“I’ll go through that,” I nudge her away. “There’s probably nothing in here anyway. But, you knew Sheila best. Maybe you should look for the stuff that the original investigators didn’t find.”
Cat pauses with her hands on her hips. She looks ready to rip me a new one but thinks better of it and heads into the other room.
I sort through the mess on the floor, finding nothing of note, but straightening things into piles as I go. Maybe Cat will notice something out of the ordinary when she comes back to the room.
About an hour later, I hear Cat stomping around in the primary bedroom, then a crash.
I’m in the room, with my Bowie knife at the ready, in a fucking heartbeat.
“I’m okay,” Cat raises her arm from the other side of the bed. “Stomped a little too hard on her hiding place.”
I slip the knife back into my boot then walk around the bed. Cat sits on the wood floor, the remnants of a broken plank next to her.
“Look at these,” Cat lifts scrapbooks out of a secret compartment in the floor.
“Scrapbooks?”
“And journals.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so too,” Cat snorts. “No one wants to see your scrapbooks. She could have left these out on a shelf, but she didn’t. So it begs the question - what’s in them?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer, flipping over the first book. I settle on the floor next to her and lean in to see the pictures. Cat’s heady caramel scent fills my nostrils, and visions of throwing her down on the floor dance through my head.
“Knock it off,” Cat elbows me in the ribs. “You keep making weird sexy noises. It’s distracting.”
Weird, sexy noises?Shit.
“Look at this,” she points to a series of photos with Sheila and some brown-haired guy. “What do you see?”
“Her mysterious boyfriend?”
“Look closer.”
I pull the reading glasses out of my inner pocket and ignore Cat’s snickers. All of the photos are of Sheila and the mystery guy. While Sheila is lit up like Independence Day, looking happily in love, the smile on the guy’s face doesn’t reach his gray eyes. Every picture is the same. She’s happy. He’s - not.
“He’s humoring her,” I point out.
Cat nods. “What else?”
I flip back to the beginning of the scrapbook. Page after page of their selfies, or the candid shot of him sleeping. I tilt my head. “They’re all taken in one spot.”
“Exactly!” Cat bounces next to me. “In her hidden journal, she talks about needing to be careful with Drum, so they’re not seen around town together. She accused him of being married, and he denied it. What if he wasn’t married, but the reason they couldn’t go out was that he was hiding something bigger from her.”
“Like working with two men trying to break out of prison?”
“Right,” Cat smirks. “We need to find this dirtbag.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“We’re going to let the photos tell us where he is.”
I snort. “In case you missed it, these are actual photos, not digital pics.”
Cat clucks her tongue and pulls a face. “Oh, ye of little faith.”
In one fell swoop, Cat snags two of the pictures out of the album, then flips them over. “I don’t need a digital camera to tell me where these were taken. Just the fine folks at D.C. Drugs.”