting tied up and thrown in the back of a truck.”
“They were in the back of that truck together,” I mentioned. “I noticed them talking on the drive. Now I’m wondering about what.”
“Does it matter?” Legend asked. “You know who did it. Tell your old man and get her thrown in the cage.”
“No.”
Arsenio’s brow rose up his forehead, then the corner of his mouth. “I assume you have something more interesting in mind.”
I held my arms out. “You always did know me too well.”
“What are we going to do?” Roan spoke up.
“Remember Halloween two years back?”
Now they were all smiling.
“Good,” he said, filing past with the rest. “Always did love a hunt.”
***
Rainey
I curled up in the middle of the scratchy sheets, watching the interview on repeat. I clicked to the start of the video, watching it again.
“It was horrible.”
Jennifer Wilson looked out from my screen. By her side, an older woman with her dark hair and a man with her pale skin held her tight as she gave her story from the town hall steps. A public, violent death and a pretty young woman abducted on the same night. The careers of more than a few Bedlam journalists would be made that day. These stories were going national.
“I was getting in my car when a shadow fell over me. I felt this sudden, sharp pain in my neck, then everything went black. When I—” Her lids swelled. “When I woke up, I was in the dark.”
“Miss Wilson! Miss Wilson!” they called.
“How did you escape?”
“I’m not sure. When I came to, I heard this voice saying everything would be okay.” She shook her head. “Part of me thinks I imagined it, but there had to be someone there. Someone busted the lock and opened the freezer for me to get out. But I didn’t see anyone.”
There was a reason for that.
I closed my laptop and flopped flat on my bed.
I stuck around to make sure Jennifer got home safely, of course, but after chasing that man, or woman, out of the house, my only thought was to get out before Jennifer saw me. If she did, she’d have questions.
How did you know I was here?
Who did this to me?
Some nutcase put me in a freezer to force you to kill him?
Did you do it?
How fast can the police get here?
It was as I was lying face-first in the dirt that I accepted I couldn’t answer those questions.
Because it wasn’t over.
No matter how much I tried to convince myself the person in the house wandered in by mistake or was some random squatter looking for a free bed, deep down I knew it wasn’t true.
Someone texted me the address after Cavendish’s death, then they waited for me inside.
A shudder rippled down my body. I hugged myself, holding my knees tight to my chest. It did nothing.
I was still cold. Still afraid. Still couldn’t breathe.
I did what I had to do. Cavendish had a partner and Jennifer doesn’t know anything about them. She didn’t know anything about Cavendish, either. That ignorance would keep her safe. The partner doesn’t have a reason to go after a woman who can’t point the police in their direction.
The woman who can do that is still me, and they know I won’t, because that means revealing my part in Cavendish’s death.