Contempt cut through his voice for a second, a sour flick on the end of his sentence. The table jolted slightly as Grayson nudged him with a knee. Parker stopped and looked down at his hands.
“I just wanted to help,” he said. “And I didn’t see the harm. Mr. Macroy lets people use the house sometimes when he’s not there. To learn lines or clear their head.”
Marlow carefully didn’t look behind him at the long glass mirror. He couldn’t imagine that Cade was best pleased with that bit of information.
“So why break in?”
Parker tried to do something with his hands and was pulled up short. He laid them both flat on the table and stared at them.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “All I knew was Haley had gotten into trouble again and… and if she’d left anything that implicated me, I could lose my job. I figured you were Night Shift, so there was no way you’d be up there until after the moon waned. The plan was to get in, clean up, and get out.”
It wasn’t a bad plan. There was a chance that O’Hara would have sent up a detective on days, but at this time of the month, it wasn’t likely. Most of the force was too busy dealing with the aftermath of the previous night—towing cars, settling disputes with neighbors, processing anyone hauled in and Crated—before the next full moon clocked them off. If Marlow hadn’t been willing to cut his downtime short, Parker could have been in and out without anyone the wiser.
“What we call that,” Marlow said, “is getting rid of the evidence.”
Parker shook his head. “No. I mean, yeah. I wanted to cover my tracks, but only for letting her stay there.” He poked his finger against the table to underline his point. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know, okay? I thought she’d gone on a bender and crashed her car—again—or something like that. Not that she was, you know… dead.”
Grayson put his hand on Parker’s arm to quiet him.
“Misjudgment,” he said. “Maybe even misappropriation of his employer’s property, but not anything as extreme as murder.”
“And yet Haley was murdered,” O’Hara pointed out. “And your client has just admitted he was the only one who knew where she was.”
“Except,” Grayson said, “she died last night, according to what you shared with Ms. Farnham. My client is a wolf. As you can imagine, he was otherwise occupied. He’d booked a day package at a hunting lodge up in LA. He was killing boar, and his tags will confirm his location.”
Hard to argue with that.
O’Hara didn’t cede to Grayson immediately, but they all knew he’d have to. At least for now, on the murder charge. After a brief back-and-forth, Parker was charged with assault on an officer, since Macroy’s office had refused to press charges for the breaking and entering.
It wasn’t nothing, but…
“Farnham really went to bat for that boy,” Marlow remarked as they stood in the corridor and watched Parker limp away. “I wonder why.”
“Doesn’t matter,” O’Hara said. “He couldn’t have killed her, so he’s a dead end. Move on.”
“To what?” Cade asked. He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. “Whatever happened to Haley didn’t happen at the Reserve. Some overworked Night Shift porter put ‘Reserve’ down on the paperwork because they found the card on her. No mystery. No conspiracy. No problem.”
“She’s still dead,” Marlow said.
Cade lookedalmostsorry for a second. Then he shrugged, a dismissive twitch of his shoulders.
“That would be your problem,” he said, “not mine. Captain O’Hara, I’ve been more than cooperative—”
“I’d like one more look around,” Marlow said before the captain could cave again. “Tomorrow. I’ve got… a feeling we could have missed something. We were interrupted.”
There was a pause. Marlow felt a twinge of guilt at the back of his skull as he wondered if Cade’s maybe-flirtation was why it wasn’t an immediate no.
“Noon,” Cade said at last. He leveled a finger at Marlow. “It’s your last freebie. You want past my men again, get richer. I’d suggest a new job.”
“I could marry well,” Marlow said. “Either way works.”
Cade gave him a hot look out of bottle-amber eyes. It made Marlow’s mouth go dry, even though it took him a second to catch up with what he might have suggested. Once he caught on, it seemed rude to blurt “Not you!” so Marlow held his tongue.
Sometimes you had to settle for the win and stop chasing the loss.
“I didn’t take you for a gold digger. Good to know.” Cade brushed at the stain on his sleeve and then checked the time. “I better go. If I see you later, it won’t be personal.”
He turned without any of the expected niceties and stalked away. Marlow had to admit, as he watched him go, that he gave good stalk. It was loose, with long legs and the cocky swing of his hips. The walk of someone who knew people liked to see him leave for two good reasons.
