“Close that file.”
He made a quick grab for the papers and missed.
“Pay attention to the road,” she shot back.
She pressed herself against the window, reading as fast as she could as they pulled into the station.
There were also some flecks of paint recovered from a smashed utility box at the corner of the parking lot exit. Hailey scanned the lab report, which included a list of manufacturers that used that specific paint.
She deduced that the police should be looking for a white Ford Explorer with damage to the passenger side.
Detective Toll put the car in park and ripped the pages out of her hand.
“Don’t go getting the wrong idea about the stuff you just read,” he chastised. “It’s all preliminary. You shouldn’t have read that.”
“You handed them right to me.”
“I didn’t tell you to read them,” he said, getting out of the car.
Detective Toll hugged the folders to his chest with one hand and opened the door to the station with the other, motioning Hailey to lead the way. As soon as they crossed the threshold, Toll dropped his folders and vaulted over a tall desk toassist an officer who was on the floor, wrestling with the biggest man Hailey had ever seen.
A pair of handcuffs swung from the man’s wrist as he landed punch after punch. He was on top of the officer with one hand squeezing the officer’s neck and the other tugging on his service pistol, which, thankfully, was stuck in the holster, when Detective Toll pulled him off.
Hailey watched them wrangle the giant’s hands back into a set of cuffs. Then she stared at the folders on the floor.
This is too easy.
She fell to her knees, scanning each page, committing them to memory. There were interview notes and lists of names and locations as well as photos from the pub and a few of Holly’s shoe (foot and all), which Hailey quickly covered.
One folder was particularly interesting. It was darker brown than the others and stamped CONFIDENTIAL in big red letters. Most of the pages inside had several lines of fat black marker running across them, obliterating a lot of the text. A visible word here and there indicated the pages had something to do with the fire that had killed her parents.
She knew she’d guessed right when she uncovered some pictures of her childhood home. She puzzled over them.
One photo showed the house before the fire and one after—both from the same vantage point.
That’s weird, she thought.Why would they take a picture of her housebeforeit burned down?
Holding one of the papers up to the light, she discerned the outline of an acronym through the magic marker:
D.O.P.P.L.E.R.
Footsteps. Someone was coming. Hailey gathered the folders, put her butt in a chair, and folded her hands.
When Detective Toll came back out—not over the desk, but through a magnetically locked door—he carried a binder and found Hailey sitting in thelobby like an angel with the papers straightened and submissively tucked inside their folders.
He eyeballed her suspiciously, and Hailey looked innocently back at him.
“Bit of excitement,” he said holding his hands out.
“Is everyone alright?”
“Mostly.”
She handed him the folders, and he actually counted them. Right in front of her. Did he really think she would take one, she wondered, half offended and half amused that he’d underestimated her speed-reading skills.
“Hailey, I have to make a quick call, and it’s a mess in there,” he said apologetically. “Can you look through these mugshots out here for a few minutes? Make a note of anyone that looks familiar, okay?”
She nodded obediently as he waved a card in front of an invisible sensor. The door clicked open, and he disappeared inside.
