“A bear ate it,” I deadpan. “Probably one related to you.”
He smirks and presses his thumb against my belly button before walking past me to the kitchen table. “Briggs, I take it. All hail.” He looks at the serving platter of smoked salmon and then turns to Declan. “Morning. Thanks for bringing this.” He shakes Declan’s hand before grabbing a dish.
“It’s not all we brought,” Cami says. “We’ve been working on the Casanova suspect list. Wait until I show you how we’ve narrowed it down.”
Erik goes to the counter and pours coffee into a mug. He rifles through cupboards to find brown sugar, which he adds along with milk. My brows rise until he turns and holds the cup out to me. “Here.”
The small gesture makes an impact. For a second, our eyes lock, and goosebumps rise on my arms. I don’t know how he knows what to put in my coffee.
As I take the cup, I murmur, “Thanks.”
He pours his coffee into a wide aluminum mug and comes to the table. It’s a tight squeeze for the six of us.
We talk casually as we eat. It’s nice to get to know them in a low-key setting.
Erik finishes my leftover lox bagel and stands. To Reynolds, he says, “Come on, partner. Let’s work. Queue the list.”
Cami hops up with her laptop.
Curious, I rise as well, taking a bowl of berries into the living room. Falling back, I let Cami, Erik, Shane, and Declan stand near the flatscreen. Avery joins me against the far wall with a steaming cup of coffee in her hands.
“So here’s the list we started with, including the names you sent us,” Cami says to Erik.
Two pages are projected side-by-side, creating four columns of names that are separated by casually drawn dividers. Some groupings have headers.
My gaze stops on the lower right corner of the second sheet where the header is Shady Scholarship Men/OM. Is that a list of Octavia’s sugar daddies? If so, I’m shocked she shared it.
“Erik, something you said gave Declan and me an idea. You wished we could get access to mobile phone data the way law enforcement does, so we could eliminate men who weren’t on campus on the nights of the abductions. Well, we were able to get access to some data sets.”
Cami presses a button on her laptop and a strike-through appears on a quarter of the names. “It’s time-consuming to cross reference things. We’ve only made it through part of the list.”
Erik steps forward and studies the image. “These phones pinged too far away at times when a woman was taken? How many miles did you use to exclude them?”
“Fifty or more.” Cami joins him directly in front of the screen. “Yeah. Like him—he’s new to the faculty, but he’s been at a lot of campus functions. On the night of the Isobel Long abduction, his phone pinged in New Jersey. So, we eliminated him.”
The Viking’s head nods slowly, studying the screen. “This is good work, Reynolds.”
“Professor Smith-Hall can come off the list,” Avery says. “He's on sabbatical in Berkley, California since January 2nd. So, he couldn’t have been the masked figure you and Arya saw outside your loft.”
“Smith-Hall and Ralston are also unlikely because they aren’t friends of my aunt and uncle,” Declan says. “The opposite in fact. If my uncle suspected either of them of being Casanova, he would’ve reported it. And there’s no way either Smith-Hall or Ralston would confide in my aunt that Camrynn was on a list of targets.”
“Leave Ralston on the list for now.” Erik glances at Declan. “Your logic’s sound, but Ralston has so much access to the campus, and your uncle’s body was found on his construction site. Let’s go through the exercise of reviewing his phone data before we eliminate him.”
Declan shrugs. “Sure.”
“What is this?” I whisper to Avery. “Getting cell phone records… it’s probably illegal. They couldn’t use it in a newspaper story, right?”
Avery shrugs.
The room closes in around me. I’m so tired, but I don’t think it’s just lack of sleep that’s making my head swim. “Why is Shane involved? And Declan going through records? What is this?”
“They’re working together on it. Helping each other. It’s what they do,” Avery says.
This is much more than I realized. On the night I saw Casanova by the cars, a reporter would’ve called the police. A reporter might have gotten a gun out for protection, but after that, he would’ve stayed inside the loft with the doors locked and waited for FPD.
The image of Erik with his rifle forms in my mind. I thought he went out to try to catch Casanova. To stop him. I thought he might have to shoot him in self defense. Now I realize Erik didn’t rush out on impulse. He knew what he was going outside to do. He went out to kill him.In cold blood.
As the thoughts hammer in my head, the air thins. There’s something more on the edge of my memories. Pieces shift slowly into place as though they’re floating on an oil spill.
