His voice makes me back up until I’m standing in the open car door. I look down at Jesse, who seems absolutely devastated as he buries his head in his hands and refuses to look at me.
I watch while they push a handcuffed Liam toward the car and try to remind myself that Liam can get out of anything. They’re just doing their job. They’re just doing what they’ve been told to do.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I ask as they help Liam into the back of their cruiser.
“We’re going to deal with this back at the station. We would like you both to exit the vehicle. Why don’t you two ride back to the station with me? There’s no sense in waiting for backup when we know both of you, Detectives,” Wilcox says as another police car pulls up. “Come on now.”
I slowly follow him and get into the back seat next to Liam while Jesse is damn near forced into the front passenger seat, still holding his tarantula. The officer who just arrived is hovering around that trunk as Wilcox’s partner speaks to him, and I’m left in turmoil. I look over at Liam, whose face iscompletely unreadable for the entire drive back to the station. It can’t be too serious, right? Or Wilcox would never have let me ride back here with Liam. He’s just doing his job despite knowing that Liam is innocent… right?
The moment I arrive, Liam is escorted out and barely gets anywhere before Michaels is hustling out in a huff.
Liam tips his head toward my jacket, and I remember that I have the bag with the fingerprints tucked into it. Right… if I can figure out who did it, then I can clear Liam.
I hurry off to the department, leaving him behind while I rush up to the elevator and start hitting buttons even though the elevator is taking its sweet time.
It’s Christmas night, so there are few people here. Only essential workers are present, and someone who would generally do a fingerprint analysis doesn’t seem to be one of them. I eye the tape firmly stuck to the wrapping paper and quickly stick it in the freezer, hoping to make the tape easier to peel off without taking any paper with it. Then I begin setting up a kit to show the fingerprints before I see Jesse standing outside the door.
“Can you help me with this?”
Jesse just turns and walks away.
“Jesse, what the fuck?” I snap.
I’m far too impatient to leave the tape in the freezer for too long and touch an edge to see how easily it’ll pull from the paper. It immediately rips the paper with it, making my stomach sink.
“Fuck,” I grumble as I toss it back in. I really hope the print we need wasn’t under that piece. After I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin, I pull it out and carefully get started.
The next piece I test peels off with ease and I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but I’m doing what I can to get answers as fast as I can. I set to work on each piece of tape until I’ve revealed every fingerprint that’s on them. If thisdoesn’t give me anything, I’ll have to wait for them to analyze the box the head was found in, but who the hell would ever let me take the box that could be what condemns my boyfriend and partner?
Quickly, I set the prints to be analyzed by the computer to see if there’s a match. Of course the first match I get is Jesse, which is no surprise since he was the person who wrapped the original present…
Is there really any way that the person fucked up like this? Then again, if the person who set this up did everything they could to avoid ripping the paper, they probably had to use their nails to peel the edges up.
The computer flashes another match.
And this time… it isn’t Jesse.
Hurriedly, I write down the name and pull up what I can about him. Tate Piers… a man with a record after he was a suspect in his parents’ death. They were unable to convict him, and because of it, he was able to walk free.
“What are you doing?” Michaels asks, and I’m so fixated on the computer that I nearly jump out of my skin.
I shake my head. “Just… trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Liam wants to talk to you.”
“Okay.” I minimize what I’d been looking at and hurry after him. “You know Liam had nothing to do with this, right?”
“Just talk to Liam,” he says. Michaels takes me down to the lower floor and waves me toward the holding cells, where I see Liam sitting in one, before leaving. When Liam notices me, he quickly stands up.
“Do I look sexy behind bars?” he asks. “I feel like a badass.”
“This isn’t a fucking joke,” I hiss.
“Are you alone?” Liam asks as he looks around. The room appears to be empty besides Wilcox, who is sitting behind a desk.
“Yes.”
“So the police received a tip that I had a head, of all things, in my trunk. A setup, clearly. The box we took from Jesse’s had books in it; officers have since found the original box with books in it outside of Jesse’s home. At some point, the killer swapped the box of books in our trunk with the head and then called the police. So when they implied they wanted to check the trunk, I warned them that this was likely a setup by the killer and if it was, I wanted them to follow through, to pretend like I really was at fault. I wanted to see what the killer would do when they believed I was out of the equation,” he says, loud enough for Wilcox to hear. “I wanted to play the part. They want me gone for some reason, or at least distracted while they do something else, so I decided that we would give them what they wanted in the hope that they fuck up.”
