“But you didn’t know that before he was, uh… stabbed?” Michaels asks.
“Correct.”
Michaels stares at Liam, probably wondering again why he doesn’t make him wear a body cam at all times. I’m sure he’s aware that the reason he doesn’t is because while Liam can be rather… unorthodox, he knows how to get things done in a way that always ends up looking perfectly legal.
I’m still not sure how.
“I don’t believe he actually killed Nadine. I believe he is an accomplice. He has a partner, someone he pushed out in a wheelchair,” Liam says. “That’s the killer.”
Richard seems to realize that Liam knows too much because he hesitates before laughing. “I killed the stupid bitch. Because of her, Zach is dead. I killed her because that’s what she deserves.”
“Michaels, doyouhave a body cam on?” Liam asks.
Michaels narrows his eyes in a very clear “Don’t say it” way.
I even go a step beyond andsay, “Don’t say it.”
“We could… get the information out of him out here,” Liam suggests.
“And he still said it,” Michaels mutters.
“She’s the reason Zach’s dead. She deserves this,” the man repeats.
Liam leans down and whispers something to him that I can’t hear and Michaels doesn’t see.
Richard growls and lunges at Liam, but because he’s handcuffed, all he can do is slam into Liam’s legs. Liam doesn’t budge, merely observes as the man wallows around before he flips forward and lands on the knife still in his side. He screams, and instead of helping to flip him back over, Liam just watches him while I hurry forward and flip him over.
“You are not to move again or we will have to use force to restrain you,” I threaten.
The man seems to care very little; he just wants at Liam and is prepared to do anything it takes to get him there.
We get a medical team out here to deal with him, and then it’s just me and Liam again.
“Why put yourself in danger?” I ask, a little annoyed about it.
“He wasn’t going to risk stabbing me with two of us. I gave you the very explicitly clear ‘This man is a bad guy and I’m going to send you away so he can try to attack me and then we will deal with him’ look. I assumed you got it.”
I stare at him, not wanting to let him know that I did understand some part of that look because he’ll be using it to jump into something else wildly dangerous and assume I understand because of a simple eye flick. “Nope.”
He smiles at me. “You did too. You did good.”
My eyes narrow as I try to comprehend this. “Which… part? I literally stood there and watched you force a man to plunge his own knife into his side.”
“Such a sad situation,” Liam says, not sounding sad in the slightest. “Let’s go back inside. I feel like Whitaker is long gone,but I’d like to spend some time trying to envision how he did this.”
“How did you know that Breanna was gone? Which… where did she even go?”
“I could smell a bit of smoke on her, telling me she was a smoker. After she saw the dead body, she got really twitchy. I saw her keep reaching for where she must keep her cigarettes during off hours. The next time I saw her, she had a pack in her pocket. I knew the first opportunity she had, she’d run out to smoke. And the last time we were here, I heard how staticky the radios were in the parking lot when we walked inside. They really need to fix that.”
“Sometimes… I feel like your theories are just…”
“Phenomenal?” he supplies.
“Sketchy,” I correct.
Liam just laughs, like he’s not at all concerned by my sass.
“How are we going to connect this to Whitaker? We havenothingthat even leads us to look at this man who died years ago.”
