“Liam, be nice.” I feel like an adult trying to remind a child to play nice with his friends.
“I was oddly convinced you had me collect evidence so when the police descended on me, you could go, ‘I told you so! Look at the dumb fuck who literally put evidence in his own car.’ And then you’d have gotten to wear your ‘I told you so’ shirt and eat your ‘I told you so’ cake.”
“That would have been hilarious,” Liam says.
“Would it?” Jesse asks.
“For one of us. And delicious for two of us.” A look from me tells Liam to get back on task. “I trust that Zach’s clothes don’t have anything to do with you on them, right? No hair, your fingers didn’t touch any buttons or surfaces they would have left a print on, correct?”
“Correct. I had us wearing both hair nets and gloves and then the paper outfits they wear in the lab.”
“You promise you didn’t fuck up?” Liam asks.
“I promise you.”
With gloves on, Liam grabs the bag with the hammer and the bag with the clothes and heads toward the dumpster. He flips the lids open and hangs over the edge. I assume he’s just going to bury them beneath a few layers, but instead, I realize he’s opening up the trash bags.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to find the bags from that night.”
“How are you going to do that?”
He grabs a crumpled receipt and unfolds it. “People throw their receipts away all the time,” he says before tossing it back in the pile and digging deeper. When he seems to be satisfied by what a receipt says, he shoves the clothes and hammer into a trash bag he carefully reties. Then he covers everything back up like he’s never been inside at all.
“Let’s go. Jesse, here are the rust particles; make it look natural that you didn’t see them previously but did upon another examination. Then let’s get the word out about the hammer. Make sure everyone in that zoo knows. I’ll call in the dumpster nonsense the following morning. Any questions?”
Jesse shakes his head. “I have a lot but none that actually matter.”
“I’m glad you’re learning,” Liam says before he walks to the car and gets inside, ready to head for home. Jesse looks over at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Liam, of all people… Gabriel, was this your idea?” he asks, understandably assuming that I was the one to save his ass, not the man who cares so little for everyone but me.
“No. I actually had no idea what was going on until he texted me.”
“I think you should have him checked by a doctor and make sure there isn’t something medically wrong with him. The Liam I know would never willingly help unless he wants something… he’s going to make my life miserable, isn’t he?”
“He might,” I admit.
“Is he really blackmailing Michaels?”
“How else do you think he got rehiredandplaced as my partner? I mean… would they ever let a dating couple be partners?”
He shrugs, likely realizing that they definitely wouldn’t. It’s probably also occurring to him that a lot of what Liam does are things that he probably shouldn’t be involved in. He really does seem to have the run of the department. After contemplating for a moment, Jesse finally says, “He’s scary good.”
“Right?”
“Thank you. I don’t… I promise if I ever go down for this, I’ll never breathe a word of it. I owe you both everything.”
I smile at him. “This is what friends are for… kind of. Like… maybe not this exactly. But helping people out kind of thing.”
“Understood.”
FIFTEEN
Liam
I tear open the door to the medical examiner’s office and look in at Jesse. “I hear that you found traces of rust in the headless horseman’s hair,” I announce. Really, my acting skills are just sublime.
