Sherlock snorted. “You’re twisting the facts to suit your theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
“Yeah? Well, you smell.” I poked my tongue out at him. Morrie sniggered. “I’d like to visit the crime scene and see these disturbances for myself. Can you take me there?”
“I’ll save you a trip through a rather nasty briar patch that ruined my favorite pair of trousers. We’ve already gone out there.” Morrie hunted through a stack of ephemera on the table and shoved a stack of Polaroids in my direction. “Sherlock took these.”
“Don’t mess them up.” Sherlock paced in front of the fire, the lighter clicking as he struggled to light his pipe.
I fanned out the images, remembering them from the glimpse I had the day Sherlock took me and Morrie to the cabin. Police tape wound around the trunks of five towering oaks, cordoning off a large section of forest – the primary site, where they believed the murder actually occurred. Sam said he found the body in a fallen log further down the mountain, and sure enough, there it was… several pictures of the log from all angles, with drag marks where the killer must’ve pulled the body into the log after stabbing her.Of course, because they couldn’t have swung the blade if Kate was already inside the log.
I didn’t bother saying that out loud. Sherlock had clearly already figured it out. I flicked through the rest of the images – most of what Sherlock shot looked like random rocks and piles of twigs and leaves to me, but I peered at each one and pretended I gleaned some important information from them.
“We also foundthis.” Morrie picked up something from a petri dish and held it near the candle. It was a silver button with a distinctive crest stamped into the metal. It reminded me of the buttons on my old school uniform blazer. “The police missed it. If you can, find out from Jo what Kate was wearing when she died. If it wasn’t hers, it most likely belonged to her killer.”
I took the button and slid it into my pocket. “Thanks, Morrie. Will you be able to do any hacking up here, with the bad reception?”
He held up the burner phone. “I don’t have all my equipment, but I can cause some chaos. What do you need?”
“I need to know everything you can find about Kate’s boss, Grant Hosking. Especially the juicy, incriminating stuff.”
“Easy. I’ll probably have that for you before you get off this cursed mountain.”
“You mean you haven’t been enjoying the peace and tranquility of nature?” I ruffled his hair, usually close-shaven and impossibly neat, but after only three days almost rivaled Heathcliff in its unkemptness.I can’t believe I was so distracted with the garrotings I didn’t notice how bad things got for Morrie.
“You know I don’t do nature.” Morrie patted the ereader I’d packed for him. “I appreciate this.”
“I hope so. I’ve stocked it with all my favorite reverse harem books – J Bree, Kim Faulks, Mila Young, Steffanie Holmes.”
Morrie’s voice cracked. “Gorgeous, why do you do all this to me?”
“You’ll thank me later. Just don’t tell Heathcliff about the ereader, or he’ll skin us both alive. Oh, and your algorithm came up with a new headline today. Apparently, another rare Romanian plant was stolen from Lower Loxham.”
Morrie screwed his face up. “That’s close.”
“Yep. We’ll investigate it.”
“Good.” Morrie looked away, his shoulders shaking.
I squeezed his leg. “What are you thinking?”
“That I hate not being able to be with you, especially with… our greater enemy closing in.” Morrie couldn’t speak Dracula’s name, in case Sherlock overheard. He sighed. “I thought I was prepared. I thought I’d given you everything you needed for when they hauled me in. I made that algorithm, I used the last of my legitimate money – everything MI5 didn’t seize – to bail out your mother. I know you have Lord Pricklybum and the birdie to look after you… but I didn’t imagine it would be this hard to let go of you.”
I remembered then how Morrie looked when he’d first shown me the algorithm, sick to his stomach as he handed it over. My fingers dug into his shoulder. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?”
Morrie shrugged. “I had an inkling.”
“How long?” I demanded. “How long have you known?”
“I’ve lived on the edge of the law my entire life, gorgeous. In my last life, that got me tossed over a waterfall by the man I loved.”
“Get over it,” Sherlock muttered from the fire, smoke curling from his pouting lips.
“Eat me,” Morrie yelled back. “I had a second chance when I came to this world, and it wasn’t until I met you that I realized I might have been making the same mistakes again. There was always a chance I’d get away with my crimes forever. I even fancied myself a bit of a Robin Hood figure. But when a person who faked their death turns up dead for real, the police start digging into how they stayed hidden for so long, and all it would take was one bribed official or crooked border guard to crack and they had my name. The footprints around the body, the letter opener, my business card in her pocket – this was a calculated and deliberate attempt to frame me. I’ve been expecting my arrest ever since they found Kate’s body. I read about it in the paper the morning of Danny Sledge’s murder, if you recall.”
I remembered now. I’d come downstairs from Quoth’s bedroom to find Morrie standing over his computer with a frown on his face. He flicked over the screen as soon as I walked in, but I’d been so distracted by Danny’s death and the murder investigation his odd behavior escaped my notice.
“Why didn’t you pull some criminal mastermind wankery out of your arse to save yourself? It’s like youwantedto go down for this.” And I hated the way I sounded, like a selfish cow who only cared about what I wanted and not about the poor dead girl, but I missed Morrie like crazy and the thought that he’d willingly walked into this knowing he could end up behind bars made my head spin.
“Because…” Morrie wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “Because I know you struggle to reconcile being my girlfriend with that pesky conscience of yours. I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to make you proud of me.”
