Page 45 of Breathe Me In

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at her expression.

“Bradley.” Jacob waved. “How are you?”

“Well, sir, and how about you?”

“Good.” He squinted at the sky. “Gonna rain heavy here soon. You two working?”

“Yes, sir.”

Her father looked at Bree, who had her arms folded tightly around her. “Who pissed in your cereal, darlin’?”

She scoffed. “Your demon sidekick is determined to give me a heart attack.” I pressed my lips together when Kevin put his hooves up on the car window to look out at us. “Why can’t you just love our Finley and not waste it on that soon-to-be appetizer?”

“I’ll have you know Kevin’s won two county fairs and one state.” He reached over and patted the ugly thing. “Maybe if you gave him a chance, you’d see he’s not that bad.”

“Hang out with Kevin Bacon? Unless he can teach me some dance moves from Footloose, I’m not interested.” Bree shivered as the wind blew across us.

“Well, up to you. I’m glad to see you two together again. You best get inside now.” He looked up at the sky, and I saw Bree scowl at the pig.

The heavens opened, and the rain came down in a sudden sheet, and with the help of the wind, we were soaked. I grabbed Bree’s hand, and we raced inside.

Bree went to grab a towel as I peeled off my wet shirt and hung it on the back of a chair to dry. I put my shoulder holster on the side table. I’d learned to carry it with me at all times, as I was really never off duty. I bent down and began to build a fire.

“No,” I heard Bree exclaim behind me. I turned and caught her glare. “No way, I can’t do this again.”

“Do what?” I stepped back as the flame took off on the kindling.

“We need to find you a shirt.” She opened up a drawer and started to dig. “There is only so much a woman can take, and because the world hates me and decided that double-A batteries can’t be stocked here, I need to set boundaries.”

“Boundaries?”

“Yes, boundaries with you and”—she raked her gaze down my front—“all that.”

I joined her as she pulled out a tube top. “That’s funny.” I took it from her and tossed it back in the drawer. “Can we talk about Wes now?”

“Brad,” she groaned. “All right, fine.” She pulled back the curtains to expose her giant whiteboard. She had put up the photos of both victims, Shelly and Maggie, and had notes beneath them.

“Someone’s been busy.” I went over to examine her work, as she had done a lot since the last time I’d seen it. “And Wes?” I plucked one of the markers off the ledge and added a few more things I knew about the case.

“Right.” She pulled her phone from her purse. “Wes said”—she swiped the screen a few times—“that the drug found in both victims was confirmed to be butterfly root moss.”

“Okay, we knew that already, but we don’t know how much or how deadly.”

She nodded. “Right, and he said there was four milligrams in each victim. It’s as potent as fentanyl.” She glanced at me. “You don’t need more than a few grains of fentanyl to take a person out, so it’s like major overkill.”

“Interesting.” I let my head go with it.

“I agree, and Wes said that they found traces of it in their noses, throats, and lungs.”

“They’re inhaling it, not ingesting it.” I studied the girls’ photos and internally played out what I thought had happened.

“Seems that way.” Bree squinted at her phone. “Wes said that, given the amount in their systems, the girls had only seconds before they felt the effects and minutes before they died.”

“Okay, so he’s comparing it to fentanyl, which is a hundred times stronger than morphine and fifty times stronger than heroin,” I thought out loud. “If these women are being blasted with that much butterfly root moss, he made it a quick death.”

She scoffed. “How big of him.”

“Mm-hmm.” I added Wes’s findings to the board and stood back, letting it all sink in. “But what this gives us is a time between an inhale and death.” She turned on her TV. I saw it was connected to her laptop. “Nice setup.” I smiled. “Can you bring up the footage? Maybe we can start to eliminate those from outside those two minutes.”