“Okay, if that’s it for now, I’ll check in with Austin and call Jace, and someone should—”
“Was that EmilyBlakeForrester?” Davey asked, as I stood from the booth. I turned to see her at the bar again, staring at her computer screen. She looked past me at Tucker, and I turned back to him.
“Um…I’m not sure,” he admitted, crossing the dining area with his own plate and glass. “I assume Forrester was her married name, but I don’t remember whether or not the obit listed her maiden name.”
“It did,” I said with a glance at the paper he’d given me. “EmilyBlakeForrester. Who left behind her husband, Martin, her parents, Bobby and Anne, and two brothers. Carey and—”
“NolanfuckingBlake!” Davey cried, spinning her laptop around to face us. “He’s right there on her Facebook profile, listed as her brother.”
I turned to Tucker with both brows raised.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ve looked at hundreds of obituaries in the past two days, and they all started running together.”
“So, wait.” Davey closed her laptop. “Austin and Bishop accused Nolan Blake of killing Yvette, but it turns out Nolan’s sister might actually have been a victim too? Did he kill his ownsister?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Vance was looking at Davey, but he was actually talking to me. Because if Nolan was somehow involved in Emily and Yvette’s deaths, then he could also have been involved in—
Tucker cleared his throat. “I’ll go through them again and make sure I didn’t miss anything else.”
“Let’s put that on hold,” I said, as the first customer pulled into our lot. “The bar opens in ten minutes, and I have to go talk to Nolan. So—Shit,” I swore with a glance through the front window at the white 4Runner. “It’s Austin and Bishop. If they ask for me, tell them I’ll be with them as soon as I can. Donottell them about any of this.” I waved the folded obituaries for emphasis. “And keep them out of the basement.”
My mind raced as I headed downstairs. I could hear Vance unlocking the front doors, and when I focused, consciously blocking everything else out, I could hear Bishop cursing beneath his breath about being hungry. He was probably standing on the welcome mat, right in front of the door, beneath the neon sign.
I couldn’t afford to think about the brother and widower right now. This moment wasn’t about them. It wasn’t even truly about Yvette and Emily. Not entirely anyway.
I stepped into the basement and bolted the door behind me. Then I dropped the bar, an old-fashioned two-by-four slab of iron fitted into two brackets, intended to hold the door shut, medieval-style.
That wouldn’t keep Austin and Bishop out, if they decided they really wanted in. A couple of good hits from a shifter shoulder, and the brackets would pull loose from the wall. But the bar would give me several seconds of warning.
“Charley?” Nolan Blake sat up from the twin-sized bunk in his cell, rubbing his eyes. He’d tossed around in his sleep overnight, and the mattress pad and ill-fitting sheet had slid half out from under him. “Breakfast time already?”
“It’s damn near lunch time.” I tried to keep hostility out of my voice, and I think I mostly succeeded. Under the circumstances, that was a fucking miracle. “Someone will bring food down in a minute. First, though, I have some follow-up questions for you.” I grabbed a bottle of water from a half-empty case on the floor and slid it through the bars toward him. There was a toilet in his cell—an upgrade I was glad Titus had been willing to pay for.
Otherwise, we’d have to let prisoners out to use the restroom. Or we’d have to empty buckets.
Startled, I realized I was now thinking of Nolan as a prisoner, though until that moment, I’d thought of the cell as protection for him.
I sank into a chair several feet from the bars.
“What’s going on?” Nolan asked. “You mind if I get dressed before…whatever this is?” A pile of clean, folded clothes sat in one corner of the cell. Tucker had brought them, after he’d searched Nolan’s apartment.
“Let’s get this over with first.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Tell me about Emily.”
“Emily? You mean my sister?” Nolan shook his head, clearly confused. “What about her?”
“How did she die?”
“I don’t— What is this about, Charley? Why are you… Why are you digging into my family?”
“We weren’t. Her name came up in a search of human women who died of infection-like symptoms. So…how did she die?”
“I don’t know, really. I wasn’t there.” He ran one hand through brown sleep-tousled hair. “All I know is that one day my mom called to say she was sick. Then she called back a few hours later and said Em had died. It was crazy-sudden. My mom was out of her mind with grief. I could hardly understand a word she said, so my brother had to take the phone from her. All he said was that Emily had gotten sick while her husband was at work. By the time he found her, she was unconscious, and there was nothing the hospital could do.”
Foreboding swelled in the pit of my stomach. “Sick with what?”
“I don’t know. Mom said the hospital never figured it out, but they didn’t think it was…communicable.”
“What did her husband say? Your parents? Your brother? What did people tell you about your sister’s death, Nolan?”
