“Callum let me keep the Zoe Marshall case open.”
“That’s good.” I scan her features, and they don’t seem to agree.
She lifts her gaze toward the kitchen. “You don’t have to do this for me every day.”
“It’s the least I can do. You’re doing all the hard work growing the baby, and I get to reap the benefits in…” I glance at my watch as if I need to know the date, but I have the countdown memorized. “…One hundred and forty-eight days.”
“Is it actually?” She tilts her head.
“Yeah. Actually.”
She drinks some juice. “Love this stuff. Apparently, I need to be careful with Vitamin A, though.”
“Noted.”
She’s trying to act casual, and I’m pretty sure it would be obvious to even someone who hasn’t learned to read people for a living.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask. “Because I’m here for it if you need to unload.”
She smiles tightly. “I went to the quarry.”
“On your own?” I can’t help the question slipping out. It’s not that I think Freya can’t handle herself, but even… What if she passed out? Got too hot? Anything.
There’s no signal out there.
I hate the idea of her being alone at all now.
“Yes. I was just going to check the site of the incident as if starting the case from scratch even though I know the tire marks are long gone and… I just figured, you start at the beginning, right?”
“Actually …” I start to correct.
“I know, I know…you startbeforethe beginning. Which is why I wanted this case kept open in the first place.”
Now’s not the time for mentoring. I get that. But I do love that Freya and I have this in common. A love of justice. A love of the chase…the mystery. But I also know how quickly someone can get twisted up as a character in someone else’s thriller.
She inhales, shaky. “Something is really off. All the guardrails were loosened.”
“Loose or loosened?”
“Loosened. As in uniformly—maybe three threads left on each bolt. I was thinking how hard it would be for a Mazda Miata to go through industrial grade guardrails. Well, there’s your answer. They were barely held together. And there was no mention of it in the file.”
Shit.
She tightens, holds her breath, as if considering how to tell me the next part.
“What else did you find?” I ask.
“I think there was someone there…hiding.”
I bolt upright.
She hurries her words, sensing my concern. “I didn’t see them. They were in the woods, and there was this whole thing with coyotes…”
“Coyotes?” I nearly choke on the word.
The hell went on out there?
She scrunches her eyebrows together, recalling her time there. “I think the coyotes came too close to the person there, and they dropped something and it turned out to be…a wrench.”
