I gave a single nod. “Yes, but without Ines here, why be in the apartment at all?”
“That’s fair.”
“Right. That evening, my gut said Brantley was behind the break-in, since we’d been gone long enough he had plenty of time to toss the place. But I recognized that was an even bigger assumption.”
Beast stroked the stubble along his jaw. “Why bluff about something like that?”
My eyes slid to Alexandra for a beat and back to Beast. “Because of Porter. Something told me I could play the two of them against one another, and that’s what happened.”
“I’m impressed,” Tundra muttered.
“Yeah,” Beast said.
Alexandra shook her head with a small smile on her face. “He’s always been a bluffer, he used to do it all the time.”
Tundra shared a look with Beast. “Seems like that could be his road name.”
Beast cocked a brow. “He’s gotta get done prospecting first, Tun.”
Alexandra stood and grabbed Tundra’s empty beer bottle. “Are you going to corner Tobias before or after the sun sets?
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
She dropped the bottles into a recycle bin, shoved the paper plates into the garbage, and came back to the dining nook. “It’s not that simple, Raff.”
“It is, Alexandra. The less you know the better, right now,” Beast said.
She pressed her lips together into an angry pout. “That’s the last thing I want to hear.”
“Tough,” Tundra said.
“Don’t you have studying to do?” Beast asked.
“Always, but seeing as Brantley insinuated that Ines was using drugs and that’s as crazy as the day is long, I think I can put off studying until tomorrow. I want to know what’s up with Tobias and him stealing a kilo of cocaine.”
“Did Ines have a part-time job? Or any kind of internship?” Tundra asked.
Alexandra gave it some thought. “Not this semester. Last fall, she delivered auto parts for a distributor - but only part-time, mainly on weekends.”
Tundra cocked a brow. “You mean when they needed a timing belt or some other part that they didn’t have already, she would deliver it that day… or did she deliver it later?”
She sat down in a chair at the table. “I think that day, but I don’t know because I never really asked that.”
Keeping my mouth shut proved to be a massive struggle. I sensed that Tundra had a theory. My gut said Ines was more involved than we realized, and maybe Brantley had lied to me about her wanting to score a hit. In fact, part of me suspected he’d reversed the roles. If Ines were selling drugs… I couldn’t mention that in front of Lex. But from the way Brantley behaved, he definitely seemed the type to score a hit off Ines.
“How long did she have the job? Last semester only… or did she have the job for a year?” Beast asked.
That didn’t help my wayward thoughts, and seeing as Alexandra was damned intelligent, it keyed up her suspicions, too.
“Why do you ask?”
Beast held up his hands for a moment. “I don’t have a reason, I’m just curious. If it’s too difficult to talk about your friend right now—”
“No, it’s just that I get the feeling you and Tundra are assuming the worst of her.”
Beast slowly shook his head. “Not at all, honey. Seriously, I’m not assuming anything. Just trying to get a feel for the situation.”
I watched Alexandra. The way her chest deflated, she’d exhaled, and her expression softened on Beast. “Fine. The past few days have been so crazy. She worked the auto parts job for a little over a year, but not more than a year and a half, because that would have been more than three semesters.”
