“Landlines,” Kinsley finally said once the shooting pain in her mouth had faded. She pulled the conversation back to the Bell case. “I don’t recall seeing any phone records in the original case files.”
“I doubt you’d be able to get your hands on them now,” Owen said as he reached for his bowl. He stuck his spoon upright in the ice cream, preparing to carry it over to the table where the last remaining slice of pie waited in its box. “Those phone companies folded long ago, and I doubt the records were stored anywhere after the accounts were closed.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Kinsley leaned past Owen to drop her spoon in the sink, then reached for her phone, keeping it plugged in while she opened her messages. “Go grabthat last slice before Dylan gets to it. Or before your ice cream melts.”
Owen didn’t hesitate to return to the table, and she barely registered his departure as she composed a quick message to Toby. She instructed him to double-check the original case report for any phone records she might have overlooked, and if none had been included, to find out whether the records might still exist in storage somewhere or had been digitized into an archive by the phone company’s successor. It was a long shot, but long shots were all she had on the technology front for a case this old.
While she waited for a reply, she lifted her gaze from the phone and found Noah staring in her direction from the table. Their gazes met briefly. Then he looked away, returning to his conversation with Emily, his wife, who was seated beside him with her hand resting casually on his forearm.
Kinsley studied the two of them for a moment, her mind doing what it always did, which was the thing she wished it wouldn’t. Noah and Emily were on the same data plan. Shared data plans meant shared location services. It meant that Emily could, if she wanted to, pull up her husband’s location history.
Had Noah been gone long enough that night to make Emily suspicious?
The drive to Terrapin Lake, the sinking of the vehicle, and the drive back to Kinsley’s car had taken hours.
Had she checked his location?
Emily had never given any indication that she was aware of what had happened. But then again, neither had Kinsley. Emily was warm, steady, the kind of woman who held a family together without drawing attention to the effort, and Kinsley had always admired her for it. But admiration didn’t eliminate the possibility that Emily knew more than she was letting on.
Kinsley forced herself to think it through rationally. Emily had neither the motive nor the means to remove evidence from Terrapin Lake. She wouldn’t be the one sending notes that carried the weight of someone who had witnessed or discovered something firsthand.
And yet Kinsley couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that she had made a mistake that night. Not a single catastrophic error, but a constellation of small oversights that someone with patience and access could eventually piece together into something devastating.
One mistake.
That was all it would take to unravel everything she’d built and everything she was trying to protect. And sitting here in her parents’ kitchen, surrounded by the people she loved most in the world, Kinsley understood there was a very real chance that if that moment came, it wouldn’t just be her freedom at stake.
It would be Noah’s, too.
20
Shane Levick
July
Friday, 7:54 am
Shane rolled down the driver’s side window just enough to allow the humid air to infiltrate the unmarked cruiser. The sour, pungent odor of Sam’s egg sandwich had intensified in the confined space over the past ten minutes, turning his stomach more with each passing bite. Despite the persistent drizzle that occasionally found its way through the crack and landed on his forearm, the alternative seemed far preferable to sitting in a sealed car with whatever combination of onion and processed cheese Sam had requested for breakfast.
“Can you eat any faster?” Shane asked, unable to mask the irritation in his voice. He kept his attention on the front entrance of a small boutique across the street, a women’s clothing store that wouldn’t open for another six minutes. “That smell is killing me.”
He took a sip of his convenience store coffee for a brief reprieve, but he only ended up grimacing at the bitter taste andthe way the hot liquid aggravated the heartburn that had been smoldering behind his ribs since before dawn.
“Then you should’ve let me eat at the station,” Sam muttered around a mouthful of food. He almost certainly had crumbs in his mustache, which was reason enough for Shane not to glance his way. “Not my fault you were in such a hurry to leave.”
Shane jostled his knee against the steering column to expend some of the nervous energy that had been building since they’d pulled out of the parking lot. He’d caught sight of Kinsley’s Jeep pulling into the station just as they were heading out, and he’d pressed the accelerator with more urgency than the situation warranted. He couldn’t stomach the sight of her right now. Couldn’t trust himself to keep his expression neutral if their paths crossed in a hallway or a stairwell, couldn’t guarantee that the anger wouldn’t surface in a way that invited questions he wasn’t prepared to answer.
A week had passed since he’d discovered what Kinsley had done. Seven days of avoiding her, of timing his coffee breaks and witness interviews to ensure their paths wouldn’t cross. He’d declined drinks at the pub across the street from the station in case she stopped in after work. He’d rearranged his desk schedule so that he arrived early and left through the side entrance, reducing the overlap between their hours to the narrowest possible window. Seven days and nights of the burning sensation behind his ribs that no amount of antacids could touch.
He reached up instinctively and rubbed at his chest, pressing his knuckles against the spot where the discomfort radiated outward. At this rate, he was going to develop an ulcer before the month was out.
“Antacids are in the glove compartment,” Sam said between bites. “Maybe you should see a doctor, though. My brother-in-law had something similar. Turned out to be his gallbladder.”
“It’s nothing,” Shane replied, dropping his hand back to the steering wheel. “Just need to lay off the spicy food.”
The rain picked up slightly, creating a rhythmic patter against the roof of the cruiser. Drops collected on the windshield, distorting their view of the street into a watercolor blur. Shane kept the engine idling to prevent the windows from fogging, the steady hum blending with the sound of falling rain and Sam’s methodical chewing. The cramped space seemed even smaller with Sam’s large frame occupying the passenger seat, his knees nearly touching the dashboard despite having pushed the seat back as far as it would go.
“Decades on the job, and I still hate eating inside cars,” Sam muttered, finally wadding up the grease-stained wrapper and tossing it into the back seat. “Especially on days like this. Tell me again why you were in such a hurry this morning?”
