“Why see Lacey as a threat?” Holt asked, playing along with June’s logic.
“Let’s think about it this way,” June said and then went on to remind him. “The envelope was addressed to Lucy and me. Unlike the other threatening notes, this one was in an envelope that was probably hand-delivered to Lucy's office or sent to her post office box she has in town.”
“Lucy’s mail gets sent to a P.O. Box at the post office?” Holt looked at June in surprise, making a mental note to check whether there was video footage at the post office and to go in to find out. “I’ll go there in the morning and find out if anyone knows anything.”
June nodded in confirmation. “So it got caught up with the rest of Lucy’s mail, which she left in Lacey’s office, and that is the only reason Lacey ended up with it.”
“Lacey wasn’t supposed to get it,” Holt had realized that, but he’d honestly not looked at it in the light June had, and suddenly he was seeing what she was seeing, and June was right. The letter didn’t match the other threatening notes. “I wonder when it was delivered?”
June stopped and thought a moment. “I’m not sure.” She shook her head and finally pulled the file from the box. “There were no stamps on it, so…” She shrugged. “I guess unless you find someone on camera at the post office or going into Lucy’s office, we won’t know.”
“Regardless of where or how the note was delivered, the contents still read like a threat.” Holt’s eyes fell on the file in her hand questioningly.
“Or a warning.” She looked at him and cocked her head slightly.
“Then why is Lacey in the hospital with a head wound?” Holt asked.
“That I’m still trying to figure out,” June said, not sharply, but with the strain of someone trying to hold three thoughts at once. “I’m not dismissing what happened to Lacey or that the letter might very well be a threat. I’m saying the letter itself doesn’t feel like the others.”
“I can see that now,” Holt admitted.
“When Lacey was brought in and briefly woke up, she told Dean, ‘Not my enemy, find the letter.’” June reminded him. “Why would Lacey say that? Not my enemy?” She tapped the folder against the palm of her hand. “When Lacey was shocked, thinking she had an enemy that wanted to run her off the road…” Her eyes narrowed. “There was a flash of fear in Lacey’s eyes. And now when I think of how she said it and how flustered she’d gotten…”
“That she wasn’t surprised by it but more fearful of it?” Holt added.
“Yes, or like someone whose past had finally caught up with them,” June told him. “Those words she uttered were a very strange choice of words, not my enemy.”
“I get it. Like she was admitting she had enemies, but the one that attacked her wasn’t hers.” Holt figured out what she meant.
“Exactly. Then we immediately linked that to the current case,” June said. “Maybe because it was the obvious thing to do.”
She finally opened the folder. “But, if I look at the letter as more warning than threat, then the whole thing shifts.”
“You think it’s separate from the larger case.” Holt leaned one hip against the desk.
“No.” June glanced up at him and shook her head. “I think it is connected. But not like we think it is.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Holt stated. “But you’ve got me stumped here.”
June smiled, and she flipped through the file. “There are four people who we know of who’ve been actively looking into what happened ten years ago,” she pointed out.
“Margo. Willa. Rad.” Holt looked at her. “And me.”
“While you, Willa, and Rad have had threats and incidents around you, three people, two of whom, as far as we knew, weren’t actively looking into the case of ten years ago, have been brutally attacked.”
Holt went very still as his eyes landed on the folder she was flipping through once again, and it started making sense where June was going with this and why they were in Lacey’s office.
“The difference matters,” June said as she stopped on a page and used her finger to scan it before making a small snort, her eyes met his. “A couple of months ago, Lucy told me that she didn’t know if Lacey was going to be back for the summer. I asked her why, and she said because Lacey was working on something big out of the country.” She moved behind Lacey’s desk and turned on the laptop. She typed in the password, then her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I should’ve seen this earlier. I thought it was fishy.”
“Are you going to let me in on this?” Holt moved closer to the front of the desk.
“You once told me there was no such thing as a coincidence,” June reminded him. “I’ve always kept that at the back of my mind.” She turned the file for him to see.
Holt looked down.
His brows rose.
It was a record of one of the Vet Without Borders missions from a few months earlier. It was from Mexico, and the exact town that one of the YouTube videos was from.
