I chose to ignore him. If we got into a discussion about his pecs, we’d end up in the bedroom again. It already happened once after we finished the interview with Bud. I couldn’t have any more distractions, even if he argued an orgasm would help clear my mind.
I made another full loop of the room, making sure to pick up my feet at the uneven lip of the floors. “Bud gave us everything and nothing. Selene killed Lisa and Casey over the house. I know it.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Reed said, watching my path from his spot on the couch.
He gave me a head tilt as I walked over the lip on the floor and stared at him with narrowed eyes. No one was jumping to conclusions. These were cold, hard facts.
“Or do,” he said, flipping his head the other way. “It’s up to you. No judgment.”
It felt judgey. I turned the bend in my path at the end of the living room and started toward the front of the house while I ran through the clues again. “It just seems like we’re missing the last piece.”
A quick turn in the small front room as I headed back toward Reed. I closed my eyes in concentration and tripped over the stupid uneven floor. Who made two connecting rooms at different heights?
My eyes flashed open in panic. I pitched forward, my arms flew out to catch myself, and I stumbled, regaining my footing before I made contact with the floor. What the heck?
A silver piece of metal flickered as it lay right in the corner of the floors connecting. “What is this?”
I bent down to pick it up as Reed left the couch to meet me. He leaned over as I held up the silver pushpin between us. We stared.
“Where did it come from?” he asked.
I pointed to the floor. “Someone probably dropped it at some point and couldn’t find it.”
It probably happened across America daily, but the part that made this important was the connection.
“It matches the ones from Casey’s note and the threatening newspaper,” Reed said as I dropped it on the table next to the other two.
I laid all three of them out in a line. “Exactly.”
Until right then, I hadn’t noticed the note and the threat were both tacked into the door with the same type of pushpin.
Reed moved away from the table. “There are probably thousands of those.”
“Maybe millions. Even so, they have to be a connection. How did this pin get here?” Did someone use it to attach a threatening note to Lisa’s door when she was alive? Or did the pins belong to her, and when she died, Selene took them to her home after they went through Lisa’s belongings? Either option worked for me. “This is even more evidence. Selene did it, Reed.”
“I’ll admit it doesn’t look great for her,” he said with his hand on his chin.
Not great at all. Poor Selene. She seemed so nice. No, wait. Poor Lisa and Casey. We didn’t have sympathy for murderers.
“But how do we prove it’s her?” I asked the room in general. If a ghost wanted to take that opportunity to weigh in with some advice, I’d happily accept. Ghost Lisa couldn’t expect us to do all the heavy lifting.
Reed, who was hovering over the table, hit his fist against the wood and stood up straight. “I have an idea, but I need Torin.”
“The surfer SEAL?” I asked, surprised by the sudden change of direction. I guess living SEALs would probably be more help than dead ghosts.
He twisted his entire body, put a hand on his hip, and tipped his head in disbelief at me. “Is that what you think he looks like?”
Oops.
“Ignore me,” I said and forced out a quick laugh before turning back to the pushpins on the table.
“Do you like surfers?” Reed asked.
Oh, that’s what this was about. I smiled. “No, I prefer the rough get-to-business type for my former SEALs preference.”
He gave me a head jerk that I took to mean he accepted my answer. “Anyway, Torin is great with computers. We can get into their system through the Wi-Fi and see what Selene’s been searching. Best case, they’ve got one of those home devices and we can have Spencer hack into the database. Maybe get a voice recording from the big fight.”
Wow. All that stuff sounded super spy and scary but impressive. Plus, highly illegal, but if it helped us solve the case, I wasn’t one to complain about it.
