“She had one vodka cranberry, and I poured it,” I said quickly. “And we looked at the surveillance cameras. Someone took her, Abe, and she’s already been gone for more than twelve hours. I need to fi—”
“Declan, I’m going to ask you one more time to lower your—”
“Damn it, I don’t have time for this.” My hands clenched to tight fists, breaths quickening. “If you hadn’t been a dick to her, she’d be safe right now. But you had to be an asshole, so she stormed off, and now she’s fucking gone.”
A vein in his forehead throbbed. “I won’t argue with you over what I said, boy, but I will say that if you call me a name again, you’re going to pay for it.”
I scoffed and shook my head.
He turned to Ria. “Since you seem to know how to behave yourself, you and I will talk. What do you need from me?”
“A list of whoever was close enough to slip something in Brooke’s drink. Like Declan said, whoever came in here to pull him and Tommy apart. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”
“Ten minutes, and I’ll get you their names and addresses.” He glanced at me. “Are you going to behave like a civilized person now, Declan?”
My jaw was still hard. My hands were still balled to fists. But I nodded.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX
DECLAN
Gerald, Harrison, John, Arthur, Peter, Frank, Tommy, and Eric.
Those were the only people who’d walked close enough to Brooke’s drink to drop something in it.
Tommy hadn’t. I’d had my eyes on him every second from the time he walked into the room to the time that he plopped to the sofa beside her.
Gerald, Harrison, John, and Arthur were Abe’s guards. With those doe-eyes, Ria asked Abe in her sweetest voice if she could read their minds. Not to my surprise, he agreed. He even smirked and offered to let her search his head too, ‘just to ease her worries.’
All five were clean. Didn’t think a single one of their thoughts about Ria were, but they hadn’t done anything to Brooke, at least.
So we set out to the addresses Abe scribbled on the notebook paper.
Peter was first. He was the one who’d held me off, and now that I saw his name, I remembered him. He was a good guy with three kids and a wife at home. I highly doubted he was responsible, but we showed at his door regardless.
Holding a toddler on his hip, he rushed Ria through reading his mind, but had no objections.
Next was Frank. He lived on the southern side of the city, not far from me. The timeline didn’t even out in my mind. He couldn’t have left Abe’s, gone home to change, went to Spades to follow Brooke, and then gotten to the gas station in time, so I doubted it was him.
When I relayed that to Ria, she said, “Yeah, but that’s the thing that isn’t computing to me anyway.”
“What is?”
“No one would’ve had the time,” she said. “Unless two people were working together—one at Spades and the other at Abe’s—how would anyone have had enough time to get from Abe’s to Spades in the time that you and Brooke did? None of them are teleporters.”
A wave of dizziness crept through me, warmth draining from my face.
The timeline.
I assumed someone followed Brooke.
But it’d been a good fifteen minutes from the time that Brooke parked before that car pulled up beside her.
“What side of the road did they come from?” I asked.
“What?”
“In the video, which direction were they driving?” I asked. “Did they come into the lot the same way Brooke had? Or did they pull up the opposite direction?”