OVER YOUR GRAVE

Hale Hastings Mystery Thriller

Book 2

ALEX SIGMORE

ASH MERCER

Dark Woods Press

OVER YOUR GRAVE: HALE HASTINGS MYSTERY THRILLER BOOK 2

Copyright © 2026 by Alex Sigmore & Ash Mercer

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imaginations and are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

1st Edition

Print ISBN 978-1-971270-32-6

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Also Available

About the Authors

Prologue

The air was stale, as if there were too many bodies crammed into too small a room and not enough circulation to keep the musty smell of sleeping people at bay. She’d grown accustomed to stagnant air after spending more nights than she could count in packed hostels and overcrowded shelters. Places where too many bodies shared too little oxygen, and windows stayed sealed to keep out the cold.

She catalogued it lazily, the way she always did as she woke up. That was one of the benefits of living her life the way she did. Sure, sometimes she woke up in strange places, but she didn’t have anywhere to be or anyone to check in with. There was no overbearing husband demanding to know why she hadn’t texted him back fast enough or failed to answer when he called without warning.

She was free to simply lay there for as long as she pleased and never feel the rising panic of someone else’s expectations pressing in around her.

There were still reasons to get moving each day. Sometimes it was something simple, like needing the restroom or feeling hungry. Other times it was the annoyance of a cop or social worker telling her it was time to move along.

Right now, it was the uncomfortable slab of wood she called a bed and the tingle running through her arm where it was pinned beneath her, pinching a nerve. She kept her eyes closed even as she shifted around, not ready to face the day quite yet.

Nerve endings sparked up and down her forearm as her elbow hit against a wall. Frustrated and still groggy from sleep, she shifted around and grunted as she managed to free her arm without hitting it against the wall again.

Finally, she ran a hand over her face and cracked one eye open.

No ceiling that emerged from the shadows above her, no faint outline of a room took shape around her. Instead, the darkness pressed in like a thick blanket that blocked out all light.

She’d woken up in worse places than this; under bridges with traffic screaming overhead, on church steps with her spine stiff from the rough edges of the stone. On couches that smelled like old beer and someone else’s sweat.

Darkness wasn’t an unfamiliar experience. In fact, there was something comforting about it. It meant the world around her was still asleep and she didn’t have to get up and decide where she was going next.

Not yet, at least.

She let her eyes flutter shut again as the weight of exhaustion lured her back towards sleep and she groaned as she fought it. Whatever she had taken last night had left her sluggish and unable to remember where she was or how she had gotten there.

She remembered walking along the side of the highway, headlights coming towards her. Had the car stopped? She didn’t think so. The lights of a city in the distance came to mind. She had been so tired of walking by the time she hit the outskirts. Maybe she had found a dark spot to hide away in while she slept off the exhaustion or maybe she simply hadn’t slept long enough for daylight to break through.

That would explain why she still felt so tired, at least.

She shifted, trying to roll onto her side without hitting against the wall to her left, only for her shoulder to strike something solid above her instead. Frowning, she lifted her hand and her knuckles hit the same surface, much closer to her face than she expected.

Wood, her brain supplied as the dull knocking sound reached her ears. She spread her fingers on the surface above her, palm flat, and pushed. The wood above remained unmoved, a solid barrier. She ran her hand along the surface, trying to make sense of where she was, only to find that the wood continued, connecting to another solid wall on her right.

Her pulse kicked hard, a sudden animal rhythm in her chest as a thought at the back of her mind attempted to surface. She couldn’t quite grasp it through the fog of sleep that still clung to her. She drew in a frustrated breath that brought the smell of pine and damp earth with it, filtering through the stale quality of the air.

Had she crawled under a deck or hidden herself away in a lumber yard?

Her hips ached from staying in one spot too long, but there wasn’t much room to shift around and no immediate explanation for the situation she had gotten herself into. She struggled to pierce the haze that clouded her memories, to figure out how she had gotten herself stuck like this and how to get back out.

She was walking along the road at dusk, counting her cash and debating whether to stop for food or keep going while the light held, briefly distracted by the sting of a blister on her left heel.

After that, everything had gone dark.

She had taken no recreational substances that could explain her foggy thoughts and there had been no sudden impact to account for the gap in her memory. There was no reason for her to wake up to wooden walls hemming her in on all sides, leaving barely enough room for her to breathe.

She was backed into a corner she didn’t know how to get out of. Trapped, like an animal in a cage with no way out. Her blood raced through her body as her heart began hammering against her ribs. It felt like it might crack them open from the inside. Like it might try to escape without her.

“Help!” she called out, but the words scraped at her throat and echoed back at her, swallowed up by the thick slabs of pine. She banged on the wood above her with her knuckles, once, twice. The noise was muted and wouldn’t get anyone’s attention unless they were very close by. “Hey, help me!”

She pressed her hands along the sides again, fingers sliding over smooth boards, the grain catching slightly under her fingernails. She traced the length of the space down toward her feet, and then kicked, searching for any openings or weak points she could exploit.

There were none.

The wooden cage around her was well crafted, the corners all perfect right angles that left her boxed in on all sides. Her throat tightened and she dragged in another breath, fighting to slow her heart rate. Panic would only make things worse. She’d learned that long ago, in a different kind of trap.

One she’d run away from and never looked back.

Her chest tightened painfully, the air seeming too thin with every inhale. How long had she been in here before she woke up? How much air was left in this small space?

This coffin, her mind supplied, because it was obvious now that the space had been designed to hold exactly one body. Her body. This couldn’t be real—people didn’t just wake up buried alive. Not in this century. Not anymore.

There had to be a reasonable explanation, and soon enough she would hear footsteps approaching, muffled voices realizing their terrible error. Any second now, someone would lift the lid, laughing nervously about the mix-up and apologizing for the inconvenience.

As the seconds stretched into minutes, nothing changed. Silence stretched on, unbroken by footsteps or voices, each passing second confirming what she already knew—no one was coming for her. Not because she was unwanted or unloved but because she’d made a life out of not being tethered or traceable. She had no fixed address and no one waiting for her calls. Nobody who would be surprised if she failed to appear tomorrow, the next day, or even the day after that.

Freedom, she had always thought, was worth that trade.

She was a self-sufficient kind of woman who refused to sit by and do nothing, so she pushed at the wood above her again, harder this time. Her shoulders burned as she strained with the effort, but it didn’t budge at all. She pounded it with the side of her fist over and over again until pain shot up her arm and her vision swam.

Am I already dead? she thought to herself, hysterically. Is this what everyone who is dead experiences?

She shuddered at the idea that she might spend the rest of eternity in this darkness with nothing but her own mind to keep her company. She didn’t feel dead.

Her breathing became uneven and her heart rate increased as the thought of being trapped there forever was taken over by the realization that she wouldn’t be.

If this was death, it wouldn’t matter how thin the air was because she wouldn’t need to breathe. And she did need it, desperately. She sucked in another lungful of pine-scented air and her chest burned with the certainty that she was alive—for now.

The reality of dying alone in this box truly hit her then, and she screamed, scratching at the wood in pure panic. The sound tore out of her, leaving her throat just as raw as her fingertips. Her scream ricocheted off the wooden walls, a feral sound that clawed against the coffin’s interior, only to bounce back to her ears as a pathetic echo, muffled by the earth above.

“Please,” she screamed, a desperate plea that she feared no one else could hear. “Help!”

Silence collapsed around her as her scream evolved into breathless gasps and helpless sobs.

When the air was too thin for her to think straight and her voice too raw to make a difference, she went silent. She continued to cry, tears sliding back into her hair and her body slick with cold sweat. Her hands curled against her chest. There were slivers under her nails from clawing desperately at the lid of the coffin. She dug her fingertips into the fabric of her shirt and welcomed the pain.

It was a reminder that—for now—she was still alive.

And finally, as darkness swam at the edges of her vision, the truth settled over her like the six feet of earth she knew must be above her. This pine box was meant to be her final resting place, and her carefully cultivated solitude had become her perfect tomb.

Chapter One

You’re safe.

I repeated those words over and over again in my head like a mantra, trying to convince myself that it was true. And I was safe, as much as one could be when they were a fugitive from the FBI, wanted for murder they hadn’t committed, and pretending to be someone else three thousand miles from the streets and people I once called home.

Still, no matter how much I reminded myself that those words were true, I could not bring myself to fall asleep.

I’d heard Kenna quietly slip up the stairs and past my door a few hours ago, after the fireworks had petered out and the last of the guests from the Fourth of July barbecue were headed home. She was probably fast asleep and certainly unaware of the simmering panic that continued to plague me throughout the night.

Beside me, Rogue was curled up against my hip and taking up more than half the bed. The Cane Corso was a warm and welcome weight, his back rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm. If anyone was planning to sneak up on me or take me by surprise, he would be awake and alert at a moment’s notice. 

My own personal security system.

It wasn’t quite morning yet—not really—but it was closer to dawn than midnight at this point. The sky outside my window was made up of a thin, gray light that suggested the sun would be coming up soon enough.

And instead of getting a proper night’s sleep, I laid there motionless on the queen-sized bed in my new room at Cavanaugh Cottage, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the house around me. Wood constricting, the distant tick of a water heater, something skittering outside that might have been a raccoon or a branch against a window. Or it could have been nothing but my imagination, heightened and on alert for any danger that might approach. I tapped the middle finger of my left hand against the mattress, irritated that I couldn’t simply will myself into unconsciousness.

You’re safe, I told myself again, and while I knew it was true I still didn’t feel it. I’d been stuck in this heightened state of awareness since some time just after midnight; ever since I’d pulled a packet of photos out of the gift basket that had arrived on my doorstep last Wednesday night.

I hadn’t thought the basket was meant for me, the recipient addressed as My Sunshine and signed off with Your Storm.

I didn’t have that kind of relationship with anybody, and yet the photos I had found inside suggested an intimacy that made my skin crawl.

The first time I saw them, I’d gone through the stack of images at a rapid pace, horror dawning on me as each one revealed a version of myself from the past month. And after the initial shock, I had gone through them a second time, slowly examining them the way I had been trained to. Not letting the adrenaline and fear run ahead of the facts.

Hours later I still held them in my hands, pressed against my chest, like if I let them go then the evidence would disappear. I didn’t need to look at them anymore, though. I had every one of them memorized. 

They revealed not only my movements over the past month and a half, but the photographer’s vantage points—sometimes across streets, sometimes through windows—always with me centered in frame. The images had been arranged chronologically, creating a visual timeline of my life here. Someone wasn’t just watching me; they were documenting me, crafting a narrative with their lens. 

In the first photo, Trick Cavanaugh and I were standing outside Mug+Shots while we discussed my schedule for the week. The glow of the open sign was reflecting off my skin, my hair freshly dyed brown and chopped to shoulder length with a pair of scissors.

I had given myself that makeover in a truck stop bathroom in Virginia, and in cutting off my hair I had also severed ties with my old life, changing my name and appearance so strangers wouldn’t connect my current face to the one the FBI had broadcast across every news network in the country.

Even though I knew from years of study that most people didn’t pay enough attention to the news to tell that the brunette in front of them was the same as the strawberry blonde on the TV screen, I still expected someone to look up one day and to see the dawning realization in their eyes as they recognized me for who I was.

The second photo had been taken through the window of Backporch Coffee Rosters, capturing Kenna and me at the counter. Her eyes were narrowed in my direction, her stance slightly angled away from me—this was during those first tense days when she’d watch my every move, certain I was some Fed looking to build a case against her brother’s less-than-legal document business. In her defense, I had foolishly nearly used my real name for my coffee order, still not used to being Hale Hastings at the time.

Her instincts had warned her I was lying about who I was, she simply hadn’t pinpointed the right reason for that suspicion to exist.

The next photo showed me running along highway 97 in shorts and a tank top, my hair pulled into a ponytail. I was looking to the right, towards where I knew that a homeless man frequently camped out with a rotation of several rescue dogs.

Then there were the photos I couldn’t make sense of. One so close-up that it was clear the photographer had to have zoomed in, and another that was nothing but my shoulder from behind, my dark hair the same color as the mole that I frequently forgot was there.

There was an absence of certain photos that caught my attention as well. These photographs and the gift basket they had been delivered in arrived at my doorstep the previous Wednesday, which meant there was nothing to show for the eventful week I’d had since then. At least, not in the stack of photos I currently held. I could easily imagine my unwanted photographer developing other images in the meantime.

I closed my eyes and the bright white of the Red Cross blood drive tent in Drake Park came to mind, Rogue laid out in the grass as I stood with my back to the imaginary camera. In front of me would be Gracie Shepherd, her daughter Hadley Shepherd and Dr. Milo Lombardi coming out of the tent behind her.

Like a snapshot of a moment, the photographer could have captured a pivotal moment in the cold case I managed to solve only four days later. Seven years ago, Gracie Shepherd’s cousin Lexi Tate had been killed by Milo Lombardi, and Rogue had been there to witness it. It was Rogue who had led me to Lexi’s remains, and it was Hadley who Milo had attempted to kidnap in a desperate bid to use her Rh-null blood to keep his sister from dying of some complex bone marrow disease.

There were no photos to show for any of that part of my week, however.

Instead, there were more close-up images of my face and others where the background was indecipherable and didn’t correspond to any specific memory. The last one was of Rogue and me standing outside my studio, only minutes after I had brought him home for the first time. My hack-job of a haircut was smoothed into something softer, and my gaze was hardened as I searched for signs that I had been followed or found out. Watching for even a hint that the FBI had figured out where I was hiding or that Kenna had returned her Rivian to the spot across the street where she had taken to keeping a close eye on me, convinced I was a danger to her brother and his illegal activities.

But Kenna hadn’t been there and neither had the FBI. Instead, despite all my caution, vigilance, and training, I never once caught sight of the person who had been watching me. They were a ghost, and it seemed that I was the lucky one they had chosen to haunt.

I mentally ran through the list of reasons I was safe again, like I had somehow overlooked a threat to my safety and if I could only think of it then I could shore up the weak points in my security and finally feel safe enough to get some sleep.

Both the bedroom window and the door remained locked. The unfamiliar sounds of the cottage were natural, and they meant that I was no longer lying vulnerable in my studio apartment. Cavanaugh Cottage had a full-blown alarm system, and the stairs to reach the second floor were hidden behind a secret passage.

According to Kenna there were only a handful of trusted individuals who knew how to access them behind the Murphy bookshelf in the library.

The cottage itself sat back from the main road, down a long drive and half-hidden by a copse of trees. If the FBI figured out where I was, they would arrive with a warrant, and their presence would be loud and official. Anyone else attempting to reach me would have to push through multiple layers of security before they could even get close.

In either case, Rogue would alert me to their presence, and I would see it coming from a mile away.

Still, knowing all of that was true did nothing to calm my nerves and I could not bring myself to fall asleep. Instead, I stared at the ceiling and forced myself to slow my breathing. I drew a steady breath in through my nose and released it slowly through my mouth.

You’ve assessed the threat. You don’t need to catastrophize. Relax, Hale. You’re safe.

There were several people who could have done this, including Kenna who had spent days staking me out, my landlord who had repeatedly invaded my privacy, Detective Shepherd whose father served as an FBI ASAC in New York, and his friend Mason Campbell who had conveniently found my dog wandering along the highway after my landlord accidentally let him out.

Yet for every potential suspect I named, I could also find a reason to rule them out.

Kenna had warmed to me, had trusted me enough to show me how to access the second floor and had invited me to move in permanently. If she had left the gift basket and the photos, she would have mentioned them when we moved my belongings from the first-floor guest bedroom to where I was now.

Since she appeared in one of the photos she couldn’t have taken it, and by that same logic her twin brother Trick couldn’t be responsible either, not unless they were working with an accomplice.

My landlord was a likely suspect for the envelope of photos, but it didn’t make sense that he would leave me the gift basket that I’d found them in. He enjoyed the power of going into people’s apartments, using their things, and eating their food. He didn’t strike me as the kind of person to feel guilty enough to replace the things he had taken. 

I didn’t know Dt. Lachlan Shepherd well, but from what I could tell he was a decent detective and a dedicated father. If he knew or suspected anything about me worth documenting, he wouldn’t bother with round-about threats. He would simply investigate me without tipping me off, and once he realized who I was he would tell his father. Then, I would be behind bars before I even knew what had happened.

As for Mason Campbell, I found that I couldn’t quite make sense of him. He was a friend of the Shepherds, who bantered over the remnants of his breakfast at the cafe, rescued my dog from a dangerous situation, and then proceeded to drunkenly flirt with me at the Fourth of July barbecue the night before. He seemed, for all intents and purposes, like a good guy who happened to have bad timing.

But my guard had been up around him from the start, and if he had been the one to take these photos I felt like I would have noticed him lurking.

Then again, I thought I would have noticed someone watching me regardless of who they were.

When I considered all the possibilities, it seemed that any of them could theoretically be responsible, but I was only listing the people I could think of, the ones I’d spoken to in the past week. There was a strong chance that none of them were my admirer. Most stalkers preferred to keep their distance and communicate through unsettling gifts like these, after all.

Whoever was behind it, they appeared to understand my routines far too well. They’d taken their time to gather pivotal moments instead of just images, curating a selection with a level of variety that was concerning. But knowing my routines and the angles to use to stay out of my line of sight didn’t necessarily translate to knowing where I was right this second.

That thought settled me better than anything else had so far, enough to push the panic down to a low simmer in the back of my mind. I turned over on my side, curled around Rogue, and flipped through the stack of photos once more. I went even slower this time, taking in the angles, the distance, the lighting. 

From what I could see they had all been taken in public spaces, the photographer blending into the background of my life. It could have been a passerby or a customer at Mug+Shots, someone I had made eye contact with and politely smiled at before dismissing them as harmless while I focused on the more obvious dangers in my life.

There was another key detail that made itself obvious to me as I worked my way through the images once more. They all depicted a woman with dark hair rather than the strawberry blonde I had spent my entire life accustomed to before moving to Bend. That meant that the photographer didn’t know about my past or that I was Avery McHale, the FBI’s most wanted. 

Instead, they only knew Hale Hastings, comically bad bartender and mediocre waitress.

I took a deep, calming breath at that realization. Whoever had taken these photographs was a serious threat to my safety and my privacy, but they weren’t an emergency. Not yet. I had time to figure this out, and the skills to track them down. But I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to catch them following me if I was too exhausted to think straight. 

Setting the stack of photos on the bedside table next to my charging phone, I closed my eyes, willing myself to fall asleep for a few hours and reminding myself once more that I was safe enough to do so.

For now.

Chapter Two

I came into the cottage from the back yard just after nine a.m. the following morning.

Sunlight slanted through the sliding glass door that was wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows, catching on the spines of the books lining the shelves to my right. The electric fireplace was dark, its glass reflecting the room back at itself. A throw blanket had been folded with care over the arm of the couch and there was a lit candle sitting on the coffee table.

I had stumbled through feeding Rogue this morning before taking him out to do his business, too drowsy to notice the faint hint of something citrusy and antiseptic in the air until now. But as I examined the room again, I realized there were no traces of the barbecue from last night anywhere to be seen.

The morning air followed me into the cottage, already on the wrong side of warm. Rogue trotted ahead of me, nails clicking against the kitchen tile as he veered toward his bowl, drank noisily, and then nosed at his empty food dish before turning to look at me with big pleading brown eyes.

I gave him a stern look in return.

Kenna stood at the open concept kitchen counter, measuring coffee grounds into a filter. She was barefoot, wearing soft gray leggings and a black tank top, her hair pulled back into a messy bun at the top of her head. There was a mostly empty water bottle on the counter that made me realize she had to have been up for a while if she had already cleaned up after the party and gone for a morning run.

“Morning,” she said, without looking over at me. “Coffee?”

“God, yes,” I replied, trying to stifle a yawn. She glanced over, taking in my rumpled pajamas and half-closed eyes before snorting and turning back to the coffee machine.

“Yeah, you look like you need it,” she said, pouring more water into the reservoir. 

“Rude,” I protested, though there wasn’t much heat in my reply and no doubt in my mind that she was right. My lack of a good night’s sleep wasn’t something novel, though, and I’d functioned off far less in the past. At my response she glanced back at me again and I could see the flicker of apprehension in her eyes. I made a silly face at her to show that I wasn’t actually offended, and that shadow of worry vanished as she made a silly face right back.

Although I knew it would take time for us to fully settle into life as roommates, the easy rhythm of this exchange felt like a promising beginning. Like what it might have felt like to grow up with a sister instead of being an only child.

“He good?” Kenna asked, nodding towards the dog who was still stubbornly staring at me, his whole body thrumming with expectation.

“He’s convinced he’s owed a second breakfast,” I replied, sitting at the kitchen island and resting my forehead on the cool countertop. The whole room was several degrees cooler than it was outside and the air conditioning felt good after standing out there waiting for Rogue to decide he was finished.

Kenna huffed quietly. “Bold, considering his contribution to the household.”

I kept my head lowered and was relieved that Kenna couldn’t see the way my lips pressed together at the thought of not contributing enough to the household. We hadn’t talked about what I owed her for the room each month, but with the stack of photos burning a hole in my back pocket, I’d already decided to stay here as long as I could.

I doubted I would find any place nicer or safer, no matter what she ended up charging me. And maybe I wouldn’t have to pick up extra shifts at Mug+Shots to afford it if we could come to an agreement around her suggestion that we team up to work cold cases.

The coffee maker gurgled to life, and I listened as Kenna took a few steps before the hinge of a cupboard squeaked. The clink of two ceramic mugs on marble reached me, and I cracked one eye open in time to watch her slide one across the island countertop towards me. I pushed myself upright again, the smell of brewing coffee drawing life back into my weary soul.

“I think we should talk,” I said before I could overthink it.

“Uh oh, nothing good ever comes from that phrase.” Kenna glanced over at me from where she was leaning against the counter, one eyebrow lifting. “You’re not trying to move out already, are you?”

“No,” I replied. “Unless⁠—?” 

“Let’s not do this little miscommunication dance,” she said, fully turning around and gripping the counter behind her with both hands as she leaned back, pinning me with a stern expression. “If I wanted you out, I would tell you. And I’m not telling you that, because it isn’t true.”

“But you barely know me,” I pointed out, furrowing my eyebrows.

“I know enough,” she replied. “I know that you risked your own safety to protect Hadley, and that without you we may never have figured out what happened to Lexi. I know that you couldn’t bear to leave Rogue in a shelter for even a single night before you decided to foster him despite having a complicated past. You’re a bleeding heart, Hale, and a kindred spirit. That’s more than enough to be getting on with, don’t you think?”

I stared at her, not sure what to say. I felt like all my layers had been peeled back and everything that was left was raw and vulnerable. Too close to the truth to be safe.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice going soft. The sound of the coffee pouring into the carafe behind her began to slow but I still almost didn’t hear her over it.

“What are you sorry for?” I asked, brows furrowed in confusion. 

“I’ve been told I can be a little too direct,” Kenna replied, turning to pull the carafe from the machine and then turning back around to face me. “Most people don’t like that.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not most people,” I told her, holding my empty mug out for her to fill. She did, and I slipped off the stool to investigate the fridge. There were no flavored creamers to be found there, only plain half & half, which was something we would have to fix. 

“Good thing,” Kenna agreed, and as I turned back to the kitchen island, I found that she had set out a bottle of syrup. There was no brand name on the bottle, no ingredient list. Just a vinyl label that simply said vanilla on the outside in a looping, elegant black font. She looked more relaxed as she poured a little of the syrup into her coffee with a measuring spoon.

“What I was going to say is that I think we should talk about your P.I. assistant proposal,” I continued as I added half & half to my coffee before Kenna and I traded, her fingers wrapping around the carton even as she slid the bottle of syrup over to me. It felt like a familiar dance, one I had done with half a dozen roommates in the past, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Kenna had taken in other people. People like me, who were down on their luck. I couldn’t imagine she had ever needed to share space with someone out of financial necessity. “I like the idea of working on cases with you, but I have a few questions before I agree to anything.”

“Good,” she said as I poured the vanilla syrup into my coffee. “If you had said yes immediately, I would’ve needed to check you for a concussion.”

“Ha ha.” I pretended to glare at her, and she threw a cheeky smile right back at me.

“Go on, ask your questions,” she said as she stirred her coffee, took a sip, and then added another tablespoon of half & half. I idly wondered what the point of using a measuring spoon was if she didn’t know exactly how many it would take to get her coffee the way she liked it but didn’t feel comfortable pointing that out to her just now.

“I agree that I should keep my bar tending job,” I told her instead. Kenna nodded immediately but didn’t appear to have anything to add so I pressed on. “However, juggling two full time jobs isn’t something I’m interested in. If I do work cases with you, I can’t commit to them the same way I would if⁠—”

I hesitated, refusing to meet her gaze as I stopped myself from saying the rest.

If I were still FBI.

Kenna didn’t push. She didn’t even look at me right away. She took another sip of her coffee instead and grimaced slightly.

“—if your life looked different,” she finally said as she reached for more syrup. I nodded, pushing past the discomfort of someone else even knowing enough about me to accurately finish that sentence. 

Kenna’s understanding of my situation was the closest anyone had come to knowing the truth aside from Trick and Noah, but the thin layer of misdirection about what I was running from put a barrier between us that would keep us both safe. She could rightly claim plausible deniability if the FBI ever discovered me here and I was safe in the knowledge that Kenna wouldn’t be the one to tip them off about where I was. That didn’t mean it felt right to tiptoe around the truth, and I had to push past the discomfort to focus on what actually mattered in this moment.

“This can’t be a nine-to-five thing,” I said. “I can’t chase deadlines or take on responsibilities that put me on the clock.”

“No deadlines,” Kenna echoed, like she was adding it to a mental list and checking it off all at the same time. “That shouldn’t be a problem as long as we restrict ourselves to only cold cases. I mean, it’s not like the dead are going anywhere.”

That surprised a laugh out of me. She shot me a pleased look, like she considered that a personal victory.

“Just the cold cases then,” I agreed. “Another thing, I think it might be better if you’re the one who talks to the cops when we do find something. You already have those relationships, and they’re familiar with your work.”

“The Bend P.D. is like any other police department,” Kenna said, nodding along. “Most of the detectives hate working with private investigators but they aren’t stupid enough to ignore a good tip, and they know I’m thorough with my work. We shouldn’t have a problem there.”

“Good,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. It was sweet and creamy, with barely any of the bitterness of the coffee flavor remaining. Exactly the way I preferred it. This could work, I found myself thinking, my shoulders slowly relaxing from the tension that had built up there over the course of too many major life changes being thrown at me without a moment to breathe between them.

“I’ll need your bank account information, of course.” Kenna added, and I promptly choked on my coffee, coughing as it went down the wrong pipe.

“You—what?” I said when I could breathe properly again, blinking at her.

Kenna sent me a look that told me I was behaving strangely enough for her to notice and that she was going to chalk it up to the category of things we couldn’t properly talk about and ignore it for now.

I also got the sense that despite what she said about trusting me and knowing enough about me that she was subconsciously cataloging everything she noticed about me that didn’t quite add up. If I wasn’t careful then eventually she would start to do the math and end up arriving at an answer she didn’t like.

“I plan to pay you, of course” she said, setting her mug down with a decisive clink. My mind instantly raced through a dozen different ways to refuse the money without raising suspicion. There was a reason Trick paid me under the table and it mostly had to do with a lack of social security number that I could use to open a bank account or file a W-9 without it leading the FBI right to my front door. “I don’t believe in unpaid labor, and I definitely don’t believe in pretending work isn’t work just because it’s interesting.”

“The idea of being paid for this makes me uncomfortable,” I said, leaning back a little as I gauged just how determined she was to legitimize this partnership. “We’ve already agreed that I’m not going to be beholden to any timelines, but if we involve money I’m going to feel like I have to produce results. To earn my way.”

“So what, you just want to work for free?” Kenna asked, furrowing her brows like she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting that. I tilted my head as I realized that’s exactly what I was saying.

“This isn’t about the money for me,” I told her, hoping that would be enough. “Besides, cold cases aren’t lucrative. Chances are that the cases we do end up solving won’t be the ones offering any rewards.”

“That’s not a problem,” Kenna said. “Never mind the fact that I have enough to pay you myself. I’ve also been toying with the idea that what we’re doing is essentially charity. And once word gets out in my circles that there’s a new, interesting charity to donate to I expect we’ll have plenty of cash flow to work with.”

“If we’re turning this into a charity then I definitely don’t want to be paid,” I replied. I didn’t know the first thing about running a charity, but Kenna looked both confident and excited about the idea, and as long as it meant I was able to solve cases without the complications of getting a job to do so, I was happy to let her run with it.

“Okay.” Kenna said the word slowly, like she wasn’t sure what to do with me now that I’d turned down her money. Like no one had ever refused to take money from her before. “Well in order to create an official charity we need a board of directors. Three people in charge of making sure the charity’s vision remains aligned. And board members are unpaid volunteers.”

“That sounds perfect. Do you need anything special from me to make that happen?” I asked. As Kenna shook her head, I felt a quiet surge of relief that I had managed to avoid explaining the real reason I couldn’t provide any bank account information.

“To have a board of directors we need three people,” Kenna told me. “I have a few ideas about who would be the best fit, but all I need from you right now is a commitment to being on the board.”

“I’m committed,” I told her, and she gave me a pleased smile. “And now that that’s settled, we should probably figure out how much I should be paying you in rent.”

Regardless of her reassurances, I still felt as though I hadn’t done enough to truly earn my place in her home. Rent would balance the scales here a little, and ease even more of the tension I was holding in my shoulders.

She made a face. “See, now that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Why?” I asked, brows furrowed.

“Because you’re still going to work for Trick,” she replied. “So you would be paying me money that he paid you. I don’t want money that comes from my brother’s bar going straight into my pocket. Especially when I’m the twin who wasn’t disowned. That imbalance already exists and I don’t want to deepen it. You can contribute to communal purchases, but I’m not going to charge you rent.”

I searched her expression carefully, expecting to find some hidden condition she hadn’t voiced.

She clocked my hesitation and rolled her eyes. “You keep waiting for me to say unless.”

“Can you blame me?” I shrugged. “I haven’t really caught a break in a while and this whole situation seems a little too good to be true.”

“I get that,” she conceded. Then, softer, “But I meant what I said earlier. You living here is not contingent on you doing anything and I’m not going to kick you out if this little venture doesn’t work out.”

“Why?” I asked. “You’ve let me into your house, given me access to your secrets, and the only thing you really know about me is that I have a complicated and dangerous past. Why are you being so generous?”

“Because I can,” Kenna said. “The thing about being wealthy is that no matter how many charities you throw money at, it never feels like enough, but you keep doing it because there’s a void you’re trying to fill. That void only goes away when you start doing things that actually make a difference in your community and in the lives of the people around you. You made a difference when you rescued Hadley and I want to return the favor, if you’ll let me.”

After a brief pause to weigh the sincerity in her voice and the way her eyes went soft when she said Hadley’s name, I nodded in agreement. While she wasn’t saying it, and possibly didn’t even know it, it seemed that what I’d done by stopping Dr. Milo Lombardi had earned me a place here. As I realized that, the precarious and uncertain feeling in my chest settled into something hopeful. I belonged here, in this city, in this kitchen, in this life I was building for myself. I was meant to be here working cold cases with Kenna and cuddling with Rogue. This was my life now, and while it wasn’t what I had expected it was still better than anything I could have asked for.

“Then here’s what I can offer,” I said, “I bring my training, my instincts, and my time—when I have it. I don’t promise speed, and I don’t promise closure. Just an honest effort to solve the cases that no one else could.”

“And I’ll bring the administrative side,” Kenna said, “The public facing questions, tips to the police, and donations from high society types who want to look like they care about interesting issues.”

“And your experience as a P.I.,” I reminded her. “I’m not the only one here with investigative skills, and I know I work better with a sounding board. If that works for you?”

Kenna smiled, slow and genuine. “That absolutely works for me.”

We let the decision sit there for a moment, the quiet no longer holding the sharp edge of two people dancing around each other. Now, it was companionable, and it had a direction to go in. Rogue let out a dramatic sigh at our feet, as if offended that none of these negotiations involved him getting a second breakfast.

Kenna glanced down at him with a fond smile before she looked back up at me and lifted her mug slightly, quirking that one eyebrow again. “So. Partners?”

I raised mine in return. “Partners.”

“Excellent.” Kenna’s expression turned pensive for a moment before shifting to something decidedly mischievous as she set her mug down and pushed off from where she was leaning against the counter. “Come on then, Hastings, it’s time I showed you the company office.”

Chapter Three

I’d already gotten the memo from the lobby—all that sleek white flooring and those angular chairs that looked designed to make you leave quickly. Rich people and their aesthetics. The wooden door we stopped at was identical to every other one in the hallway, except for the frosted glass panel with “Cavanaugh Investigations” etched into it.

I should have known that Kenna Scott’s P.I. office wouldn’t be listed publicly, but I still felt a small professional embarrassment at missing it in my initial research. While she had been watching me, digging into my present in an attempt to get a glimpse at my past, I had returned the favor.

I knew that her parents, Rhys and Corrine Cavanaugh, were affluent members of the community who frequently donated to local and national charities. I knew that Kenna’s husband (ex-husband, according to Kenna) was currently spending all his time and attention improving the effects that tourism had on local recreation areas. I knew that Kenna had graduated from a private school in northern Oregon before attending college in Oxford, and that she had returned with a degree in business management only to throw herself into apprenticing as a private investigator. I knew that her mentor, Charles Kahele, had moved back to his home town of Hilo, Hawaii six months ago.

What I hadn’t known was that she ran her private investigation business out of a gleaming glass-fronted office on the fourth floor of an unremarkable building perfectly situated downtown.

Kenna fished out her keys, tapped a small black fob against the lock, and pushed the door open when it clicked in response. She gestured for me to enter first and I did, taking in the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the far wall. It was a nice day and sunlight filled the space, which looked like it had been staged for a photograph.

The furniture was minimal and deliberate—two chairs and a low glass table arranged near the windows for clients to sit at, several tall filing cabinets along the back wall as well as a whiteboard that was wiped clean. There wasn’t a single errant mark on it to assure me it had recently been used. The desk took up a large portion of the room, oriented to face the windows with only a little space between the desk and the wall for someone to sit in the luxurious-looking office chair.

The space was immaculate in a way that made me want to keep my hands in my pockets.

Kenna didn’t seem to have the same hesitation, brushing past my shoulder to reach an immaculate credenza tucked into the shadows of a recessed space just to the left of the door. A small arrangement of succulents crowned the surface, adding character without demanding care, alongside a coffee maker that was flanked by two ceramic bowls. One contained coffee pods and the other held creamers, both thoughtfully arranged.

Kenna didn’t bother with the coffee, though. Instead, she opened the credenza to reveal a mini fridge hidden inside. It was filled with various soft drinks, seltzers, and fruit juice. Kenna produced two bottles without asking if I wanted anything—handing me a lemon-flavored water while choosing a cranberry seltzer for herself.

It was strange to be reminded of just how closely she had paid attention to me for the last week, trying to figure out my secrets and prove to her brother that I was a danger to his livelihood. But just like I hadn’t known about this place, there was plenty that Kenna didn’t know about me.

I pivoted on my heel, scanning the room with the same careful attention I’d developed since everything changed. Two doors—one to the hallway, one likely leading to a closet or a private bathroom. The desk was positioned so that anyone behind it would be shrouded in shadow while the clients sat exposed in full light of the windows. A setup that couldn’t be accidental. Kenna didn’t strike me as someone who left such details to chance.

“This is officially the Cavanaugh Investigations office,” Kenna told me. “But as soon as I file the paperwork it will officially become an asset of our cold case charity.”

“You’re going to dissolve your investigation business?” I asked, a flicker of alarm growing in me at how quickly Kenna was willing to throw everything into this cold case charity idea when we barely knew each other. I had just told her I was willing to commit to this, but there was so much instability in my life that the difference between intention and execution was a chasm that only I could see but we both might fall prey to.

“I was always going to dissolve the investigation business,” Kenna told me matter-of-factly. “I told you before, that the types of clients I was getting weren’t satisfying me. If you hadn’t come along, this office would already be stripped down and everything packed away in little boxes.”

I nodded along, remembering the way she’d talked about her investigation business while we were staking out my apartment, that lost feeling that had led her to start travelling. That made me feel a little better about her decision to turn this into a space for both of us, for the charity we were going to build together.

Still, there was some part of me that felt like we ought to honor the stage of her life as a private investigator that had led us here, that had caused her to spend an entire week watching my every move before using those same skills to catch the man who was invading my privacy.

“It should be called the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity,” I told her. “We could call it C4, for short.”

“Like the explosives?” Kenna wrinkled her nose for a moment, but she let out a little laugh and I could see how quickly it was growing on her. “Actually, that isn’t bad.”

“I have a good idea every once in a while,” I told her, gazing around the space and wondering how much time Kenna actually spent here. There was no dust on any of the surfaces, but that could easily have been due to bringing in a regular cleaner.

“Well, since you have such good ideas, why don’t I show you around and you let me know what you think we need to change in order for this space to work for both of us?” Kenna asked, and I shrugged my agreement. The space wasn’t so large that she really needed to act as a tour guide, but she did so anyway, clearly proud of the set-up she had created. “You’re familiar with the credenza. I’ve got still water, sparkling water, and cherry cola, as well as room to keep lunch if you want to. The coffee pods are all espresso or decaf, and the creamers are a mix of vanilla and hazelnut. If you’d like us to stock something else there’s an order form over here.”

I followed her with my eyes as she moved to a clip board hanging from the wall near the door with some kind of spreadsheet printed out and a few marks already on it.

“This is where I bring clients who happen to show up,” Kenna said, waving to the two chairs and the coffee table near the window before moving clockwise around the room to the row of filing cabinets. “And these are the client files. I’ll be archiving everything here to make space for our new cases. Sometimes I use this whiteboard to work out theories. I’m not sure if that’s your style, but it helps me keep things organized. Speaking of, there’s only one desk right now, but we can go shopping for a second one and maybe turn them to face each other?”

“That’s okay,” I replied. “I’ll probably just work out of the client chairs. I’m not much of a desk person.”

“Not a desk person?” Kenna asked, making a face. “What does that even mean? You have to have a desk. Where else would you keep everything like pens, sticky notes, active case paperwork?”

“In a satchel,” I replied, thinking back to my time in the Academy when I had done just that. Phoebe had used her own desk and mine had become a catch-all place for everything from our coffee maker to our coats.

“In a...” Kenna began to repeat my words with a horrified tone, staring at me slack-jawed before shaking her head and taking on a determined expression. “No. Absolutely not. You’re getting a desk.”

“You alphabetize your breakfast cereal, don’t you,” I said, a teasing note in my voice. But seeing her insistence and looking around at this place she had crafted, so perfectly staged, left something uncomfortable growing in the pit of my stomach. Kenna’s house was perfectly organized, but it still felt lived in. This space was different, cold in a way that contrasted harshly against the bright sunlight streaming in through the windows.

Kenna smiled as if she liked the accusation.

“I prefer efficiency,” she said lightly, moving across the room to lean against the front of the desk. She crossed her legs and popped the tab on her drink, the soft hiss of carbonation loud in the stillness of the room.

“Being disorganized can mean missing things,” I conceded, mostly to fill the silence. I wasn’t nearly as organized as Kenna was, but I had an organization system of my own. I had often been told it looked like chaos from the outside but it worked for me and I really didn’t know how else to function.

“Speaking of things that are missing,” she said after taking a sip of her drink and setting it on the desk behind her. “We don’t currently have any cases to work on. You’re the specialist here. What’s the right way to go about acquiring them?”

I appreciated that she asked it like a real question, like she really did see me as the authority on the subject. And thankfully I had an easy answer ready for her.

“We’ll use the public records office,” I said, unscrewing the cap on my water and moving over to the windows, looking down. The street below looked softer from up here, the smaller details blurring into the bigger picture, hiding the dirt and grime. Which was probably the point in having an office like this, to separate yourself from everything going on below. I turned my back on the windows, the bright summer sun hurting my eyes. “Every cold case in the county should be accessible and we can request copies. The fee varies but it’s usually manageable. The only decision we need to make upfront is whether we narrow the search to one specific case to pull, or whether we cast wide and decide what to work on once we can see the full picture.”

“How wide are we talking?” Kenna asked, tilting her head.

“There could be only a handful of files, or there could be dozens depending on how far back we go,” I told her. “If the missing person’s database for Oregon is any indication, we’ll have enough cold cases to do this the rest of our lives. It’s just a matter of finding the right county records offices to gather them all up.”

“Let’s go find out what we’re working with, then, shall we?” she said, picking up her drink again and heading toward the door. I followed her out, softly closing the office door behind me. I still had the bottled water in my hands, and the cold plastic was a relief to hold on to when it felt like my world was spinning just a little faster than I was really ready to handle.

Kenna was a force to be reckoned with, and I knew it was going to take everything in me to keep up.

As we waited for the elevator, she reached into her pocket. “Take this,” she said, extending her palm to reveal a key fob—the twin of the one she’d used moments ago on the office door. My fingers closed around it before my mind caught up to the implications of her gesture.

“Thanks,” I managed to say, the word feeling inadequate against the weight of what I now held.

“It’ll be good to have someone else to work with,” she replied. “The space can get a little…cold.”

The elevator arrived before I could reply and as we stepped inside a chime went off, echoing in the space. Kenna frowned, reaching into her back pocket and pulling out her phone.

Something shifted almost imperceptibly in her expression as she read the message—not irritation exactly, but something close to it.

“Apparently we’ll have to do this another time,” she said, taking a deep breath as if recalibrating her expectations for where the day would take her. “The Hendersons are in town and Alistair’s mother has strong opinions about my poor attendance record at social functions of late.”

“I can handle picking up the files myself,” I said immediately, feeling the opportunity already slipping through my fingers. I hadn’t realized how excited I was to work another cold case until I was faced with this sudden change of plans. “It’s really not a two-person job and I can get a ride share⁠—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kenna said, wrinkling her nose. “The whims of Madame Scott are not about to get in the way of our work. This is a charity, after all. Who is she to frown at charity work? Although, this would be the perfect time to suggest to the Hendersons and the Scotts that they ought to donate to our charity.”

“It’s settled then,” I said. “I’ll go to the public records office, and you’ll deal with the public in general.”

“Fine,” Kenna conceded. “But I’ll drop you off and then you can take a ride share back to the office once you have the files. Oh, and take this.”

She pulled her wallet out of her bag and produced a matte black card—no bank name, no decoration, just Cavanaugh Investigations embossed on the front and the card number on the back.

“You can use this for expenses,” she said as she held it out to me, guiding us through the lobby and out towards the Rivian. “Copy fees, access charges, whatever they try to nickel and dime you for. And don’t worry about a limit, you won’t reach it.”

“First your home, then your office,” I said as I took it, keeping pace with her even as I felt my head spin at how quickly she seemed to move when she’d made a decision. “And now you’re giving me your credit card. That’s…a lot of trust.”

“That’s because I trust you,” she said simply. “Pull everything. Every file you can get and bring it back to the office. I want to see what we’re working with before we commit to anything.”

She dropped me off in the parking lot of the public records office five minutes later, and as I stood on the sidewalk watching the Rivian pull back into traffic, I felt like I’d just survived a hurricane.

Chapter Four

I walked into the records office with the single-minded determination of a woman who really wanted to avoid thinking about her problems. The building’s atmosphere hit me as I entered—a peculiar blend of photocopier chemicals, settled dust, and some artificial floral air freshener that tickled the back of my nose.

Fluorescent lights hummed overhead as the tension in my shoulders eased. There were rules in places like these. I found comfort in the predictable choreography of bureaucracy; the paperwork that demanded signatures in triplicate, the orderly lines of people waiting their turns, the silent understanding that no one made eye contact for longer than necessary.

In places like this, I could breathe easier, knowing exactly what came next.

Here, I became just another face in a bureaucratic dance where nobody looked twice at anyone else. The office hummed with activity, but none of it was directed my way—people moved through their routines with the comfortable blindness of those focused entirely on their own concerns.

That changed as I followed the signs and approached a cut-out window at the end of a long hall where the records clerk looked up at me, already smiling. A laminated name tag was pinned to her left breast pocket and told me her name was Rose. The freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks told me she’d spent plenty of time outside when she wasn’t working in this artificial light. A baby pink blazer was draped over the back of her chair, and the sleeves of her white blouse were rolled to her elbows.

I tried not to stare at the woman’s strawberry-blonde hair, but my determination to avoid looking at it only made me more aware of how it caught the fluorescent light, the color so similar to what mine had been before the dye. It was pulled back into a high ponytail that had pieces coming loose at the front to frame her face, and for a moment I felt a pang of longing as I remembered looking in the mirror and seeing my own hair look quite the same. Not nearly as curly and not exactly her shade, but it was close enough to stir something in me I hadn’t anticipated. I missed my own hair and regretted hiding it under the weight of the brown dye.

The dye job was necessary, I reminded myself firmly. Every news outlet in the country had plastered my face across their screens, their news anchors breathlessly describing “the red-handed redhead” as if the red in my hair and the blood on my hands was all the evidence they needed of my alleged crimes.

“Hi there,” Rose said. Her accent was soft and rounded, a sweet Southern drawl that didn’t hold any sharp edges to it, pulling my attention away from the ache in my chest at seeing a reflection of what I used to be. “What can I help you with?”

“I’d like to request copies of your cold case files,” I said, keeping my voice low and professional.

“Okay,” she turned to her monitor, hands poised at the keyboard. “Do you have a name or a case number I can look up?”

“No, sorry,” I tried not to wince as I continued, knowing what I was about to ask for wasn’t going to go over well. “I’d like copies of every cold case you have on file.”

The professional mask slipped as her eyes widened. “You want... the entire cold case archive?”

“Yes?” I said, biting back another apology. There was a beat where she was clearly considering whether I was joking or not and possibly calculating just how much work my request involved.

I squared my shoulders and locked eyes with her. Something in my expression must have communicated my determination, because her lips compressed into a tight line. 

“That’s a lot of files to copy,” she told me, turning to a cabinet to her right and pulling out a form with the practiced motion of someone who knew their job well. “But we actually have a process for bulk file requests. They take a little longer than a regular file request would, but we also have a subscription program that will allow you to only pay a dollar per file, up to 290 files over the course of three years. Plus one dollar for the processing fee.”

“I’m pulling these files for someone else,” I said, looking at all the identifying information on the request and feeling my stomach turn. There was no reason to think that my forged identification wouldn’t hold up against this form, but after dancing around the issue with Kenna this morning my nerves were already frayed and sensitive when it came to providing my identity. “Can I take this and have her fill it out before bringing it back?”

“Actually, we have an online form if she wants to fill it out that way,” Rose told me and then narrowed her eyes. “Please tell me this isn’t for one of those true crime podcasts.”

“God, no,” I said with a quick laugh. “It’s actually a nonprofit. We’re trying to bring closure to families stuck in limbo with unsolved cases.”

The stiff lines around Rose’s mouth relaxed, and something warm flickered in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Well, that’s certainly more interesting than most of the requests I get in here. Impressive, too.”

“Thanks,” I bit my lip, hating the idea of leaving without anything to show for it but a link to a website we could have used from the start if I had simply thought to look. “I’d like to get started as soon as possible. Maybe we could look up cases that were marked cold in the past six to twelve months and see if that narrows it down?”

“That I can do,” she said with a warm smile. She typed her search into the computer and made a little humming noise as she scrolled through the information. “It looks like there are eight cases that were marked cold in the past year. Did you want all of them?”

“Yes,” I said, “Please.”

“Sure thing,” Rose replied and then asked for the basics, which I was used to giving in situations like these. After she had taken down my name and phone number, she tapped a well-manicured nail against a newer-looking payment terminal. Much newer than the ancient computer she was working from, at least. I took Kenna’s card from my wallet and tapped it against the plastic screen, not entirely sure there even was an RFID chip to be read.

The terminal made a promising beep, though, and Rose seemed satisfied.

“It’s going to take me a minute to get all of these printed and collated,” she warned me. “Mark is on lunch, so it’s just me right now. Feel free to ding the bell if anything comes up while I’m in the back.”

Then she disappeared through the door behind her, and I was left to my own devices, standing next to the clerk’s window, with nothing to do but observe the office life around me. I leaned against the wall beside the counter while I waited, letting my gaze drift naturally rather than staying too focused on any one thing.

Near the water cooler, a woman in a navy pantsuit cupped her hand around her phone, her whispers sharp enough to slice paper. At the far end of the hallway, a man with his face scrunched like he’d bitten into something sour hurried toward the restroom, each step of his polished oxfords announcing his urgency with a high-pitched squeal against the floor. As he crossed the hall, I noticed another man heading my direction.

He walked slowly, eyes fixed on his phone screen, oblivious to everything around him. I could only see half of his face from where I stood, but that dirty blond hair was unmistakable—I’d seen it across tables and parking lots enough times now to recognize Mason Campbell.

With his phone in one hand and a briefcase in his other, dressed in a well-tailored suit, it was easy to surmise that he was here on business rather than pleasure. He strode toward the clerk’s counter, apparently on the same kind of errand that had brought me here.

He nearly reached the counter before noticing me standing there. When our eyes met, his widened slightly, lips parting in what seemed equal parts surprise and recognition.

“Hale,” he said, his voice warm and no longer slurred by the alcohol from the night before. My cheeks warmed as last night’s conversation replayed itself in my mind. His slurred compliments and my awkward silence had created a perfect storm of social disaster.

“Mason,” I replied, resisting the impulse to shift my weight from one foot to the other while maintaining my casual pose against the wall. Every time we’d crossed paths had been like watching a car crash in slow motion.

The first time we spoke I had subtly grilled him for information on his connection to the Shepherd family, and the second time I had fled the parking lot while suspecting that he had somehow taken my dog out of my apartment. And then there was last night, our third direct interaction where he had awkwardly attempted to flirt with me and I had essentially ignored him and fled once more.

In fact, the only interaction we had that could be considered neutral was when I had tackled a date-rape suspect who had managed to get past Mason in a bid to flee the scene of his crime.

“I take it I’m in line behind you?” Mason asked, the hint of familiarity in his voice, but none of the awkwardness I might have expected from someone who had taken their shot and had been shot down the night before. 

“It might be a few minutes,” I replied, giving him a little shrug that was faintly apologetic. “I put in a fairly large records request.”

“I can wait,” he said. “It’s basically all I do these days.”

I tried not to make a face at such an odd statement, hoping not to invite further conversation. Instead, I looked back towards the clerk’s window like Rose might suddenly appear and relieve me of the burden of the inevitably awkward silence.

The cramped clerk’s office remained empty and that uncomfortable silence fell between us anyway. We didn’t know each other well enough for anything more than small talk and I didn’t want to know him beyond that. He was close to too many people who could cause problems for me if they realized who I was before I had a chance to clear my name.

I could feel time ticking on as I continued to lean against the wall beside the clerk’s window and he maintained a careful distance, sliding his phone into the pocket of his slacks and clutching the handle of his briefcase like it was the only thing keeping him grounded.

My gaze darted from the wall clock to my shoes to the water stain on the ceiling—anywhere to avoid addressing the palpable tension between us. I mentally flipped through potential conversation starters, but each one felt as forced as a poorly written television script.

“I’m sorry about last night,” Mason said, interrupting my spiraling thoughts. I looked up to find him watching me, his posture stiff, shoulders squared as if bracing for impact. So much for the awkward silence. I guess we were going to talk about this whether I wanted to or not. “I had one drink too many and I don’t think I read the room very well.”

“It’s fine,” I said, gripping my right arm with my left hand. 

“No, it isn’t,” he said, raising his free hand to rub at the back of his neck. “Let’s just say that my attempt at charm fell somewhere between a middle-school dance and a hostage negotiation. Calling you a ‘kidnapper-catcher’ while three whiskeys deep wasn’t exactly my smoothest line.”

“So you were trying to flirt,” I said, a note of accusation creeping into my voice before I could stop myself. I snapped my mouth shut as I caught the wince that flickered across his face.

“I was,” he said after another awkward pause. “I can tell I made you uncomfortable and that wasn’t my intention. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said. I shifted my weight, fingers tightening around my arm as the silence stretched between us again. My teeth caught the inside of my cheek as I searched for what to say next. His apology was real, but there was something else that hung in the air between us, an unasked question that I knew I had to address. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t feel uncomfortable, exactly. I’m just not available at the moment. I have a lot on my plate and things like flirting, dating, romance? Those aren’t an option right now.”

“Understandable,” he said, nodding along as I spoke, like he really did get it. “If that⁠—” 

“Oh, Mr. Campbell!” Rose said as she returned to her desk to find us there, thankfully interrupting the end of an excruciating conversation. Mason sent me an apologetic look and then turned to the clerk at the counter.

“Hi, Rose,” he said with warmth in his voice. “I’m here to pick up the land deeds from the Gilman case that was closed out last year.”

“Sure thing, I have those in the back for you,” Rose responded with the same easy warmth she’d given me and disappeared again. 

“I didn’t see Rogue at the barbecue last night,” Mason said after a long moment of silence, thankfully not trying to return to the previous conversation. 

“Crowds aren’t his favorite thing,” I replied, with a light shrug.

“Did the fireworks bother him at all?” he asked, and his voice was light, conversational. Like we hadn’t just gone from me shutting down his advances to chatting about my dog. But maybe that was a sign that he really did get that I wasn’t interested and that he was able to take that rejection well. It certainly put a point in his favor, though I still wasn’t certain I had a good sense of who he was outside of being a friend of the Shepherd family.

“Not even a little bit,” I replied with a proud note in my voice, like I was somehow responsible for how cool-headed Rogue was about loud noises. He was so sensitive to smaller sounds—had heard my landlord drop off that gift basket and let me know right away that there was someone outside the door—but he didn’t even flinch at the fireworks last night.

“Hopefully you figured out how to keep him inside your apartment,” Mason said with a teasing tone, like there was a private joke between us. And maybe for Mason, it was. From his perspective he’d found a dog wandering the side of a highway and returned that dog to his owner. It wasn’t Mason’s fault that I was overly paranoid and questioned every innocent interaction we had.

“We figured out a solution,” I told him. Mason had seen me at the Fourth of July party at Cavanaugh Cottage the night before, but he hadn’t put two and two together to realize that’s where I lived now. And I certainly wasn’t going to spell it out for him. The less people who knew where I was, the easier a time I would have falling asleep at night.

“He seems like a good dog,” Mason said, completely unaware of the mental calculations I was making while he made small talk.

“He is,” I replied, allowing myself to show the warmth I felt when talking about the Cane Corso. “And loyal. I’m lucky to have him.”

“I’m sure he feels the same,” Mason said. His voice softened, and the skin around his eyes creased slightly as he spoke. Something about this gentler version of him revealed a warmth that changed his whole face, the way afternoon light suddenly transformed a kitchen you had walked through a thousand times.

That warmth—that care for Rogue—reached across the space between us, settling somewhere behind my ribs like the first sip of hot coffee on a crisp autumn morning.

The conversation settled into an easy silence then, different than it had been when we were talking about his poor attempt at flirting. I took in the way his body had relaxed, how he carried himself in this place, and got the sense that stopping in at the public records office was a routine part of his job. He didn’t give off the impression of law enforcement like Lachlan Shepherd did, but he was pulling files from the Gilman case. A case that, by his own admission, had been closed last year. Which led me to the assumption that he had to be involved in what came after an arrest.

Here we were, two sides of the same professional coin making small talk as we waited for our paperwork. It was a strange mirror of what I had thought my life was supposed to be.

Rose returned a few moments later carrying a stack of folders. She set them on her desk and then split them into two piles, peeking into each of them to make sure she was giving the right information to the right person.

“Here are your land deal records, Mr. Campbell,” she said and Mason shook his head and clucked his tongue even as he took the stack from her.

“What have I told you, Rose? Call me Mason,” he said. 

“Yes sir, Mr. Campbell,” Rose replied, but she followed it up with a cheeky wink in my direction like the two of us were in on the joke together. Then, she took the rest of the files and passed them over to me. “And these are all the cold case files from the past twelve months. Is there anything else I can get for either of you?”

Mason closed his briefcase with a soft click. “These are exactly what I was looking for.”

“These are perfect, thank you,” I agreed as I took my stack of files, sending her a small smile in thanks for putting in the effort of printing and putting together eight case files so quickly. 

“You’re welcome, Ms. Hastings,” she replied, and as I turned away from the clerk’s window, I realized it was inevitable that Mason and I would walk towards the exit together, both taking the only path out of the building.

“Can I ask what a bartender needs cold case files for?” he asked, and I glanced over to find his eyes narrowed as he took in the thick stack of cases I was carrying. There was a slight upturn to the corner of his mouth, though, and a tilt to his head.

“No,” I replied, wondering if he was going to push the subject further or if he would respect me shutting him down for the second time today.

“Fair,” he said, and then hesitated a fraction of a second, as if considering saying something else. “Have a good day, Hale.”

“You too,” I replied, relieved to know that he wasn’t going to push for more. I sent him a polite but indifferent nod before we split off in separate directions. 

More than grateful to be on my own again and no longer required to keep up a conversation with a near-stranger, I finally felt my shoulders begin to release some of the tension that had begun to build up there from the moment Mason Campbell’s eyes had fallen on me with recognition.

I shook off the interaction and compartmentalized the conversation we’d had, putting it out of my mind as I headed back to the office, not bothering to call a ride share when it was only four blocks away.

There were eight cases that had gone cold in the past year waiting for me to review. Eight people whose story had been cut short in one way or another and who weren’t at the top of anyone’s mind anymore.

And suddenly I had more work ahead of me than I possibly could have hoped for.

Chapter Five

The office felt different when Kenna wasn’t there with me.

As I entered, I set the stack of cold case files on top of the desk and stood in the middle of the room for a moment, taking stock. The midmorning light was still coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the same angle, falling across the same gleaming surfaces and catching in the same way on the glass coffee table. Nothing had changed in the time I was gone, except for Kenna no longer being in the room with me.

I moved to the windows first, not because there was anything to see but because standing near them gave me something to do with my feet. Four floors down, Bend went about its afternoon without me. I thought about Rogue at home, probably asleep on the couch, and felt the absence of him like a missing piece of evidence that would crack the case wide open.

I spent far longer than necessary watching the world outside those windows, scanning the street for anything out of place. I inspected the building across the road, which also went up several stories. I could see into the offices of their fourth floor, people moving around and going about their day.

If I could see into the building across the street that meant that they could see into this one as well, and with everything pointing towards a stalker in my life—one that we hadn’t proven was my landlord—I wasn’t going to forget the possibility that someone could be watching.

I shivered, turning my back on the view. Kenna was right, this place was cold. Not in temperature—okay maybe a little in temperature—but more in how it felt. And how I felt in it. Because as nice as everything was, there was no personality, no evidence that someone actually spent any time here.

When I looked around, the word that came to mind was staged.

I tilted my head at that thought. Kenna had spent the first week she knew me trying to uncover all my secrets. To her, I had been a case that needed to be cracked. If she actually used these offices there should have been some evidence of that investigation lingering here.

And if I could find that evidence then maybe I could keep her from closing the gap between what she already knew and what I really didn’t want her to find out.

With only a little guilt lingering in the back of my mind I got to work examining the office from top to bottom, looking for anything that indicated how Kenna used this space and how she organized her investigations.

I started with the obvious, the filing cabinets. I opened each drawer with the same methodical attention I gave everything and found exactly what I expected. Color-coded tabs, neat labels, alphabetized with precise handwriting.

I rifled through a couple of cases, confirming that they were as real as they appeared to be. Most of them were marital indiscretions in upper class neighborhoods. There was nothing filed under H for Hastings or M for McHale, though.

I moved back to the desk, examining it for wear and tear. There was a slight scuff on the inside wall where Kenna’s shoes would have pressed while she sat there, but there were no scratch marks on the wood and no forgotten Post-it notes curling at the corners.

Aside from a basket that held pens and a blank legal pad with no torn pages or impressions from previous use, the entire surface was blank.

I pulled open the top drawer, finding color coordinated office supplies and a bottle of Tylenol that had been opened and used at some point. The second drawer showed real evidence of use, stuffed with legal documents—state statutes, court opinions with hand-drawn underlining, the missing sticky notes pressed to each other in neat little stacks. I flipped through them, reading them like little books of disjointed thoughts related to cases I couldn’t identify. None of the words on those notes appeared to point to anything that would lead back to me.

This drawer was the only thing in the room that looked like it actually belonged to someone, I realized. This was the crack in her exterior that showed the chaos of her mind at work, pressed up against the pristine performance of everything else.

I closed it carefully and moved on to the third drawer. It stuck, but it wasn’t locked and after a moment of shaking it, it gave way with the soft, wet slosh of liquid shifting inside.

The whiskey bottle was the only thing inside. It was old, the label worn at the edges, the seal long since broken but the bottle mostly full. I lifted it out, unscrewed the cap to confirm it was what it appeared to be, and then twisted it back on and went to return it to its resting place.

I felt a brush of silk as I drew my hand away and reached back in, grasping what I realized was a silk tab at the back of the drawer, a small loop stitched into what turned out to be the edge of a false bottom. I set the whiskey bottle beside me on the floor and pulled the panel out of the drawer only to reveal a completely empty space.

I stared at it for longer than made sense. Bare wood, smelling of oak, built to hold something that wasn’t there anymore or had never been there in the first place. I thought about the secret staircase in Kenna’s library, the way she had to show it to me in order to even allow me on to the second floor.

I replaced the panel, returned the whiskey to its place, and closed the drawer. Then, I gathered the cold case files from the top of the credenza and made a slow circuit of the room to confirm I had put everything back exactly the way I’d found it before I hoisted the bag onto my shoulder and headed out.

I let the door click shut behind me, and took the stairs instead of the elevator, thinking about how little I’d discovered in that room and why it felt so impossible to stay and work in a space that felt so performative while being unable to shake the sense that someone out there—someone I couldn’t see—was watching.

By late afternoon, the sitting room of the cottage no longer looked like a place meant for rest and socialization. The coffee table was buried beneath files, each of the eight folders arranged into loose constellations of association. I had stacked two together that had occurred during the same time frame, and three others that were connected by location. There were another two that were similar crimes—robberies of local businesses that did not have any cameras installed—but I kept them separate as there was a clear signature and motive in one and a lack of any real information in the other.

Rogue lay stretched along the opposite cushion now, my feet tucked beneath his ribcage, stealing what warmth I could. His tail thumped once, lazily, as if something in his sleep had briefly pleased him. I smiled and turned back to the legal pad I had taken with me from the office.

I didn’t expect to solve anything today, but I did want to know what the cases we had were about so that when Kenna and I came together I could give her a lay of the land and the two of us could work together to decide which one to start with.

With my back propped up against the arm of the couch, I went over the notes I had taken once more. Each case had a case number, victim name, and a brief description of the crime in neat lines going down the page. Then, in the margins, I had crowded that information with relevant dates, theories, and questions. There were several arrows connecting stray thoughts to the cases they belonged to. 

All in all, what started as a neat list of the information each file held had become a visual expression of my thought process. It was an absolute mess. I was a mess, and that only became more evident the longer I spent in Kenna’s well-organized presence.

I sighed and flipped the pages of the legal pad until I had a blank space to work with and then pulled the last file from the stack. Scanning the initial details of the case I wrote down the core details first.

Missing Person: Camille Nash

Reported missing by her husband, Ian Nash.

Disappeared from their bed in the middle of the night.

According to the investigation there had been no note, no warning, and no explanation for her disappearance. At least, that was what her husband claimed, and the investigation appeared to back up his story.

I shifted a little, drawing my knees closer and adjusting the throw pillow behind my back. Then I continued to read the case notes, combing through them carefully.

The initial report felt routine and perfunctory, exactly what you might expect from beat cops called to the scene. The follow-up report filed by Detective Blake Trivett showed more effort. They had not found any immediate signs of struggle or forced entry. The couple’s financial accounts were untouched. All of Camille’s clothing and possessions were accounted for. 

The only clue they had to work off was that Camille’s car was located two streets away from her home, parked in front of a small neighborhood playground.

I lingered on that detail, noting it down on the legal pad along with what Detective Trivett had confirmed; that Camille and her husband had never had any children. Ian didn’t have a good explanation for why she might go to a playground in the middle of the night or how that had led to her disappearance, either.

I flipped to the next page, hoping to find Detective Trivett’s notes on the matter, to see what his theories were about the case. Instead, the next page in the file was a death certificate for a woman named Rebecca Nash.

Rebecca Nash had been Ian’s wife—his first wife—who had died in her sleep two years before Camille Nash went missing. The cause of death was listed as asphyxiation. I frowned as I flipped to the next page, looking for any explanation as to why Rebecca’s death certificate was in Camille’s missing person’s file.

The two women were connected by their husband, but I could only speculate about how his first wife’s death connected to his second wife’s disappearance because Detective Trivett hadn’t left any notes on the subject or included his thoughts in the case file.

If we took this case, Trivett would have to be one of our first phone calls, if for no other reason than he clearly wasn’t in the habit of creating clear lines of investigation in his paperwork.

I set the death certificate aside only to find that the next page was an autopsy report for Rebecca. It was sparse but consistent with what the death certificate showed. There were drugs in Rebecca’s system and the notes from the medical examiner focused on confirming there were no visible bruises or damage to the hyoid bone.

Which meant that whoever this Detective Trivett was, he had taken the time to confirm that Rebecca Nash hadn’t been strangled. A combination of drugs and alcohol in her system were the likely culprit in her death. Yet the placement of this paperwork in Camille’s file suggested a connection or a lead of some kind.

I wrinkled my nose in confusion, trying to make the same leap of logic that the detective on the case had. But there had to be something I was missing, something that Detective Trivett knew about Ian’s two wives that I didn’t, which had caused him to connect Camille’s disappearance with Rebecca’s death.

There was the obvious explanation, that Trivett thought that Ian was the central factor in both these women no longer being present in his life. But the death certificate and autopsy made it clear that wasn’t the case. At least not when it came to how Rebecca had died.

I flipped to the next page, hoping Trivett had left something behind in the case file that would explain where his investigation had actually led. But after the two documents focused on Rebecca, the file returned its focus to Camille and the interviews done with her friends and family. 

I set the file down after reading each of the interviews, unable to shake the strange kinship I felt with Camille. Unlike Lexi, who had packed her belongings and seemingly chosen to vanish—before her body surfaced years later—Camille’s life appeared to have been sliced clean through. One moment she existed, the next she didn’t.

Flipping through the initial interview with Ian again, I noted the signs that indicated whatever had drawn her out of the house that night didn’t appear to point towards a premeditated disappearance on her end. She had filled the coffee maker with enough grounds for two people and scheduled it to run at six a.m. the same way it always did. Her husband claimed they had plans to go to dinner with his parents that weekend. The morning before she disappeared, she had purchased a full week’s worth of groceries the same as she always did.

According to everyone in her life there was no indication that she expected to disappear.

It was as if she had stepped out of her own story mid-sentence. Her husband, her family, and the entire Bend police department were left at a loss for any explanation about what happened that night.

I leaned back, closing my eyes a moment as I thought through the case, or what little of it there was to work with, at least. There were no signs that someone had come in and taken Camille, but that didn’t mean she had gone willingly.

Her husband could be lying to the police, or someone could have blackmailed her into leaving the house on her own. She could even have had a sleepwalking condition that led her to driving her car to that playground parking lot. 

But however she vanished, the question of where Camille Nash was now still remained. Disappearances like hers left a specific kind of void in their wake, hollowing out the lives around them, one unanswered question at a time. Lexi Tate’s case had shown me that. And now there was another missing woman out there with no answers to speak of and no one left looking for her anymore.

Chapter Six

The sound of the front door opening pulled me up from somewhere dark and dreamless.

I lifted my head from the arm of the couch, eyes burning, and took in the mess I had left scattered across the coffee table. Papers spread in a loose radius around me, some neatly stacked, others splayed open where I’d abandoned them mid-thought. Beyond the lamp’s small determined pool of light, the living room had gone dim.

A faint surge of panic ran through me, dulled by the weight of sleep.

“You’re looking lively,” Kenna said, voice dry.

I glanced toward the windows. “What time is it?”

She checked her watch. “Just after seven.”

The world spun a little as I sat up too fast, realizing I hadn’t simply dozed off for a few minutes. I had been well and truly asleep for several hours. That explained the ache in my shoulders, at least.

I sat back slowly, rubbing at the bridge of my nose. I had a shift at Mug+Shots at eight and hadn’t set an alarm because I hadn’t intended to fall asleep in the first place. It was good that Kenna had come home when she had, otherwise I probably would have slept right through my shift and straight on until morning.

Kenna set her bag on the hook by the door with a sigh and toed off her boots. She looked tired, but there was an energy humming under her skin that was carefully contained. Her gaze moved to the coffee table. Something passed across her face that I immediately interpreted as displeasure at the state of her living room, the careful order of the cottage disrupted by my radius of scattered papers. I opened my mouth to apologize but she spoke first.

“Is that all of them?”

I blinked. “What?”

“The cases,” She nodded toward the files. “Is that everything they had?”

“Oh.” I pushed my hair back from my face, recalibrating. “No, only the ones marked cold in the past year. Rose—the records office clerk—told me there’s a bulk request process we have to use to access the full archive. There’s an online form I can send you the link for.”

“Please do,” she said, wandering towards the kitchen. I watched Rogue follow her with pleading eyes and did a mental calculation before deciding he probably ought to go outside to do his business while I went upstairs to change into something more work appropriate than the rumpled, sleep-worn outfit I was currently wearing.

I was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and back downstairs in under five minutes, pulling my hair into a ponytail as I let Rogue back in and hurried over to his dish to serve him his dinner. Kenna stood at the kitchen island, her back to me, looking at something on the counter.

I turned to look at what she was examining, expecting it to be one of the cases I had brought home, only to register what was spread out in front of her half a second before she spoke.

“What are these?” she whispered, unable to look away from the photos that were spread across the marble in a loose row. There were only five of them in front of her and I reached into my jacket pocket to check that yes, the rest of the photos were still in my possession. I bit my tongue to keep from cursing. The ones she had gathered must have fallen out of my pocket when I’d fallen asleep.

I knew on an intellectual level that Kenna hadn’t gone snooping and didn’t invade my privacy by finding those images, but I still felt the hot rush of indignation and embarrassment that came with her seeing them. I hadn’t planned to tell anyone about them, wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do about the situation yet, and now because of my own carelessness Kenna knew. There was no point in hiding it from her, either. She was too smart to believe they were simply pictures I kept of myself.

I took a deep, grounding breath and then walked over to the kitchen island and pulled the rest of the photos out, spreading them on the counter, reorganizing them in chronological order just the way they had arrived. Just as quickly as the irritation arrived, it transformed into a spark of hope. As one of the few people who were also in these photos, and as a trained investigator, she was one of the few people qualified to help me figure out where they had come from and what to do about it.

“They arrived in a gift basket,” I said, crossing the kitchen. “It was left on my doorstep last Wednesday and addressed to My Sunshine.”

“And you didn’t say anything or tell anyone about them?” Kenna asked, looking up at me with incredulous eyes. Like she had somehow forgotten that I was in a complicated situation and that going to anyone for help was the last thing I was likely to do.

“I didn’t find them until last night,” I said instead of pointing any of that out. “I never opened the basket because I thought it was delivered to me by mistake.”

“Clearly, it was meant for you,” Kenna said, returning her focus to the images, moving along the row slowly and giving each photo the same careful attention. There was still an added mixture of horror and fascination reflected in her expression that I understood. I had felt the same way for the better part of the night before as I managed to process the situation myself.

She picked up one of the close-up photos and held it toward me to take a second look.

“There’s something about this one,” she said slowly. “This wasn’t taken outside like the rest of them were. Look at the angle of the light.”

“It’s coming from above?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the photo and trying to see what Kenna saw.

“Precisely,” she pointed to a shadow on my face, and then another. “And these shadows are from blinds, I think.”

“How would someone get an angle like that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose as I took a closer look. But even as I asked the question the answer came to me. My stomach dropped as everything clicked into place, the realization sending ice through my veins. I pointed to the faint edge of green along the bottom of the photo that I hadn’t understood the meaning of before. “That’s my comforter. This had to have been taken while I was in my apartment.”

“It was taken while you were sleeping,” Kenna replied, a certainty in her voice. My stomach turned at the thought and my hands shook as I felt the vulnerability of that image with my entire body. My apartment had been the one place I thought I was safe, that I had privacy from the rest of the world. I’d known that wasn’t true after Kenna and I had staked it out last Friday, but now there was even more evidence that my privacy had been completely violated.

“Landlord,” I said, remembering the way he had broken in and then left my studio so self-assured that nothing would happen to him despite Kenna and I catching him red-handed inside my apartment.

My mind replayed that moment again—his casual stance in my kitchen, the dismissive flick of his wrist when I confronted him about being there without permission. Had there been something in his eyes that I’d missed? Some tell in the way his mouth twitched as he denied any wrongdoing that should have warned me he wasn’t just an entitled landlord, but something far more sinister?

The room seemed to press in around me, the air thickening as my memory was weighed down by hindsight. What I’d thought was a simple power play on his part had turned out to be far worse. 

Kenna’s jaw tightened as she nodded. “That would be my conclusion.”

“We knew he’d been entering when I was out of the apartment, but this crosses a whole new line. I was unconscious. I was right there.” I said, feeling a little faint. “How did he even get through the door without waking me?”

But even as I said it, I began to imagine a man with dark intentions using his skeleton key to get into my apartment, slipping inside while I slept and softly closing the door behind him. Standing over me in my most vulnerable moments, exhausted from working a graveyard shift and being woken up by my upstairs neighbors one too many times. Taking out a phone or a camera and centering me in the viewfinder. 

It sounded so innocent compared to what he could have done to me in that state, but after weeks of living on the run I had finally let my guard down and he had taken advantage of that. I didn’t know what to do with that, how to keep myself from feeling that same vulnerability here in the cottage. It didn’t make sense for him to have access here, to get past the secret staircase and up the stairs into my locked bedroom.

Besides, we’d caught him in the act, and surely he wouldn’t risk finding out exactly how much violation I would endure before finally calling the authorities.

“I can’t,” I started to say, choking on the words as panic crawled its way up my throat. “I don’t—I don’t know how to handle this.”

“You aren’t going to,” Kenna replied, her voice calm as she gathered the photos into a pile. Her movements were methodical and efficient, but her knuckles had gone white as she gripped the counter in front of her, staring down at the top image—the one of Trick and I standing outside Mug+Shots. Her voice maintained that same control, but beneath the surface I could hear something dangerous, like the low hum of a power line about to snap. “You are going to focus on your job, and on solving cold cases, and you are not going to let this disrupt your life in any way.”

“I can’t just ignore this, Kenna. I can’t go to the police. But this—” I shook my head, my voice catching as I gestured at the pile of photographs sitting in front of her. “Today it’s taking pictures while I’m sleeping, but what happens when he decides photos aren’t enough? And God—how many other women has he done this to? Someone needs to stop him.”

“You’re right,” Kenna’s eyes locked with mine, a cold precision hardening her gaze. “I’ll handle it.”

“What exactly does that mean?” I asked, my forehead creasing as trepidation filled my voice. “How are you going to handle it?”

“You focus on your strengths and I’ll focus on mine,” she replied. “And Hale? Don’t forget that you’re safe now. This is nothing but a reminder of a time when he thought he could get away with this kind of behavior. You don’t live there anymore, and he doesn’t know where you are. Besides, by the time I’m done with him he’ll never enter anyone’s apartment uninvited again.”

I thought about arguing for a moment, worried about the dark tone that Kenna’s voice had taken, the clear threat laced through her words. But as I watched her take the stack of images and tuck them away in her tote bag with a finality that left no room for discussion, I felt the ease of letting go, of letting someone else take on my fight. It was nice to have someone in my corner who was as concerned about my privacy as I was, and the word partners echoed in my mind once more.

For as long as I could remember, I’d tackled every crisis head-on, muscles tensed and jaw set the same way hers was now. I had learned the hard way that problems didn’t get solved unless I personally wrestled them into submission, ordered them to surrender, or kept such relentless watch that they had no other choice but to retreat.

I wasn’t the only one on my side this time, though, and Kenna was right. This was her wheelhouse and it was all but resolved. All I had to do was allow her to take on the responsibility of handling it. And then all that would be left for me to deal with was squaring away the horror of knowing that this had happened, that I had been in such a vulnerable position while completely unaware of the danger.

I felt a sudden and overwhelming wave of gratitude towards Kenna for taking this problem off my hands, and the sudden itch to clean up my mess. I wanted to keep her space as clean as she liked it, so she would be able to tackle my case without the distraction that my chaos had left behind. Moving back to the coffee table, I began gathering up the eight folders that I had managed to pull from the public records office, neatening them up and planning to drop them off at the office before heading to Mug+Shots.

“Don’t you have work soon?” Kenna asked, and I paused, looking over at her as I wondered how she knew that. But she was Trick’s twin sister, his old bartender, and a damned good investigator. It probably would have been more surprising if she didn’t have some sense of what my schedule was.

“Yeah, at eight,” I replied.

“Why don’t you leave the files and your notes here and I’ll go through them while you’re at work?” she suggested, pulling something out of the freezer and placing it on a plate in the microwave. “As much as I would like to, I can’t do anything about your old landlord tonight. This will give me something useful to focus on instead.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, shrugging. I watched as Kenna came over, took the files from me, and carted them to the kitchen island. She set them down and then pulled her plate out of the microwave.

The salty-savory smell of her food hit me and my stomach growled loud enough for her to hear. She turned to look at me with a raised eyebrow and a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. Wordlessly, she held out the plate that had two microwaved frozen burritos on it, as if offering them to me.

“No thanks,” I said, “I have to stop for gas and I’m going to be late as it is. I’ll just get something to eat at work.”

“Suit yourself,” Kenna said, shrugging and pulling her plate back towards her. Then she pointed at the end table beside the couch. “But since you’re going that way, could you take those sunglasses to Trick? He left them here last night.”

“Of course,” I said, moving to pick them up and hooking them over the collar of my t-shirt.

“Thanks,” Kenna said, but she sounded distracted, and when I looked back over at her I found that she was already looking down at the legal pad covered in my notes on the various cases I had gathered. Knowing that particular combination of intense focus and curiosity all too well, I smirked and headed out the door.

Chapter Seven

I entered Mug+Shots through the employee entrance and was immediately hit by the smell of food grilling in the kitchen. The scent of sizzling oil mingled with salt and garlic, while onions hissed and browned in a cast-iron skillet on the industrial stove.

My stomach let out another hollow growl that made me pause just inside the doorway. The line was in motion—one cook plating and passing food to the swing shift waitress, another working the fryer and calling something out over the hiss and pop of the oil. No one looked up as I entered. I was familiar enough to be essentially invisible at this point, which suited me just fine.

“Mario,” I called out as I hung up my jacket. “Can I get a basket of fries when you have a second?”

Mario glanced up from the fryer and nodded. “One basket of fries, coming up.”

“Thank you,” I said, and headed down the hallway that jutted out from the kitchen. Past the bathrooms and the storeroom, past the door to the basement that I had never had cause to open, until I reached Trick’s office at the end.

The door was cracked the way he always left it when he was bouncing between front and back. I knocked once out of habit and stepped inside without waiting. Empty, which meant Trick was out front and the night was likely to be busy for a Tuesday.

His desk was cluttered with stacks of paper that were mostly aligned, a cup of pens on the right, a pile of receipts he was still cataloguing. There was nothing truly out of place, but it was nothing like the performed tidiness I had come to expect from Kenna either.

I pulled Trick’s sunglasses off the collar of my shirt and set them in the center of the desk where he would be sure to find them. As I turned to leave, however, my attention snagged on something that didn’t quite belong.

Trick’s laptop was closed, but beside it a small black notebook lay open. Narrow, unassuming, and faintly familiar in the specific way that certain objects became familiar after months of training.

I didn’t touch it. I didn’t lean in to read it properly. But even from where I stood, I could make out the familiar shape of two columns—names or initials on the left, numbers on the right. Unable to help myself, my eyes moved down the page with the involuntary momentum of someone who already knew they shouldn’t be looking.

R.T. 2,000.

D.W.H. 4,300.

Something crossed out that I couldn’t make out.

M.M.P. 6,275.

I looked away. Whatever else was on that page was none of my business, and I had already seen more than I had standing to act on. The shape of those two columns was enough to tell me that I was looking at a bookie’s ledger. I had studied one or two during my time at the Academy, after all.

That training had been extensive, running the New Agent Trainees through case after case, making us familiar with all the major federal criminals and their known modus operandi. Everything from terrorists and serial killers to white collar criminals and mob bosses were covered in our education, and now none of that information was of any use to me.

I clenched my fists and turned my back on the evidence that in another life I would have seen as my duty to address. But so much of my life had changed in the past two months and even if I was inclined to bring Trick down for his minor crimes, that would only make me a hypocrite. It was Trick’s criminal activities that allowed me to become Hale Hastings, after all.

I pivoted and walked out of Trick’s office, determined to put what I’d seen out of my mind. Except, as I closed the door behind me and looked down the hall that led back to the kitchen, my gaze caught on the door to the boiler room. It was unremarkable, slightly scuffed at the bottom the way doors got when people pushed them open with their feet because their hands were full, and with that little black book still in the back of my mind all the little clues I hadn’t realized I was picking up on began clicking together with perfect clarity.

I’d been given most Mondays off, and I had never once questioned it because the one Monday I had been scheduled to work showed me that the place was dead after the weekend rush, all the regulars scattering back to their lives. It was a shift easy enough for Trick to handle without paying additional staff.

But now my fingers tapped restlessly against my leg as scattered moments on Sunday nights resurfaced: the guy in the crisp button-down asking for fish and chips, which we didn’t serve, his disappointment vanishing when Trick caught his eye and passed him a whiskey with a nod. Then there was the blonde woman in that striking red dress who had passed Trick what I’d assumed was her phone number—but those stacked figures could just as easily have been odds and wagers. Even the winking regular who’d mentioned ordering a boilermaker ‘for good luck’ followed by Trick’s too-loud laugh cutting through the dim music.

The meaning of those words had sailed over my head then, but I understood it now. I finally got the joke. Mug+Shots didn’t need heating equipment—but it sure as hell could use a place to hide playing cards, poker chips, and stacks of cash brought in from its secret gambling ring.

My fingers hovered inches from the doorknob, a strange electricity running through them. What lay on the other side of this door? What was Trick really hiding in his so-called ‘boiler room’?

The buzz of my phone against my leg broke the spell. I let my hand fall and checked the message.

Noah:

Landed in D.C.

I let out a breath of air, slow and measured, turning my back on the door. Noah was handling what I couldn’t anymore, and I’d left that life behind—the badge, the rules, the responsibility to uphold every letter of the law.

Whatever Trick was running down there—poker games, drug deals, maybe even knock off Gucci bags—it wasn’t my problem unless someone was getting hurt. And from what I could see, nobody was being forced to participate.

Walking away from the ‘boiler room’ door, I sent back a quick good luck to Noah, praying that he could do what he’d gone to D.C. to accomplish and get some answers out of Vienna Quinn about the part she played in Monica’s death.

He had a hard task ahead of him. Fixers like Quinn were a fascinating element of the crime world, operating mostly in grey areas and knowing the law better than most lawyers, all to cover their asses while they cleaned up the messes of the elite or anyone who could scrape together enough to cover their exorbitant fees.

Preoccupied with thoughts of what Noah might actually be able to get out of Quinn once he tracked her down, I silenced my phone and made my way to the front of house to begin my shift. Mug+Shots was already humming, conversations layered over the clink of glassware and music playing in the background, pulling it all together in a low buzz of noise. I slipped behind the counter, tied my apron, and let muscle memory take over as I clocked in.

I was pouring a pitcher of lager when Trick returned from working the floor, arms stacked with empty glasses. He slid them into the sink and gave me a once-over.

“You look suspiciously well rested,” he said.

I snorted. “That’s not the compliment you think it is.”

“Seriously,” he said. “You usually come in looking like you’ve been arguing with gravity all day and you desperately need a coffee before you can function.”

“I would never say no to a latte,” I told him. “But I am a little more rested than usual. I fell asleep on the couch this afternoon. Almost missed my shift and definitely missed dinner. I put in an order of fries with Mario, though.”

He grimaced. “That’s not dinner.”

“It’s potatoes,” I argued. “That counts.”

“No it doesn’t,” he said flatly, already turning toward the kitchen. “You’re getting chicken tenders too.”

“I didn’t order⁠—”

“I’ll put them in myself if I have to,” he cut in. “I’m not watching you run on salt and spite all night. Last thing we need is you dropping glasses because your hands are shaky.”

“That happened one time,” I protested, feeling heat rise in my cheeks.

“And that was one time too many,” he said. “Just say thank you.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, recognizing the particular irritability of someone who hadn’t eaten since morning and was losing an argument they deserved to lose.

“Thank you,” I finally said.

He paused and glanced back, blinking once before his expression shifted into something insufferably smug and he pointed a finger gun at me. “You’re welcome.”

Then, he disappeared into the kitchen.

I stared at the space he was just in, the juxtaposition of Trick the forger and Trick the bookie reconciling itself in my mind. Nothing about him had changed in the last hour. He still moved through the bar the same way he always had, falling into the practiced rhythm of stacking glassware, pouring drinks, and commanding the floor like it was an extension of his own body.

Minutes ago, I’d discovered the scope of his operation stretched far beyond what I had first assumed, but watching him now, Trick hadn't transformed at all. The revelation had altered only my perception of him, not the man himself.

I thought about the ID in my wallet with my photograph and a name that didn’t legally belong to me, and the two months of paychecks I had received in cash with no paper trail attached to them, and I decided that I was in absolutely no position to have an opinion about Trick Cavanaugh’s business practices or even continue thinking about them.

If I ever found evidence that someone was being hurt—actually hurt, not just relieved of money they had wagered freely—I would figure out what to do with that when it happened. Until then, whatever was in that basement on Monday nights was between Trick, his regulars, and the IRS.

Chapter Eight

My impromptu nap on the couch the day before had thrown off my entire sleep schedule, leaving me wide awake before dawn despite only crawling into bed four hours before. I shifted, trying to convince my body to fall back asleep and instead only managed to wake up the dog sleeping beside me, his ears perked up and his tail sweeping against the mattress.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand—it was just past six a.m. and there was no chance I was going to fall back asleep now. So, instead, I kicked off the covers, watching as Rogue sprang up, tail wagging with anticipation. I got out of bed and grabbed my running shorts and tank top from the closet, deciding it was time to resurrect my old morning routine now that I was settled in at the cottage.

“Just a second,” I muttered as Rogue jumped off the bed and pressed his face up against the closed bedroom door, though I couldn’t blame him. I felt that same buzz of energy—that specific restlessness that came when your body had precisely enough sleep to keep you upright and refused to waste another minute horizontal.

Outside, the temperature was perfect—cool and dry, a breeze that hinted at the high desert heat still an hour or two away. I stretched in the front yard while watching Rogue conduct his assessment of the perimeter, sniffing along the edge of the driveway with the focused intensity of someone who took their responsibilities seriously.

My whistle caught his attention and he glanced up, eyes meeting mine in brief assessment before deliberately returning to the fascinating scent he’d been investigating. Only after another handful of sniffs did he trot over to my side, allowing me to clip the leash to his harness.

I decided that was as close to obedience as I could hope for and led him towards the driveway, starting off at a light jog to warm up. By the time we hit the main road and turned left, we had sped up to a genuine run.

I took in the area as we ran together. The few times I’d driven to and from the cottage I had been navigating the roads rather than looking at the neighborhood, and the area was different when you viewed it on foot. As much as a few sporadic houses separated by acres of land could be considered a neighborhood at least.

At the end of the third mile I decided to turn around and head back. Rogue’s ears perked up as my pace naturally quickened, running towards something rather than away from it always did that for me. He matched my stride, his paws hitting the pavement with a new urgency, ready to get back.

Waiting for us at home were the breadcrumbs of other people’s lives—manila folders bursting at the seams, crime scene photos paper-clipped to witness statements. Cases that deserved to be solved despite the time that had lapsed, turning them cold. My fingers itched to sort through it all, to find the single thread that, when pulled, would unravel the whole tapestry.

My heart rate picked up, not from the exertion but from anticipation.

When we got back to the long driveway I came to a stop, needing to cool down. Rogue looked up at me, panting lightly, and I tilted my head. Could I trust him to be off-leash or would he bolt South again, toward the river where Lexi’s body was found? Did some canine instinct tell him she was no longer there, or would he forever feel that pull guiding him back to her watery grave over and over again like a ghost forced to haunt their greatest moment of trauma?

I decided there was only one way to find out and quickly unhooked him, preparing to chase after him just in case. Rogue stayed at my side, though his body hummed with energy—muscles quivering under his coat, paws dancing on the gravel. He looked like he was ready to bolt and it was taking everything in him not to, but his focus was pointed towards the cottage rather than the distant river that had once been Lexi’s grave.

“Ready to go home?” I asked softly. His ears shot forward. I couldn’t help but smile, shaking my head. Rogue’s intelligence never failed to amaze me. “Alright, buddy, let’s go!”

We exploded down the driveway together, gravel crunching beneath our feet. For three strides we were neck and neck before he unleashed what he’d been holding back all morning—that effortless canine acceleration that made my fastest sprint look like wading through molasses. I laughed as he pulled ahead, my own legs pumping harder in hopeless competition. He beat me to the cottage by twenty yards, wheeling around with renewed energy, then charging straight at me before veering sideways as zoomies took over. I slowed to a stop, grinning as I watched him race around the driveway in circles for a few moments before he truly wore himself out.

Leading him inside, I measured out his breakfast and waited until his breathing evened out before I let him have it. Olivia from Street Dog Hero had been thorough on the subject of bloat, which I was careful to avoid. The last thing either of us needed was a medical emergency.

While Rogue downed his breakfast I turned towards the kitchen with the determination of a woman facing down the first real battle of the day.

The space was organized the way everything Kenna touched always seemed to be. The silverware and spatulas were sorted into drawers by type, the spices were alphabetical, and the fridge contents were arranged by category from top to bottom. The freezer held identical meal prep containers of broccoli and cooked chicken alongside, unexpectedly, a box of frozen waffles and a carton of vanilla ice cream.

I began the process of making coffee, because that was something I was confident I could do without disturbing anything else in the house. I decided to make a full pot, enough to share when Kenna eventually came downstairs.

I was spreading butter on two toaster-warmed waffles when she appeared, barefoot and still wearing her pajamas. It felt like we had reversed roles from yesterday morning as I pulled two mugs out of the cupboard and slid one across the kitchen island towards her.

“Please tell me that isn’t your breakfast,” she said, a note of disappointment in her voice, eyes narrowed at the scene in front of her like it was a crime that needed to be solved.

“I’ll go to the grocery store and replace them this afternoon,” I said, in lieu of an apology. “But I needed something after my run, and I was hoping to get started on picking a case as soon as possible this morning.”

She paused, a faint expression of surprise in the arch of her brows before her whole face scrunched up in disbelief.

“Hale.” She said my name with the same tone she had used the first day we met, when she was guiding Trick towards the obvious answer of why she was back in town for the week. It made me feel like a child being gently but firmly led towards the correct answer. “You’re welcome to my waffles. You’re welcome to anything in the kitchen. But two frozen waffles does not a breakfast make.”

Then she was moving towards the fridge, pulling things out with a chaotic energy that I wasn’t used to seeing from her. She paused, glancing over her shoulder at me, the refrigerator still wide open and the light inside casting a glow on the wrinkled brow she sent in my direction.

“Are you allergic to nuts?” She asked, and when I shook my head, she made a satisfied sound and closed the fridge behind her again. I watched as she pulled two bowls from the cupboard and spooned Greek yogurt into each of them, measured chia seeds, scattered pecans, added fresh sliced strawberries and plump blackberries to the bowl before sliding one across the counter to me with the decisive energy of someone closing a negotiation.

I took it, unable to argue with her any better than I’d argued with Trick the night before. Instead, I accepted the act for what it was—the way the Cavanaugh children showed love through taking care of those around them. So, I pulled two spoons out of the drawer and handed one to her before I dug in, savoring both the flavor and the care that it represented.

“This is fantastic,” I told her.

“And it will keep you going considerably longer than frozen waffles could,” she replied, mixing her coffee with the same measuring-spoon precision I had noticed the day before.

I set my yogurt bowl down and began stowing the ingredients she’d laid out for us. After she went through the effort of making us breakfast it was the least I could do to keep her kitchen as orderly as she liked it.

“Okay this is officially getting disturbing,” she said, leaning back against the counter with her own yogurt bowl in her hands. “Why is it so important that you clean up before you let yourself eat?”

I paused with a container in hand. “It’s not. I just didn’t want to—well, you know.”

“I don’t know, actually,” Kenna said, setting her bowl aside and sipping her coffee. “Care to explain it to me?”

I hesitated, shrugged, and returned the yogurt tub to the counter, wrapping my hands around my breakfast and taking another deliberate bite as I considered what to say.

She watched me over the rim of her mug until she finally spoke. “I know this is all new, but it feels like you’re treating this place more like a museum than a home.”

“It’s just that you’re very… precise,” I said after a long moment of consideration. “Everything in your life has a place and a purpose. I don’t want to be the reason that’s disrupted and make you regret letting me stay here. I have a tendency to create a mess as I work. I mean, you can’t say I’m wrong. You looked so shocked by all those scattered files last night.”

“Oh,” Kenna said, leaning back against the counter with a look of understanding dawning on her. “I guess that makes sense. But order isn’t about freezing things in place, you know. It’s about knowing where they belong so you can restore them when chaos strikes. I don’t organize because I fear disorder. I do it because chaos is inevitable. But my system can handle more than a few stray papers.”

Her words eased a tension that had taken up residence in my chest after several days of observing her need for order. I knew I couldn’t keep everything perfect in the long term but knowing that I didn’t need to was a massive relief.

“And,” she added, picking up her mug again, “I didn’t invite you to live here because I wanted things to stay exactly the same. The face I made last night wasn’t because you made some big mess that I was annoyed about. It was because you elected to come home and work from the couch instead of using the office after I just gave you access to it. You can see why I might have wondered what the problem was.”

“It was the light,” I said after a long moment of consideration. Because she was right. She had given me the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, and I’d chosen to bring everything home instead.

“The light?” she asked, prompting me to continue.

“There are too many windows.” I explained, wincing even as I said it. Of all the things that I could complain about, the windows were probably going to be the hardest to change if she was dead set on us working out of that office. “Sorry, it’s just that for someone who is supposed to be keeping a low profile, especially with all those photos from my landlord, I felt too exposed sitting there with a whole wall of windows showing me off to the world. And I know the cottage also has a wall of windows, but I can see the entire backyard and know there’s no one watching. It’s different, being downtown.”

Something shifted in her expression—not quite chagrin, but close. She set her mug down and looked at me with an apologetic expression.

“I should have realized,” she said. “The PNW being what it is, I spend most of the year wishing I had more light in that office. It never even occurred to me that you might want less. But I think I have a solution. Let’s finish breakfast, then clean up the mess, and after that we can head over and see if there isn’t a way to make the space work for both of us.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering what her solution might be. Hopefully it was as simple as hanging some blinds and not forcing her to change to an interior office or, God forbid, deciding to renovate the place to have fewer windows.

That seemed like something a wealthy person might do on a whim, but I decided then and there that I would put my foot down and demand we install a few pull-down shades instead. And if that somehow wasn’t possible, I would simply tough it out. I didn’t need Kenna solving all my problems, after all.

“Now that we have that figured out,” she started as she picked up her mug again, pinning me with all of her focus and attention. “Why don’t you tell me about the cases. You said there’s a bulk request form I need to fill out to access the full archive?”

“Yeah, let me send you the link,” I said, pulling out my phone and doing so before I continued to explain. “The eight I have are just the ones marked cold in the past year. Once you put in the bulk request, we should have access to everything the county has on file.”

“And until then,” Kenna said. “We still have those eight cases to work with. Good. Which one are you most interested in?”

“The woman who disappeared from her home four years ago.” I replied, putting my phone away after sending Kenna the link and finally pulling my yogurt bowl back towards me. “Camille Nash.”

“I remember seeing that one,” Kenna nodded. “There’s not much to go on. If we want to make sure we’re solving these cases it might make sense to pick one with a little more of a trail to follow and build up momentum before digging into a case that doesn’t have legs.”

“All cold cases are cold because they didn’t ‘have legs’,” I replied.

“Why does it feel like there’s something you aren’t saying?” Kenna asked.

“There’s just something about this one that’s eating at me.” I shrugged and scraped the last of the yogurt from the bottom of the bowl, finishing it off before I continued. “People don’t just disappear without a trace, no matter what certain television shows would have you believe. And the detective on the case was either terrible at his job or he left his own notes out of the case file on purpose. Either way, I think that gives this case more to go on than meets the eye.”

“All right,” she said. “Camille Nash it is. But I reserve the right to point it out if we hit a dead end and need to move on to a different case.”

“That’s fine by me,” I told her. “Sometimes working on a new case is exactly what you need in order to make a break with an old one anyway.”

I kept my face as blank as possible in the silence that echoed from my words, but in my mind I could still remember Monica saying them to me back when we first met. I had been so innocent back then, so naive to just how bad things could get and how drastically my life could change.

And yet despite the changes, there were some things that stayed the same. I was no longer using the name Avery McHale but I was still working towards solving cases that no one else was looking at. I was still innocent no matter what the FBI said. And I was still a total coffee addict with a competitive streak a mile wide and an inability to leave well enough alone even after I’d spent years working a case.

My mother’s death might have been personal, but I knew my need to keep working on a case until I had it solved ran much deeper even than that.

“Good to know,” Kenna said as she finished off her coffee and nodded her head toward the front door. “Come on. I’d like to see if we can’t get the office set up to your liking before we start working on this case.”

Rogue claimed the patch of floor beneath one of the two client chairs as his own the moment we arrived, circling twice before settling in. Kenna raised an eyebrow at him, but she was also the one who had insisted we bring him, that the office was ours and he was an essential part of the team. As he looked back at her with the complete absence of apology, I bit my tongue to keep from asking what, exactly, she thought he brought to the charity. The answer was obvious, in that I always felt safer with him around, and if he was here, I wouldn’t be worried about getting home to let him out or feed him.

“So I feel a little dumb for forgetting to show you this,” Kenna said, turning her attention away from the dog and walking over to the far corner of the room where the glass of the windows met the wall of the office. She waved me over and I followed, brows furrowed until I was close enough to see a dial tucked away in the space between the glass and the last filing cabinet in the row.

“Is that a light dimmer?” I asked and then glanced back at the light switch across the room by the door. What was the point of having it all the way over here?

“Kind of,” Kenna replied. “It’s the switch for the smart glass. Watch.”

She reached out and turned the dial one click to the right and the light in the room immediately changed. It took me two seconds too long to make the connection and realize that the entire wall of glass in front of us had changed, becoming tinted like sunglasses. She clicked it again and the glass became even more opaque. I could still see through it slightly, but it left the room with the perfect amount of ambient light that I didn’t feel like I would spend the entire time squinting at the case files.

Then Kenna clicked it one last time and the window went dark the same way a two-way mirror in an interrogation room did and I stepped back, suddenly uncomfortable again. Suddenly I was slipping back into the memory of sitting on the wrong side of an interrogation room table, staring at my reflection in the darkened mirror with a streak of Monica’s blood still on my forehead. Before I could really lose myself in it Kenna noticed the change in my body language and switched it back to the previous setting, letting a little light back into the room.

“You can adjust the lighting and opacity to your preferences, and I probably won’t change them unless I really can’t see,” Kenna told me, thankfully not asking any of the questions I certainly could not answer. “Unfortunately, you’ll have to get up and walk over to the dial if you want to make a change. Somehow, I lost the remote and I’ve just accepted it isn’t going to be found.”

“You...lost it?” I asked, blinking a little as I turned to look at her.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m not really into screens. If I watch a T.V. show it’s streaming on my laptop. So remotes aren’t something I’m used to keeping track of.”

“Still,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “It doesn’t seem like you to lose something.”

“You’ve got me all wrong,” Kenna laughed. “All the systems and processes I have set up to keep things organized come from years of being too absent-minded to keep track of my stuff. And growing up the way I did, I had a lot of stuff.”

“Interesting,” I said, taking her in and trying to reconcile the woman I knew with the girl she was telling me she had once been.

“So, do you feel like you can work in here now?” she asked, moving backwards as she made her way to the center of the room and held out her hands like she was presenting the space to me. “I still plan to get you a desk of your own, but we can share until then.”

“Yeah,” I replied, looking around the room and feeling much more at home and far less exposed. “This will do nicely.”

“Excellent,” Kenna grinned at me and pulled a whiteboard marker from the top drawer of her desk, passing it over to me. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

I took the marker from her, uncapping it as I wrote Camille Nash in the center of the board, printing out her maiden name underneath in smaller letters, and the words Missing—4 years beneath that. The marker moved smoothly across the board, and I paused for a fraction of a second, running my thumb along the edge of the tray. There was no ink residue there, no faint marks from previous investigations. Either Kenna was as meticulous about cleaning the board between cases as she was about most other things, or this was the first time this board was being used.

I kept writing, putting all the known details of the case in plain view so we could both work off the same information. From Camille’s name I drew lines to other people in her life, and the structure of her network began to take shape—Ian Nash, her husband. Maria Gibbs, her mother. Marisol Vega, her best friend. Finishing the last of the connecting lines between them and stepping back, I looked at the web of relationships that might lead us to wherever Camille had gone, or how she had been taken. Then, realizing there was a detail missing, I added Ian’s first wife, Rebecca Nash, and connected her to him. The lack of connection between Rebecca and Camille was glaring, the two women bridged only by the man they had both loved.

Kenna perched herself against the desk as she watched me work, tapping a finger against her bottom lip. She looked like she was trying to put together a puzzle with only half the pieces, and I felt the same way. “What are you thinking?” I asked, stepping back to take in the bigger picture.

“There’s someone involved in the case who isn’t on the board,” she replied, and I nodded, immediately following her train of thought.

“Dt. Trivett has to know more about the case than he’s put in the file,” I agreed. “Which means we need to get a hold of him and see what he knows before we start speculating without having all the relevant information.”

“I’ve got this,” Kenna told me, pulling out her phone. She clicked a few buttons and then held out the phone between us. Rogue’s head perked up as the sound of ringing filled the office, but by the second ring he had decided there was no threat and returned to dozing.

“Bend Police Department, Gwen speaking. How may I direct your call?” the voice on the other end of the line answered with a bright but professional tone.

“Hi, Gwen, it’s Kenna Scott. I’m hoping to get in touch with Detective Blake Trivett about a case I’m working. Could you possibly patch me through?”

“Oh, Kenna, hi!” Gwen replied, that brightness in her voice elevating further as she recognized who Kenna was. I saw the slight crinkle at the corners of Kenna’s eyes and took that to mean the two women were friendly acquaintances. Gwen’s voice immediately shifted to a more somber tone as she delivered the bad news. “Unfortunately, Blake went on vacation for the fourth and he won’t be back for another two days. Is this urgent or would you like to leave him a voicemail?”

“It’s not urgent,” Kenna assured her. “I was just hoping to pick his brain. If you could transfer me to his voicemail that would be great.”

“Can do,” Gwen replied. “It was good hearing from you, Ken. Patching you through now.”

“Thanks, Gw—” Kenna started to say, but Gwen had already transferred her before she could get the words out. We sat there silently as we waited for Dt. Trivett’s voicemail message to play through. Then, after the beep, Kenna continued. “Hi, Detective Trivett, this is McKenna Scott from the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity, formerly Cavanaugh Investigations. I’d like to speak with you about a cold case of yours that our charity has taken on. If you could call me back when you get this, I would appreciate it.”

Kenna rattled off her phone number and then hung up.

“Well,” I said, “Looks like talking to the detective is off the table for another day or two.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Kenna suggested. “It will give us time to look at the case with fresh eyes before taking on his preconceived notions of what happened.”

“Good point,” I told her, nodding along. “Now the only question is where do we start?”

“Money talks,” she told me as she turned to the desk and opened the laptop sitting on it. “If Camille was planning to disappear, her bank statements would show it, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I agreed, “but people talk louder, and numbers can’t tell us what her best friend knew, the secrets or fears she would only divulge to the people closest to her.”

“Right, but numbers don’t lie or forget important details,” Kenna pointed out, fingers hovering over the keyboard like she actually expected to be able to access the financial records. They were referenced in the case file, one of the few things that Trivett had written down was that there was no sign in her bank accounts that Camille was stashing cash away or siphoning it into a secret account. But aside from that, no actual financial records had been kept in the case file.

“That’s fair,” I conceded. “But numbers only tell us how and when. They can’t tell us why she might have left—or what would motivate someone to take her. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a way to access other people’s financial records, cold case victims or not.”

“There’s all kinds of financial information you can find from public records and tax filings, but I’m willing to follow your lead. If you think the people are the place to start, then we start there.” She glanced at the board, lips pressed into a thin line. “We should talk to the husband first. It’s always the husband.”

“Except when it isn’t,” I said, thinking of my father sitting across a table from Detective Pearson, whose alibi was airtight and who had still spent hours answering the same questions in different configurations until the case went cold.

I reached for my phone and dialed the number that was on file for Ian Nash. His original phone number was crossed out, the new one written by hand and the words ‘moved to Flagstaff’ next to it. It was one of the few instances that showed Trivett had done any work on the case at all. The line connected after three rings.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end was cautious and confused. I was glad he had at least bothered to pick up. These days if someone didn’t recognize the number calling there was a high chance they would let it go to voicemail.

“Mr. Nash,” I said, mimicking the tone that Gwen had taken, a cross between warm and professional that would hopefully keep him on the line and talking. “This is Hale Hastings with the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity. We’re conducting a fresh review of the unresolved disappearances in Oregon that have been marked cold in the last year. I’m reaching out about your wife’s case.”

The silence lasted only a moment before he drew a sharp breath. “You’ve found something about Camille?”

“We haven’t made any discoveries yet,” I told him, hearing the eagerness in his voice and feeling a spike of guilt at getting his hopes up prematurely. This was all a learning process, but I decided then and there that I would always start with making it clear that there were no changes in the cases I called about. “We’ve only just begun to look into Camille’s disappearance. My partner and I were hoping to ask you some preliminary questions if you have a moment.”

“Yes,” he said right away. “Of course. Whatever you need.”

Kenna and I shared a look, the immediacy of his reply more suspect than if he had simply asked a few questions first or outright refused to entertain us.

“Is there anything you can tell us about Camille’s disappearance that didn’t make it into the reports?” I asked. “Anything you remembered afterward, or that the detective didn’t take as seriously as you thought he should have?”

Kenna’s expression turned from skeptical to confused. These weren’t the standard questions and she knew it. They were the ones that mattered to me, however, and the ones most likely to crack open a case that had sat unsolved for three years.

There was a pause on the line, and then, “Detective Trivett handled everything thoroughly. When questions about Rebecca—my first wife—came up he didn’t jump to conclusions. Unlike both Rebecca and Camille’s families. He was skeptical about their insane theory that I somehow played a part in both of their cases. Have you spoken with Trivett yet?”

“We’ve reached out but weren’t able to get ahold of him. We’ll keep trying,” I told him. “Speaking of Rebecca—you married Camille only six months after your first wife passed. Did you know Camille before Rebecca died?”

“I know what you’re implying, and no.” His voice went soft, almost careful. “The first time I met Camille was two weeks after Rebecca’s funeral. I was still raw, barely functioning. And then she walked into my life—bright, fearless, chaotic. She had this freckle on her thumb.”

“Her thumb?” I glanced down at my own hands without meaning to, imagining what it might look like to have a freckle there that was so distinct someone else talked about it years later. Were there people in my old life who wondered where I was—not just out of curiosity about the girl who killed Monica but because they loved me? My father and my aunt. Maybe Phoebe and Marissa from the Academy, or Juliette who I hadn’t even heard from since high school.

Of course they would reminisce about the parts of me they liked best. My red hair, my dimples when I smile. Maybe even the mole on my shoulder. I was quickly distracted from that train of thought as Ian replied.

“It was right there on the side of her nailbed—this dark speck that stood out and that caught my eye the moment she offered me her business card.” He laughed quietly. “I fell for her fast. Too fast, maybe. But she made it impossible not to. It was a whirlwind. Everything about her was like lightning in a bottle.”

“And after she disappeared?! I prompted.

His voice caught for just a moment. “I never stopped looking. I’ve held onto this foolish hope every single day that there might be some new lead. Detective Trivett still returns my calls, doesn’t mind that I check in with him once a month, just in case. My family says I should move on, but how do you move on when half your heart is missing?”

My throat tightened, caught off guard by the vulnerability in his voice. Before the silence stretched too long Kenna leaned toward the phone.

“Mr. Nash, Kenna Scott, head investigator at C4,” she introduced herself. “In order to properly investigate this matter, we’re going to need formal permission to access your wife’s records—medical, financial, legal. Could you email us your consent? It would streamline the process considerably.”

“Of course,” Ian said without hesitation. “I can send that right away.”

My eyebrow lifted. Even cooperative people usually hesitated at blanket consent. Kenna recited the Cavanaugh Investigations email address without missing a beat and the rapid sound of Ian’s keyboard carried through the phone as he drafted and sent the email Kenna had requested before we’d finished the call.

After brief goodbyes I hung up and set the phone down on the desk, looking at Kenna and waiting to hear her thoughts before I voiced any of my own.

“That was interesting,” Kenna said, moving to the desk chair and sitting down. I leaned against the desk, too restless to sit. I knew if we were about to begin theorizing on the case it was likely that I would start pacing anyway. I gestured for Kenna to keep going and she shrugged, sending an isn’t it obvious? look towards me. “Most husbands try to limit an investigator’s access. Not hand over the keys.”

“Which means that either he knows there’s nothing for us to find or he’s desperate to get answers and convinced there are still some to find,” I said.

“You’re not?” she asked.

I looked at the whiteboard, at Camille’s name in the center of it, and shook my head. “Three years is a long time to vanish. Which means either she had a very good reason to stay gone, or⁠—”

“We’re looking for remains, not a reunion,” Kenna finished.

“And yet he’s still searching,” I said. “So, the question remains, is he the grieving husband who can’t let go, or is he someone who stays close to the investigation because it’s the smart thing to do?”

“Either way, we’re going to find the answer.” Kenna closed her laptop and grabbed her tote bag, her energy shifting from brainstorming to action. “You know what? You were right about the in-person approach. If I was to track down Simon Crawford, I’m not going to find him in his financial reports, which means I need to start with the people who are closest to him.”

“Who is Simon Crawford?” I asked, taken off guard by the sudden change in topic and the way Kenna was clearly preparing to leave when we had only just begun to make headway on this case.

Kenna looked up from where she was sorting through her bag to make her laptop fit, surprise and then understanding flickering across her face.

“Simon Crawford is the name of your sleazy ex-landlord.” She said it with a matter-of-fact efficiency. “He owns three apartment complexes on the east side of Bend. High turnover rate with renters.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I have my ways,” she said with a mysterious smile that would have made me uncomfortable if I didn’t already know which side of this she was on. “With any luck I should be face to face with Crawford by end of day.”

“Good luck,” I said and watched as she left before I turned back to the case board and uncapped the marker, continuing to outline the hole that Camille Nash had left behind with her disappearance. The system had let her vanish into it, but we wouldn’t.

Not if I had anything to say about it.

Chapter Nine

I activated the smart glass after Kenna left, watching the windows go opaque with slight disbelief. The outside world simply gone; no one able to see in and no harsh light filling the space. The city noise didn’t disappear entirely, but it was easier to ignore, and for the first time in days I felt secure. This place was unlisted. No one knew I was here, and no one could see me.

Outside of the cottage, this was the closest I could get to total privacy.

Rogue watched me from the client chair, chin on the armrest, tracking my movement between the desk and the whiteboard. The slow thump of his tail against the cushion was the only sound besides my own footsteps as I rounded the desk and sat down, trying to get used to the idea of working from a desk if Kenna was so insistent that she needed to buy me one.

I had to admit, her office chair was more comfortable than any of the ones I’d sat in, but I still wasn’t quite comfortable sitting with my back straight and my feet on the ground. It was too stiff, too corporate. Luckily the seat was wide enough that I could cross my legs and once I’d done so I felt like I could finally concentrate.

Smoothing out the legal pad where I’d written down the names and numbers of everyone I planned to call, I took a deep breath and got to work.

It took four rings before Camille’s younger sister picked up.

“Hello?” she said, sounding wary.

“Hi,” I started. “My name is Hale Hastings. I’m hoping to talk to you about the disappearance of your sister Camille.”

I barely got through her name before I was interrupted.

“Haven’t we been through this enough already?” she asked. “We’ve talked to the Police, the private detectives, even those ridiculous psychics. All of them were dead ends.”

“I’m not with any law enforcement agency,” I said carefully. “I’m with the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity and⁠—”

“I’m not interested,” she said, cutting me off. “Do not call again.”

The line went dead.

I put an x next to the sister’s name and moved on.

Camille’s best friend answered with measured politeness that lasted exactly forty-three seconds before something in her snapped. The laugh that came out of her sounded like glass breaking.

“Everyone promises something new,” she said. “But you’re all the same vultures circling the same dead story.”

“I only want to piece together who Camille truly was⁠—”

“Before she disappeared?” the woman scoffed. “I doubt she’s the same person she was back then. Besides, if Camille had wanted to be found, she would be by now.”

The line went dead.

I put another x next to her best friend’s name as well.

Camille’s mother, Maria Gibbs, answered on the third ring. Her voice was a whisper-thin thread that seemed to fray with each syllable, as though she’d spent years carefully measuring how much of herself to give away to strangers asking about her daughter.

“My daughter warned me you might call,” she said, cutting me off halfway through my introduction. “And I need you to stop. Stop harassing my family. Stop looking for Camille. Just stop, please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to cause any harm. I just want to help.”

“What you’re doing isn’t helping,” she said firmly. “Enough damage has been done by looking for Camille already.”

“Can you tell me what you mean by that?” I asked, searching for any point of leverage to keep this call going. If anyone knew Camille, it would be her mother, and if I couldn’t get Maria Gibbs on my side then I would lose a treasure trove of information that could help me find her.

The line hummed with silence. Each breath Maria took seemed measured, as if she were counting in her head, trying to stay calm rather than blow up at me over the phone for bringing her daughter’s case back into the light of day.

“We were so certain,” she finally said, a rasp in her voice that told me there were tears in her eyes. “So certain that Ian was responsible for Camille’s disappearance, and that she wasn’t his first victim. We badgered Detective Trivett over and over again until he convinced Rebecca’s family to agree to an exhumation. To allow us to disturb their daughter’s grave, because it would prove once and for all that Camille was dead as well.”

My grip tightened on the phone. That explained why Rebecca’s death certificate and autopsy were mixed in with Camille’s file, at least.

“But Rebecca died the way they said she did,” Maria continued. “There was no foul play, no proof that Ian killed anyone. All that certainty and righteous anger and what did it get us? All we managed to do was accuse an innocent man and tear open another family’s grief, and for what? No, Camille’s disappearance has ruined enough lives. Knowing what happened to her won’t bring her back.”

“I understand,” I said, keeping my voice soft.

“I don't think you do,” she replied. “If Camille is gone, then let her be gone. Please.”

And again, the line went dead.

I set the phone down and rubbed a hand across my face, suddenly feeling exhausted after less than an hour of dead-end calls. Putting an x next to Maria Gibbs, I sighed and rifled through the desk to locate the Tylenol I knew Kenna had stashed in there.

Moving to the credenza I pulled a bottled water from the mini fridge and took the medication, downing half the bottle in the process before putting it back.

Rogue lifted his head as I crossed to the client chairs then, crouching down beside him and pressing my fingers into the thick fur at the back of his neck, closing my eyes against the headache forming there.

I stayed there petting him with my eyes scrunched shut and my brow creased, thinking about the case while I waited for the pain to ease.

Every door around Camille was slamming shut. There were no coffee meetings or interviews to attend. No soft recollections and nostalgic smiles that would lead to clues the family didn’t even know they were still holding onto.

There was just exhaustion and the collective decision amongst those closest to Camille to simply leave all their unanswered questions in the past.

Still, none of them had spoken about Camille as though they thought she was dead and gone. Instead, they spoke of dead ends, told me to stop looking, begged me to leave well enough alone.

It was like their refusal to talk was a coordinated agreement to close ranks.

But they weren’t the only people connected to this case. As the ache in my head began to clear I stood up and pulled myself together, striding back over to the desk. I started putting together another page full of names and numbers—everyone I could find who had known Rebecca Nash.

But as I began making those calls, I received an even chillier response. Rebecca’s mother hung up the moment I said Rebecca’s name. None of her siblings even bothered to pick up, and the only cousin I could get into contact with said he didn’t trust investigators to know their head from their ass and hung up.

By the fourth rejection the pattern was clear. This wasn’t a family closing ranks, but one that had experienced so much pain they didn’t have the ability to go through any more. It seemed like the exhumation had burned something between these two families, but it had also brought them to the same certainty that there was nothing for me to find and that nothing I said or did was going to get through to them.

Not today, at least.

I sighed and stood up again, looking at the whiteboard with resignation. Camille’s name was in the center of it all, with every line stretching out towards a dead end. Ian Nash was the only person in Camille’s life who had answered the phone and sounded hopeful when I explained who I was and what I was doing. He was the only person who still believed Camille could be found—and the only one still talking.

Popping the cap off the dry erase marker I wrote family closing rank = hiding something? on the board beneath Camille’s name and then turned back to the desk where the paperwork was spread across the surface like fallen dominoes, resigned to what came next.

Because the living may not be willing to speak, but the documents didn’t have a choice, and it seemed that the paper trail I’d been avoiding until now was the only path forward.

The records office was quiet in the way only bureaucratic spaces ever were—muted voices, keyboards tapping, the soft shuffle of paper being moved from one place to another. It didn’t care why you were there. Only whether you had the right forms.

Rose wasn’t at the front desk today. A man stood in her place, sleeves rolled to his forearms, glasses perched low on his nose as he scanned a screen. A half-empty coffee mug sat at his elbow and a stack of manila folders waited at the edge of the counter. A laminated name tag—the same size and font as the one Rose had worn—was clipped to his breast pocket and told me that his name was Mark. He looked up as I approached, a neutral expression on his face.

“Morning,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

“I’d like anything you have tied to the name Camille Nash or Camille Gibbs,” I said, setting my folder on the counter. “Marriage licenses, property records, civil suits—anything you can find. And the same for Ian Nash and Rebecca Nash while you’re at it. Maiden name Baxter.”

“Right,” he said, already frowning as he typed up my request. “You’re with the charity that tried to bulk request all of our cold cases yesterday without the proper form.”

“That’s me.”

He worked in silence. I stepped slightly to the side of the counter to let a woman with a thick accordion file pass behind me, and when she was gone, I stayed where I was, hands loose at my sides, waiting.

“I can pull most of this,” he said without looking up. “Property transfers, licenses, complaints. But Rebecca Nash’s autopsy—” He shook his head once. “That’s restricted. You’ll need next of kin authorization.”

“That won’t be a problem,” I replied. “I have consent from her husband.”

He looked up. “You do? Do you have it with you?”

“I do.” I unlocked my phone, pulled up the email Kenna had forwarded to me, and turned the screen toward him. Ian Nash’s name sat at the top, the language broad—permission to access his wife’s medical, legal, and financial records in connection with an ongoing investigation.

Mark didn’t take the phone. His gaze moved over it, then back to me.

“This email,” he said slowly, “is addressed to a Cavanaugh Investigations account.”

“That’s correct.”

“And you are?”

“Hale Hastings,” I said. “Volunteer investigator assigned to the case.”

His frown deepened as he squinted at my phone screen.

“Do you have a Cavanaugh Investigations email address yourself,” he asked. “Or any identifying paperwork connecting you to the organization?”

“No,” I said, already making a mental note to ask Kenna to set one up, because this was not going to be the last time I needed to prove I was who I said I was.

“Do you have an email from Mr. Nash addressed directly to you that specifies access to his late wife’s records? It says wife here, but he had two.” Mark’s eyebrows raised, in a way that told me he knew the answer but expected me to say it anyway.

“I do not,” I said, watching in frustration as the metaphorical red tape began to unspool in front of me with all the indifference of bureaucracy.

“And is there even a signed next of kin authorization form attached to this email?”

“No,” I said. “But⁠—”

He raised a hand, cutting me off. “I’m not saying I think you fabricated this, Ms. Hastings, but I also can’t verify that you didn’t. Anyone can make an email that looks legitimate, so without a signed next of kin authorization form or a court order, I cannot release that record.”

I exhaled through my nose and nodded once. The restriction was reasonable and I knew it. This was how the system ensured that people couldn’t come in off the street and get private information, and Mark was just doing his job.

Besides, I already had the exhumation autopsy through the case file. I didn’t need the original and I didn’t need the argument that attempting to get it would cause, either.

“All right,” I said, raising my hands in surrender. “I’ll take whatever you can give me, then.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Something in the man’s posture eased as he shifted into action, typed a few more words into the computer, and disappeared into the back. I moved to the side of the counter to wait, just like before, rolling my shoulders out to release the tension.

While I waited, I decided to text Kenna about the work email and got a quick thumbs up in response. Mark returned several minutes later with a neat stack of freshly copied pages.

Both marriage licenses, a small stack of property records and address histories, and other various county records. People’s lives on paper, orderly and contained, telling the story that no one else was willing to tell.

As I gathered the files, Rose appeared from down the hallway, a coffee in one hand and the last of a sandwich in the other. She smiled brightly when she saw me, though I caught the edge of dread underneath it.

“Back so soon?” she asked.

“Don’t worry, I got everything I needed today,” I said, preemptively. “And I’m sorry about the bulk request. No need to rush it—those cold cases have gone unsolved this long. You can take your time. The last thing I want is for you to resent me considering how often I plan to be in here.”

She laughed. “You caught me. The idea of collating all those files has my head spinning.”

“Imagine trying to dive into all of them,” I replied.

She pulled a mock expression of horror and we both laughed, and then Rose lifted her coffee in a small farewell salute as she ducked into a door that I assume would lead to the back of the clerk’s office.

I nodded back toward Mark. “Thanks again for your help.”

“Anytime,” he replied, his expression blank and his eyes back on the computer in front of him, as if I didn’t even exist. I frowned and tucked the files under my arm, heading back to the office with a potential stack of leads in my future.

Chapter Ten

I had only been skimming through the paperwork for approximately five minutes before Rogue lifted his head from the client chair, the sound of the lock on the office door clicking.

I looked up from the stack of paperwork to find Kenna standing in the doorway, observing me. The moment she realized I knew she was there she strode forward, setting her bag on top of the files I had spread across the desk.

“It’s time to go home,” she said by way of greeting.

“I can get a rideshare home in a few hours,” I replied, setting her bag to the side so I could continue to highlight the paperwork in front of me.

“We agreed this wasn’t going to be a full-time job but look at you.” She tilted her head slightly. “If you keep working like this I’m going to have to insist on paying you.”

“I took a long break in the middle,” I replied, my tone defensive. Threats of payment were the last thing I needed. “Rogue and I went for a walk, got some exercise.”

“Rogue,” she said, looking at him, “what do you think? Dinnertime?”

“That was diabolical,” I said as I watched Rogue’s tail move with wild abandon at the word ‘dinner’, jumping up from the spot in the chair he had claimed as his and trotting over to Kenna to give her wide pleading eyes.

I knew when I was defeated.

“Tell me what you found while I put these away,” I sighed, gesturing at the paperwork. “Then we’ll go.”

She sat down in the chair that Rogue hadn’t taken up residence in all day as I pulled a fresh manila folder out of the top drawer and began organizing the forms into three piles—one for Ian, one for Rebecca, and one for Camille.

“I talked to your neighbors,” Kenna said, watching how familiar I was with the space. “Everyone who was home and willing to open their door said the same thing.”

The knot of tension that lived in my chest these days pulled tighter. “Which was?”

“Every single one of them had some version of your story,” she told me. “Items moved around or misplaced. Doors unlocked when they were certain they’d locked them. Food missing, appliances unplugged. One woman swore she heard footsteps in her apartment while she was in the shower, but when she came out the room was empty and the door was locked.”

My jaw tightened. That did sound like exactly what I had experienced.

“Did anyone else get gifts?” I asked.

“No,” Kenna replied softly. “No one else reported any gift baskets, personal notes, or photographs. Whatever Simon had going on with you, it escalated beyond what he was doing to anyone else. What’s more, he’s not answering his phone or his office door despite posted hours. I haven’t pinned down his home address yet, but I would bet anything he isn’t answering that door either.”

“So he’s hiding out,” I said. “Waiting for all of this to blow over.”

“Probably.” She paused, then added, “I was able to speak with both his mother and his girlfriend.”

“And?”

“Formidable women,” she said, a hint of respect in her voice. “Strong willed and opinionated. Certain they know what’s best for him and willing to tell anyone who will listen. But neither of them has heard from him since Friday.”

I paused at the filing cabinet that I was about to put the folders into. I could feel the part of my brain shaped by interrogation rooms and procedural rules beginning to run calculations. It was the same part of me that knew exactly how quickly a narrative could form around the wrong evidence.

“Kenna,” I said slowly, turning back to her and closing the filing cabinet. “You know what that looks like, right? We were the last ones to have a conflict with him, and now he's gone.”

She crossed her arms, leaning back in her chair as she considered my words.

“He’s not dead.”

“We don’t know that,” I replied. “But even if he is alive, his absence will cause the people in his life to fill in the gaps with whatever narrative makes the most sense to them. And right now, we make the most sense.”

“Hale,” she said, her gaze holding mine as she leaned forward, resting her hands on the edge of the desk. “We are not the bad guys here and no one is suggesting we are. When we confronted him, we were together, and we left together. That makes us witnesses at best.”

“That’s not always how it plays out.”

She studied my face for a moment, like she was looking for the answers she knew I couldn’t give her, about what had brought me to Bend and why I couldn’t talk about it. I returned her look with a blank wall, praying that she would drop it.

“That’s true,” she said after a long moment. “But this isn’t just your word against his. I documented everything that happened that day, just in case you decided to bring a case against him. I have dates, times, and locations all written down. And now, I have statements from his other tenants about potential misconduct.”

“That’s impressive,” I said, raising an eyebrow. I knew she was thorough, but I hadn’t known she would do something like that. And there was still that lingering fear at the back of my mind, that she was being just as thorough about investigating me as she was about everything else. Keep your friends close and your brother’s strange new employee closer.

“We are each other’s alibis,” Kenna said, mistaking the unease in my expression for fear that Simon’s disappearance would fall on my shoulders. “You aren’t alone in this, Hale. I’ve got your back.”

“Thank you,” I said, only slightly missing a beat before filling the silence. Kenna Scott did not like to leave mysteries alone any better than I did, but that didn’t mean she was incapable of leaving something alone if asked, and I hadn’t found any evidence that she was still investigating me. Trusting her was the only choice I had.

“We’re partners,” she replied, her words echoing my thoughts from a different direction. “That’s what we do.”

I glanced down at my hands, wishing I could simply tell her the truth. Someday, maybe, once I’d cleared my name.

“You’re right,” I said. “He’s probably just hiding from our confrontation.”

“Probably,” she agreed, her jaw set as if she had already decided how this would go. “People like him try to disappear when their control slips. But they always come back looking to reestablish it. And when he resurfaces? He’ll find the ground has shifted while he was away.”

Chapter Eleven

Saturday morning, I stood at the counter in socked feet, wearing my only pair of running shorts and a sweater. I hadn’t made a whole lot of progress on the records I’d gathered. I mulled it over in my head, watching diced potatoes sizzle in the cast-iron skillet, becoming crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. Fluffy scrambled eggs waited in a dish beside the stove, along with grilled onions, peppers, and mushrooms in another.

It was real food, the kind of meal you made when you needed your body to cooperate after a rough night.

My head felt thick with the residue of spending too much time staring at screens and trying to think my way through the problem of Camille Nash. It felt like I had been slamming my head against a wall, or like waking up with an awful hangover, without the benefit of having earned one.

Behind me, the floorboards creaked.

“That smells amazing,” Kenna said, and I glanced over my shoulder to find her stopped short of the kitchen, taking in the scene with a pleased smile. I hummed, scraping potatoes out of the pan and into one of the dishes that already had eggs in it, portioning out the peppers and onions before sprinkling cheese over the top and turning to hand one of them to her. She accepted it with glee and settled at the island with the morning light coming through the windows and steam rising off her plate. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a gourmet chef in your old life? I would have invited you to move in much faster.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I replied, biting the inside of my cheek in irritation at the mention of my life before coming here. Clearly it was still at the top of her mind and, as I’d suspected, she hadn’t let it go. “You haven’t even tasted it yet.”

“Trust me, I can tell good food a mile away, and this smells like good food,” she told me, and then dug into the plate in front of her while making a pleased sound and nodding along to her own statement.

I smiled a little to myself and sat down beside her with my own plate. We ate in silence for a minute, Rogue stationing himself between us with the strategic patience of having learned that two people eating at a counter produced better odds of dropped crumbs than just one.

“So,” Kenna said, when more than half her plate was cleared. “What’s the plan for today?”

“Rogue and I are going to head to the office, keep working through the paperwork until we find something that breaks the case open,” I told her. “You?”

“I’m still working on tracking down Simon Crawford,” Kenna said, setting her mug down. “I’m not going to let up until I find him and make sure he knows you’re off limits, okay?”

“Okay,” I said as I pushed the last of the potatoes around my plate, not feeling much hope after four days without any hint of him resurfacing. “How do you plan to find him?”

“I’ve staked out his house long enough to know he isn’t hiding out in there,” she said, not nearly as discouraged as I was. It was that tenacity that made her an excellent P.I. and while I had the same level of focus when it came to cold cases, those were easier to be patient with. It was like Kenna had said, the dead didn’t care about deadlines the way the living did. “I’ve considered watching his office next, but I think there are more obvious places to start looking. Places that most people don’t like to check, and I don’t like to forget.”

I looked up from my plate and met her eyes. “Like the morgue.”

“Like the morgue,” she confirmed. “Hopefully I don’t find him there, but if I do it’s better we know now than to wait until some detective is banging down the door.”

I sat in my car, a coffee from Fox & Fern cooling in the cupholder. I had wanted to stick around once I saw all the comfortable and funky chairs the cafe contained, but after returning to the office that morning I had finally caught a break with the paperwork.

Three months before Camille disappeared a deed transfer was initiated between her and someone named Carmen Gibbs. The house, as far as I could tell, had been gifted to Camille by her grandmother before she ever married Ian, and based on Carmen sharing a last name with Camille’s mother I had to assume this was a relative.

Which was why I had loaded Rogue into my Honda, and made a pit stop at the coffee shop for a fancy coffee and a pup cup on my way to the address on the deed.

Now I sat across the street from the house in question, which was small and well-kept. The lawn was immaculate, a mature maple tree peeking out from the back. It was the kind of place that told me the owner cared for it.

I watched the woman I assumed was Carmen kneeling in front of a flower bed along the edge of the porch, digging holes for the tray of plants she’d brought out through the front door.

Taking my coffee with me, I left Rogue in the car with the windows down and a sheep antler to chew on, reasoning that I didn’t know enough about Carmen Gibbs to show up at her door with a hundred and thirty pounds of Cane Corso and hope for the best.

Carmen’s gloved hands were buried in dark soil as I approached her, making as much noise as I could so I didn’t startle her. She looked up when she heard my footsteps on the gravel path that led from the sidewalk, her eyes narrowing slightly as she assessed me.

The resemblance hit me before I was even close enough to speak.

She wasn’t identical to the pictures I’d seen of Camille, but the family resemblance was uncanny. The shape of her jaw, her wide-set eyes, the particular way she tilted her head as she evaluated me—all of it was close enough to the photographs I had been studying for days that my stomach dipped with the recognition of it.

“Ms. Gibbs?” I said, keeping a little distance so I hopefully didn’t come across too strong.

Her shoulders stiffened at her own name and she rose slowly, brushing the dirt from her knees without taking her eyes off me.

“Are you here about Camille?” she asked. When I nodded her expression soured. “My family warned me you might call, but you have some nerve coming here. Why haven’t you gotten the message yet? We don’t want to talk about her.”

“I know your family’s been contacted by law enforcement before and I know people are exhausted by it,” I told her gently. “But I can’t let this go. People don’t simply disappear, and if there is any chance of finding Camille, I’m going to do it. I know what it’s like to spend years wishing you knew the truth about what happened while the police twiddle their thumbs. Whatever happened, I’m going to figure it out, whether your family decides to help me or not.”

“Why can’t you just leave it alone?” she growled, frustrated.

“What aren’t you saying?” I asked, watching her carefully. “Because it seems like your family have closed rank for a reason, and I’d like to know why.”

“They don’t know anything,” Carmen said, far too quickly, looking away from me.

“Maybe they don’t,” I said, stepping closer and lowering my voice. “But you do. Why did Camille deed you her grandmother’s house? What do you know, Carmen?”

“Nothing!” she shouted and then put a gloved hand up to her mouth, eyes wide and darting around like she was startled she had even raised her voice. Her focus came back to me and she dropped her hand, a furious expression on her face. “I don’t know anything and you aren’t going to either. We’re all telling you to stop looking. Why won’t you listen?”

“Because if it were me, I would want someone to keep looking,” I told her. “I would want to be found.”

“Well, she doesn’t want to be found,” Carmen snapped.

“So, she is alive,” I said, latching on to the way that Carmen spoke about her in the present tense, like she knew exactly where Camille was and what she wanted. “Can you tell me why Camille doesn’t want to be found, or what happened that night?”

“She's alive,” Carmen confirmed, her voice so low I almost couldn’t hear her. “And that’s all anyone needs to know except⁠—”

“Except?” I prompted, feeling the rush of knowing I was finally getting somewhere.

She studied me then with the particular attention of someone deciding whether I was a liability or an asset, weighing something behind her eyes that I didn’t have access to yet.

“If you’re serious about helping her,” she said finally, “then stop asking where she went and whatever you do, do not tell Ian that she’s alive. Please.”

“So, he is the reason she’s missing,” I confirmed.

“Stop,” she shook her head. “I shouldn’t have told you anything. I should have kicked you off my property the moment I saw you. Because the only way Camille will ever come back is if Ian is locked away. So, if you want to help her, stop asking my family questions about Camille and start figuring out how he got away with killing Rebecca.”

I stared at Carmen, surprised at the sudden flow of information. I had been asking questions, sure, but I’d also gotten so used to being shut down and blocked out that it hadn’t even occurred to me that I might make any progress here.

“The exhumation—” I started to say and Carmen’s expression shuttered, all that progress gone in an instant.

“Ian told Camille that he killed Rebecca,” Carmen said, her voice cold, but there was still a slight waver to it like she couldn’t quite hold back the hot temper running under the surface. Like everything she knew was pressing against the back of her teeth, fighting to break free. “Then he told her he could do the same to her, and that he would get away with it again. That’s why Camille disappeared, and the only way she’s ever going to come back is if Ian Nash is behind bars. Understood?”

I held her gaze and nodded once, a chill racing down my spine. Camille Nash hadn’t vanished on a whim. She’d made the deliberate choice to disappear, so that she wouldn’t be another victim, and it seemed that everyone in her family knew some version of that truth. That was why none of them would talk to me, why they all warned each other I was calling.

The only danger to Camille wasn’t her disappearance, it was her husband finding out where she’d gone. And if I wanted to help her, I was going to have to solve an entirely different case.

Chapter Twelve

Kenna called while I was still driving. “Where are you?” she asked, a current running under her voice—something straining against its own containment. She had news, and as far as I could tell, it was going to be bad.

“Just crossing the river on Colorado Ave,” I said. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone,” she replied, which only caused me to worry more. What was so terrible that she couldn’t tell me over the phone? “Any chance you’re hungry?”

“I could be,” I said, glancing in the rear-view mirror at the dog in the back seat. “Do you have someplace in mind? I have Rogue with me.”

“Meet me at Bend Brewing,” she told me. “They have an outdoor seating area that runs along the river and a damn good burger.”

“I’ll be there soon,” I agreed, and before I could even hit the ‘end call’ button the line went dead. I stared at the road ahead, guiding my car towards downtown and locating a parking spot, the excitement of having found a crack in the cold case muddied by nerves about what news Kenna had.

The lawn beside the brewery was scattered with picnic tables, people spread out in the easy clusters of a Wednesday afternoon, no one in any particular hurry.

Beyond the fence there was a walking path, and beyond that a section of the Deschutes wound its way through downtown, catching the light as it went. I led Rogue towards the table where Kenna already sat, my heart racing as I caught her expression. It was deeply worried and when she caught sight of me it shifted to relief, like she wasn’t able to relax until she saw me in person. Kenna set the menu down and stood up as Rogue and I reached the table.

“I found Simon Crawford,” she said right away, and I could see in her expression that this wasn’t a good thing, so I waited for her to continue, saying nothing. She took a deep breath. “He’s in the ICU. He was admitted as a John Doe the Friday before last. Severe head trauma and a skull fracture. He’s still in a coma.”

I collapsed into my seat at the picnic table, Kenna’s words washing over me. The fear I had expected to feel—terror that someone would come and arrest me for this crime as well—never arrived. What came instead was something so much worse. A wave of relief hit me and tears sprang to the corners of my eyes.

He wasn’t watching me. He wasn’t watching anyone, anymore.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It looks like a mugging,” she said. “It happened three blocks from his condo. His wallet, keys, and car are all missing but there’s no indication that this was targeted. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I looked past her toward the river. The water moved in the unhurried way of something that had been doing this long before any of us arrived and would keep doing it after we left.

“So, it had nothing to do with me,” I said once a waitress had come to take our orders and left once more.

“Nothing to do with you at all,” Kenna confirmed.

I turned that over for a moment. I had spent five days afraid of Simon Crawford and now he was in a hospital bed, neutralized by chance rather than by anything either of us had done, and I found that I didn’t know what to do with that. There was no satisfaction in it. There was no closure. There was only the uncomfortable awareness that the man who had stood over me while I slept was currently somewhere I couldn’t reach, and that when he woke up—if he woke up—none of what he had done would have been resolved. Right now, we were just delaying the inevitable.

“He’s not absolved by this,” Kenna said, reading something in my silence accurately enough to respond to it. “The evidence of the tenants’ rights he’s broken still stands on its own. And when he comes to, I’ll be ready. I’m not letting him go back to running that complex like nothing happened.”

I nodded and picked at my napkin, wishing I hadn’t ordered any food now. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to eat with the turmoil churning in my gut.

“I made progress on my case, too,” I told her, hoping the distraction of talking about something other than Simon Crawford would make me feel better. “I learned something very interesting.”

Her eyes sharpened in the particular way they did when she was shifting fully into investigator mode. “Oh?”

“She has a cousin who says she’s alive,” I said. “A cousin who wasn’t listed anywhere in the original investigation, and who has been living at a property Camille gave her three months before she disappeared.”

Kenna’s eyebrows rose steadily higher as I went on to tell her about my interaction with Carmen Gibbs.

“So, Ian did kill Rebecca,” Kenna said when I finished my story.

“Supposedly.” I nodded along, feeling a little better now that we were in a more familiar domain and the subject of Simon Crawford was behind us. “At least, that’s what he told Camille when he threatened to do it to her as well, according to Carmen. Whether any of it is true or not is an entirely different question.”

“And according to this relative, Camille vanished willingly?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And more importantly, Camille believes it’s true enough to still be hiding from Ian even after the exhumation cleared him. You should have seen how terrified Carmen was, demanding I not tell Ian anything I’d learned about Camille.”

“Do you think Detective Trivett knows?” Kenna asked, and I tilted my head as I considered that. We didn’t know enough about Trivett aside from the fact that he still hadn’t returned from his vacation and that he’d taken Ian’s call every month for the past three years. Which could mean that he either knew or suspected what had caused Camille to go into hiding and had allowed this case to go cold in order to protect her. But there was an equal chance that he was doing everything he could to reunite them and until we spoke to him, I had no way of knowing for sure.

“If he does, that means he’s spent three years trying to prove Ian killed Rebecca and still hasn’t managed it,” I pointed out. It didn’t leave my estimation of his detective skills very high.

“Or, he has no idea where Camille is and he’s just terrible about documenting his cases,” Kenna suggested, and I snorted a little, feeling much better despite both cases hanging over our heads. Simon Crawford was in a coma now, his crimes not yet answered for but well known. And Camille Nash, alive but not yet convinced she was safe. Both of them caught between what had already happened and what came next.

The waitress came by and set our orders on the table.

“So, what’s our next step?” Kenna asked once she was out of earshot, picking and stabbing it down into her side salad.

“Next, we figure out if Ian actually killed Rebecca,” I replied, lifting my burger off the plate and salivating at the smell of it. Kenna had been right, this place did seem to have some fantastic burgers. “Because if he did, then bringing him down is the only way that we can give Camille her life back.”

Chapter Thirteen

Mug+Shots was too warm when I arrived, crowded with the kind of customers that flooded in without warning and kept you moving without pause.

I tied my apron around my waist, clocked in, and let muscle memory take over. An hour in, the rush crested before finally settling into something more manageable. Trick let me know he would be in the back office if I needed him, and I sent him off with a wave.

I was restocking the well cask when I heard the front door open. I peeked over the bar out of habit, cataloguing the arriving customers into regulars, locals, tourists, and troublemakers.

Mason Campbell closed the front door behind him and looked around the room like he was taking inventory of the space. His gaze swept from corner to corner, pausing briefly at each occupied table before settling on an empty stool at the far end of the bar. He made his way over without hurry, draped his jacket over his forearm, and sat down.

I finished the restock before making my way down the bar to where he sat, putting a coaster and a napkin in front of him.

“Hale,” he said, his voice warm but unsurprised to find me working tonight. “Good to see you.”

“Mason,” I replied, staying neutral and hoping he would as well. I had him categorized as a local, but I wasn’t afraid to move him into troublemaker territory if he did anything to earn it. “What can I get you?”

“I’m in the mood for a beer, but I’m not picky,” he said. “Why don’t you recommend me something?”

I fought the urge to make a face, hating when customers asked for recommendations. How was I supposed to know what they would like?

Instead of making a fuss, though, I narrowed my eyes at him for a moment and then poured him a Boneyard IPA, setting it down without ceremony. He wrapped a hand around the glass and looked at it for a moment.

“You look like an IPA guy,” I said, shrugging. He frowned and raised his eyebrows at the same time, a strange combination of expressions that suggested he was impressed with my deduction.

“I was supposed to meet Lachlan,” he said after taking a sip, offering the information without any prompting. “He just canceled last minute, and I figured I’d come here instead. Apparently, Gracie needed someone to take Hadley for the evening so she could get some time to herself since she’s been planning Lexi’s funeral all week.”

“That’s a hard thing to do alone,” I said, wiping down the counter in front of me as I tried not to think about how I hadn’t seen Gracie in a few days and as far as I knew neither had Kenna. The two of us should check in on her soon, make sure she was holding up okay.

“It is,” Mason agreed. He took another drink and the conversation lapsed. I wandered away, topping off a glass of wine for a woman sitting further down the bar before coming back to check if he needed anything else.

“Could use some company,” he told me when I asked, and I studied him for a moment, trying to figure out if this was another attempt at flirting or a genuine request from a guy whose plans had fallen through.

“How long have you and Lachlan known each other?” I asked, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt. Besides, asking questions while lonely people drank was part of the job.

“We’ve known each other since we were seventeen,” Mason said with a wry smile. “We grew up on the East coast and both ended up out here by different routes and for different reasons.”

The words East coast caught my ears, and I noted the deliberate vagueness of the phrase. But underneath it, now that I was listening for it, there was something in the rhythm of his speech that I recognized the way you recognized a song you hadn’t heard in years.

“The East coast?” I asked, only allowing a little of my curiosity to leak through. “Where abouts?”

“New York, mostly,” he said, leaning in. “You?”

I narrowed my eyes at him and he tilted his head, sending me a wry smile and a knowing look. I thought about my own voice, the way I never bothered to hide my accent, and ducked my head.

“Syracuse,” I said, falling back on the answer I had built for myself when I decided to take on the cover of Hale Hastings. “For a while, anyway.”

“Upstate,” he said, with an appreciative nod. “That explains a few things.”

“Does it?” I asked.

“It explains the way you hold your ground. East coast girls like you don’t apologize for taking up space. It’s one of the things I miss most about being back there.” He turned the glass slightly on the bar before looking up at me as he spoke. “Do you miss it?”

I thought about the answer for longer than I expected to. I had gotten good at not thinking about home.

“Parts of it,” I told him. “The food, mostly. And the way everyone walks like they have somewhere to be even when they don’t.”

“And the trees?” he offered.

“Definitely the trees,” I agreed.

“Don’t get me wrong, Oregon is beautiful,” Mason said, glancing toward the window where the shades were drawn. On the other side of the glass I knew there was a whole city smack dab in the middle of a high desert, and beyond that were the mountains and the trees. “But it takes a specific kind of adjustment. The forests don’t feel the same and neither do the people. Everyone moves slower here, and their hospitality looks different. You figured out how to get used to that yet?”

“No,” I said. “I’m still working on that one.”

“You’ll get it,” he told me, and there was a simplicity to his words—a quiet certainty, as though my settling in here was something inevitable.

Trick appeared from the kitchen end of the bar then, clocked Mason, and drifted over with an unhurried confidence.

“Counselor,” he said, by way of greeting.

“Criminal,” Mason replied, smiling like it was an inside joke—warm and familiar.

I kept my hands moving on the bar as I chopped limes to refill the caddy and didn’t look up, but something in my chest had gone very still. It was a joke. It was obviously a joke, the easy currency of two men who knew each other well enough for that kind of ribbing.

Except that I had recently stood in Trick's office and looked at a ledger I wasn’t supposed to see, and I knew that the word criminal wasn’t entirely a joke. Which left the question of exactly how much Mason Campbell knew about Trick Cavanaugh’s business arrangements, and it was one I had no clear way to answer.

Trick simply laughed it off, unbothered.

“Nice place you’ve got,” Mason said, glancing around the bar with the proprietary appreciation of someone surveying their own vast property.

“I like to think so,” Trick said, eyes narrowing at Mason for a moment before he glanced at me with a slight raise of his brow, a silent check-in to confirm I wasn’t uncomfortable keeping our customer entertained.

I gave him a nod that let him know there was nothing to worry about and he moved on.

Mason only stayed for one more drink and a basket of fries that he ate with the focus of someone who had skipped dinner and possibly lunch. The conversation stayed easy—the bar, local highlights, the way the light was different here than back East and how long it took to get used to that.

By the end of it I found myself thinking about Newark in a way I usually kept carefully locked away in the back of my mind. Even though I was simply talking about ‘back East’, I found myself missing home with a deep ache in my chest.

Completely unaware of the emotional turmoil he had unearthed, Mason paid his tab, tipped generously, and politely left long before last call. I watched him go as I mixed a gin and tonic, preoccupied with thoughts about East coast accents and routes taken and the odd specific comfort of talking to someone who understood what it was like to be someplace new and unfamiliar while missing where you’d come from like a lost limb.

I thought about what he had said—about the certainty he had that I would become accustomed to this place—and how strange it was to be told by someone who barely knew you that your future was certain.

It was a little disconcerting, but if I was being honest with myself, it wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

When I circled back to Rebecca’s family the next morning, I knew better than to expect any warmth from them, and the first several calls confirmed that expectation. Each one of them had mastered the art of the swift dismissal—a skill honed through years of unwanted calls and prying questions about their family’s tragedy.

“We’ve put that behind us,” said an aunt.

“The police already know everything,” insisted another cousin.

“The exhumation cleared him,” one of Rebecca’s sisters said. “What else is there?”

And every one of those calls was followed by the decisive click of disconnection. After each rejection, I murmured thanks to dial tones, jotted down what little they said, and crossed out the name as a potential lead before dialing the next number.

Rebecca Baxter’s family tree wasn’t small—there were remarriages that created tangled offshoots, siblings who shared one parent but not the other, family friends that her siblings referred to as ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ on social media despite having no direct familial connection.

With so many branches of the family tree I had hoped to uncover at least one person willing to talk but I’d spent most of the morning tracking down increasingly distant relatives, my legal pad filling with crossed out names and numbers while my coffee went cold. Rogue dozed in his chair with his paws crossed in the most adorable way, the one bright spot in my day.

Everyone in Camille and Rebecca’s life was united by their exhaustion. And in the meantime, the two women at the center of it—one dead and one in hiding—had been effectively buried under the weight of everyone else’s certainty.

I understood something about that, having been the subject of a story that other people had already decided the ending to, with no one particularly interested in the truth behind what really happened.

I was distracted as I dialed yet another number— Rebecca’s half-sister Eloise Walton—and surprised when she answered on the first ring.

“Hello?” Her voice was crisp and carried none of the defensive edge I’d been hearing all morning. Then again, I hadn’t gotten a chance to introduce myself yet. “Ms. Walton,” I said, “my name is Hale Hastings. I’m a volunteer investigator with the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity here in Bend, Oregon. I’m conducting a fresh review of your half-sister Rebecca’s case, and I was hoping you might be willing to speak with me.”

The pause that followed was different from the ones I had been collecting all morning. The earlier silences had been performative—people who’d rehearsed their dismissals and were merely timing their delivery.

This silence felt alive with consideration. I could almost hear her thoughts shifting, like someone carefully examining an object from multiple angles before deciding what to do with it.

“They told me Rebecca’s death was an accident,” she said finally, but the way she said it felt different, like it was a test. I sat up straighter.

“I take it you don’t agree?” I asked.

“Becca and I weren’t close growing up,” Eloise said. “But we talked more than anyone else in the family knew about and we got closer once we were adults. Rebecca liked having someone outside the immediate family circle who she could vent to. Someone who wasn’t already invested in one side or the other.”

“What do you remember about her husband, Ian Nash?” I asked, tapping a pen against the desk as hope sparked in me. Finally, I had someone who was willing to talk about who Rebecca was before she died rather than simply hang up on me.

Eloise let out a short, humorless sound.

“That man scared me from the beginning,” she said. “Everyone wanted to believe he was some prince charming before she died.”

“And after she died?” I asked. Eloise was quiet for a long moment, as if she were searching for the right words before she continued.

“Everyone had an opinion on that as well,” she told me. “Even before Camille’s relatives became convinced that Ian had killed both of them there were plenty of people in our family who thought he could have done it. But after the exhumation, he was cleared and then everyone just wanted the whole nightmare buried in her grave alongside her.”

“And you?” I asked. “What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to help get to the bottom of things, whatever the truth may be. I thought Rebecca deserved that much,” she said. “I still do.”

I turned my pen over in my hand, looking at the whiteboard. Rebecca’s name sat in its corner, connected to Ian by a single line and to Camille by the deliberate absence of one.

“I know you probably don’t have anything concrete or you would have taken it to the police by now,” I said. “But there might still be something you can help me with.”

“Oh?” she asked, her voice filled with curiosity.

“I need next of kin authorization to access Rebecca’s original autopsy,” I told her. It was the only piece of the puzzle that had been denied to me, and I needed all the information I could get.

The pause this time was even longer, and I could hear something rustling in the background on her end. Then, finally⁠—

“Send me the form.”

I checked the time before I left the office, headed to the public records building on foot. The first time I’d shown there, Rose had mentioned that Mark was on lunch, and he gave me the impression that he was the kind of person who kept to a consistent schedule.

I had the proper paperwork, the official business email, and every right to the documents I was after, but I still got the sense that he would give me trouble if I tried to get access to any files that weren’t available to the general public.

I suppressed a grin when I caught sight of Rose framed by the record clerk’s window, sitting at the desk with no sign of Mark anywhere to be seen. I felt a thrill of triumph. I had timed this perfectly.

Rose caught sight of me as I approached the window and her face lit up with recognition and genuine warmth when she saw me.

“Ms. Hastings, back so soon?” she asked. “I was wondering when I’d see you again.”

“I come bearing official paperwork this time,” I said, setting Eloise Walton’s signed authorization form on the counter in front of her. “This is a next of kin consent form allowing me to access the original autopsy report for Rebecca Nash, signed and dated.”

Rose picked it up and skimmed over it with only half the attention to detail that Mark might have and then looked up at me with an expression that was equal parts impressed and amused.

“Did Mark give you grief the last time you were here?” she asked.

“He did,” I replied. “I wasn’t about to come back without every i dotted and every t crossed this time.”

“Yeah, that’s Mark for you,” she said, already moving toward the back, waving a hand over her shoulder. “Give me a few minutes to copy your form and to track this autopsy down.”

I didn’t know if it was merely a matter of acquiring the correct form and signature or coming at the correct time, but in either case it seemed that I would be getting exactly what I came for.

She reappeared two minutes later with the requested paperwork in hand.

“He really does make things difficult sometimes,” she said as she slid the autopsy over, picking up the conversation where it had left off and shaking her head.

“He’s thorough,” I offered, tucking the pages of the autopsy into my satchel along with the original copy of the consent form that Rose also handed back to me. “I can’t blame him for that.”

“No,” she agreed, “But I can. He’s like that about everything, not just the sensitive paperwork. Everything in his life has to be in perfect order all the time. He eats the same tuna salad sandwich every day and if there’s even one paperclip out of place on the desk I get a lecture about respecting shared spaces.”

“Wow,” I said. Words of commiseration had been on the tip of my tongue, but there was a big difference between Kenna’s penchant for staying organized and what sounded like Mark’s pathological need to keep everything exactly in its place.

“He says that’s just how he was raised and I believe him because—” She paused, something between fondness and bewilderment crossing her face as she leaned in and lowered her voice, “—apparently his mother has an entire basement full of collectible dolls. They’re all in their original packaging and every one of them is catalogued in this ‘guest book’—their arm positions, sources for their clothes, everything was written down and expected to stay exactly where she set it or he was punished. Can you imagine growing up in a house like that?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head even as I tried. My mother had done a lot of the cleaning in the house, but as I got older if I left something out she just reminded me to put it away. She even cleaned my room growing up, until I turned into a teenager and began demanding my privacy. But there was nothing in the house that was off limits except the obviously dangerous items like cleaning supplies and kitchen knives. “That must have been awful.”

“I know, right?” she said, her voice rising a little more than expected, like she got a touch of joy from sharing this benign bit of gossip about her coworker. “I think about it sometimes when he’s being annoyingly anal retentive about filing categories. Because somewhere out there is a woman who raised him to be like that. Anyway, that’s where he gets it, I think. The need to tuck everything in its own little box and require forms in triplicate.”

I nodded along, thinking more about the contrast between Mark’s precision and Kenna’s organization.

Kenna had said it herself: her organization was about knowing where everything belonged so you could put it back when things got too far out of hand.

What Rose was describing was something entirely different. It sounded like order and precision were the only language his household had spoken growing up. The sense that things had a correct state and that deviation from that state was not only incorrect but also subject to punishment.

“Well,” I said, adjusting the strap on my satchel, unable to keep from pointing out the obvious silver lining to Mark’s rigidity. “Doing things by the book is how you put criminals in jail and protect the innocent. I’m glad he’s held me to that higher standard instead of just giving me what I wanted, so feel free to tell him I said thank you for the red tape.”

“I absolutely will not tell him that,” Rose said with a startled laugh. “But have a nice day.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Hey, would you take a look at this for me?” I asked Kenna as I walked through the door that evening to find her sitting on the couch reading a book. I set two sheets in front of her on the coffee table, carefully lining them side by side. “These are the two autopsies that were done on Rebecca Nash. Neither of them indicates foul play, but look at them together.”

She leaned in and I watched her read them, waiting to see the moment it clicked for her the same as it had for me. She went through quickly at first, not catching it, before going back and reading them slower and comparing each detail one by one.

“There’s a height difference,” she said.

“But it’s only half an inch,” I shrugged. “It would be easy to make that mistake.”

“What about this tibial fracture?” She pointed to the words on the second autopsy, already shaking her head as she found the explanation. “It wasn’t marked down on the first one, but I guess if it was already healed the examiner wouldn’t have any reason to know about it without cutting her open unnecessarily.”

“Keep going,” I said, nodding along.

“Oh, the hip,” she said after another few moments, looking up at me. “Rebecca Nash had a bone pin placed in her left hip seven years before she died. It’s in her medical records so should have been immediately visible during the exhumation. But there’s no mention of it in the second autopsy.”

“Bingo,” I said, snapping my fingers and pointing them at her. “You see it too, right? There are too many variables that don’t add up here. I’m starting to think that these autopsies weren’t done on the same body.”

“That would mean that whoever was exhumed from Rebecca Nash’s grave wasn’t Rebecca Nash,” Kenna said, looking back at the reports, and I could see her running the same calculation I had run, arriving at the same place from the other direction.

“That’s why the exhumation proved Ian was innocent,” I said quietly. “They never managed to do a second autopsy on Rebecca.”

“How is something like this even possible?" Kenna asked, shaking her head.

“It would be a really complicated cover up,” I told her. “But if Ian knew they were planning to exhume his wife then he could have switched her body with someone else’s. If he was smart, he could have even done it weeks before Rebecca’s family consented to exhuming her.

“Yeah, but he would have needed to find someone who matched Rebecca’s height, weight, age, and coloration,” Kenna pointed out. “Someone who happened to die exactly the way he claimed Rebecca did.”

“Even then he would have to dig her grave up, switch the bodies, and put all the dirt and grass back in a way that made it look like the grave was untouched, without ever being caught,” I added.

“That’s a really complicated plan, but people have done worse to avoid prison,” Kenna rocked back on her heels, tapping her finger against her chin as she thought. “But here’s where it falls apart, because they didn’t exhume Rebecca until four years after she was buried. Which means he didn’t just have to find someone who would pass the examination, he also had to be sure that the person he swapped her with died around the same time so that the rate of decomposition wouldn’t raise any questions.”

“How would you do it?” I asked. “If you were the killer and needed to make that swap happen right now, how would you find the perfect body to replace Rebecca’s with in order to fake your innocence?”

“First of all, I wouldn’t,” Kenna said, her expression serious, and I was worried she may have taken offense to my hypothetical question but then her eyes glazed over a little bit as she started thinking about it, actually engaging with the scenario I’d put forward. “Second, I would probably start in hospital records looking for anyone who matched the cause of death within the time frame and once I had a list I would have to hope that one of them was a white woman in her thirties. Decomp would account for some of the differences, like the half inch of height, and without a side-by-side comparison of the two you probably wouldn’t even know the difference between a pale white woman and one who was more tan.”

“So then that’s where I’ll start too,” I said, nodding along. “If I can find any other women in the area who match Rebecca’s cause of death within say...six months of when she died? Then we’ll know who this second autopsy belonged to. And once we know that we can figure out how and when Ian swapped those bodies and prove he had a reason to do so.”

“This is a massive breakthrough,” Kenna said, pointing at the spot on the coffee table where the two autopsies intersected with a fierce expression.

“If we’re right, then yeah. It is,” I agreed, still wrapping my mind around what I had already realized an hour ago, sitting in the office staring at the paperwork.

Kenna reaching the same conclusion I had about the differences in the autopsies and what they implied gave me a level of certainty I hadn’t had when it was only my own hare-brained theory, which is exactly why I had raced home to get a second opinion.

Kenna grinned and then turned and picked up her bag from where it was sitting beside the couch, pulling out a thin folder which she set on top of the reports with the deliberate flourish of someone who had been waiting for the exact right moment to produce it.

“Before we go any further,” she said, flipping the folder open. “I need you to sign something.”

I looked inside at the page with an official letterhead and the words Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity at the top.

“This is paperwork to make the board official,” she explained. “So that we’re not just two people with wild theories and too much time on our hands. A charity requires three directors, so I reached out to Gracie, since this all started with the three of us solving Lexi’s murder. She agreed to volunteer her M.E. experience when she can and to be the third member on our board.” Kenna paused, letting me absorb that information before continuing. “All it needs is your signature.”

I flipped through the paperwork slowly, scanning for any reason not to sign. Kenna had used Cavanaugh Cottage as my address and the email she had set up for me. No social security number. Just my name beside hers and Gracie’s, already printed out in Kenna’s neat handwriting. There were already two other signatures on the page, so mine really was the final step in making this official.

I hovered the pen over the signature line for a moment longer than necessary, and then I signed. Kenna waited for the ink to dry and then took the folder back with a satisfied nod that suggested this outcome had never been in doubt.

“Alright,” she said. “We’ve made some real progress today, but I think we’ve pushed hard enough. Brains need food and rest in order to function.”

I paused, my instinct to keep pushing still there like muscle memory. But I didn’t need to force answers anymore—this wasn’t an interrogation room with seconds slipping away like suspects through my fingers.

“Okay,” I agreed, getting up from the desk. “Let’s have dinner.”

I took the peppers, rinsed them, lined them up and started chopping. The knife felt good in my hand, the blade sharp and the weight of it well balanced. I worked carefully, creating consistent slices and letting the repetition lull me.

After a moment Kenna gave a small approving nod and took over rinsing the frozen shrimp to thaw it.

The two of us fell into an easy rhythm. I stirred sauteing onions while she worked on a pan of garlic bread on the counter beside me. Heat was adjusted without comment, oil and salt measured by our hearts. Rogue bumped my leg as he sniffed around our feet and I snapped my fingers before pointing him back towards the living room. He went, tail between his legs.

“You’re easy to work alongside,” Kenna said after a while, watching the onions go translucent.

“It helps to work with someone who knows what they’re doing,” I replied and she laughed, throwing her head back. She looked completely relaxed as we made a mess of the kitchen, humming along to some song that was stuck in her head.

Our pasta dish came together with ease, and the garlic bread came out of the oven golden and sizzling. We took our places at the kitchen island and Rogue positioned himself between us strategically.

We ate in the comfortable silence that didn’t need filling, and I let my thoughts drift back to the autopsy reports, and then deliberately away from them again.

I wasn’t going to be solving anything tonight.

After a while Kenna set her fork down and wandered over to a cupboard, producing a small bottle of liquid, its amber color catching the light.

“Two truths and a lie?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

“I have work in three hours.” I told her, shaking my head. “Besides, there’s a lot I can’t talk about.”

“Then don’t talk about it,” Kenna said. “And we’ll only play a few rounds. Not even enough to give you a buzz. Come on, we have to get to know each other somehow.”

“Fine,” I said, watching the way her eyes lit up, shaking my head and just knowing I was going to regret this. “But I reserve the right to be dull.”

“You can pretend all you like,” she said as she poured two glasses and passed one over to me. “But I know you’re not dull. I’ll go first. I hate swimming, I’ve broken two bones, and I can drive a stick shift.”

“The swimming is a lie,” I said. “You don’t hate it.”

She clicked her tongue, shaking her head. “Drink up. I hate swimming.”

“No way,” I said, taking a sip and feeling the burn. “Who hates swimming?”

“What can I say, I don’t like having water in my ears.” Kenna shrugged and looked away from me. I didn’t press the issue, but I got the feeling there was something deeper there she didn’t want to talk about and decided to take my turn to shift the attention away from what she wasn’t admitting.

“I still use bunny ears to tie my shoes,” I said, wrinkling my nose even as I said it as I realized how obvious of a lie it would be. “I’ve never eaten an olive, and I’m afraid of heights.”

She studied me the way she studied case files. “The bunny ears is the lie.”

“Obviously,” I said, putting my head in my hands.

“You’re not very good at this,” she teased.

“I told you I was dull.”

“You’re just playing it safe,” she said as she refilled her glass, clearly not keeping track of who was supposed to be drinking when the lie was caught. She leaned back against the counter, smirking at me over her glass. “But let’s see if we can’t make this a little more interesting. Round 2: relationships edition.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s how the game works.”

“It is if I say it is,” she replied, sticking her tongue out at me childishly before retracting it and shifting in her seat. “Okay I’ll go first again. I’ve never been able to picture myself as anyone’s wife, I once went on a first date that lasted eighteen hours, and I’ve never dated a woman.”

The three statements hung in the air between us as I looked over at her, trying to make deductions. She held my gaze for a long moment, and then the corner of her mouth moved in a slight twitch.

“You did not go on an eighteen-hour first date,” I said and she cracked into a wide smile.

“You’re right,” she replied, “It was a twenty-hour date, and it was not good. Your turn.”

“I’ve never been serious enough with someone to consider settling down,” I started. “I once accidentally stumbled into a swinger’s party, and I always order Tiramisu on the first date.”

“The swingers party cannot be true.” She snorted, and I sent her a mysterious smile just long enough that she was starting to second guess herself before I cut the act.

“You’re right, I’ve never stumbled into a swingers party,” I admitted.

“What’s up with the tiramisu?” she asked.

“You can always tell what a guy thinks about a woman based on her ordering dessert,” I replied. “If you have a full meal and then order dessert and he makes some comment about watching your weight you know right away he isn’t the one.”

“Smart girl!” she crowed. “And you really haven’t ever thought about settling down?”

“What can I say?” I shrugged. “There’s always been something more important. Finishing high school and then finishing college. Then starting a career.”

“And now?” Kenna asked, watching me carefully.

“Now I’m focused on other things,” I said and she accepted that with grace, nodding as if she totally got it. But she tilted her head and grinned, leaning forward like she was offering a secret.

“Mason Campbell couldn’t keep his eyes off you at the barbecue the other night,” she said. I tensed up, feeling the warmth from the whiskey spread up to my cheeks as I fought to keep my expression neutral.

“If you say so,” I replied.

“He’s clearly interested,” Kenna’s voice had a teasing quality to it and she was watching me closely. “You could do considerably worse than a brilliant, employed, and apparently smitten attorney.”

“I barely know him,” I said, looking away, but I thought about all of our interactions again and couldn’t see anything wrong with the idea of dating him. It was my behavior, the way I always pulled away because I was too paranoid to get close, that had left all our interactions with a strange layer of awkwardness lingering over them.

“That’s what dating is for,” Kenna pointed out. “That’s how you get to know someone.”

“He did kind of ask me out,” I admitted. “I told him I wasn’t available and he was very gracious about it.”

“Of course he was,” Kenna said, as if this confirmed rather than contradicted her point. “And of course you did.”

“You think I should have accepted a date from him?” I looked at her with a blank expression, not saying what I meant, but she knew anyway. My past was a massive cloud hanging over my future.

“I think there aren’t a lot of guys who would be gracious about being shot down, and they’re usually the good ones,” she said mildly and refilled her glass. “And you can fight it all you want but he’s hot and you’re already thinking about him.”

“I should get ready for work,” I replied, not really addressing her point. Because she was right, I was already thinking about him. I just wasn’t sure what those thoughts were quite yet.

Falling into the rhythm of work, it took me a few minutes to realize that Trick wasn’t the one sharing a shift with me that night. When Melody slid into the space beside me, mixing up a martini in silence, she barely glanced in my direction. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as well, assuming she and Trick had switched shifts for one reason or another and that if she wanted me to know why she would tell me.

From the handful of experiences I’d had working with her, Melody struck me as someone who was bubbly and willing to chat, but I got the sense that she was avoiding every opportunity for conversation that she could. It wasn’t just with me, either, but with the customers she was passing drinks to, moving away from the bar the moment the transaction was complete and only offering short replies to any attempts at small talk.

Getting the hint, I jumped in as often as I could, taking on the bulk of the social side of being a bartender. Meanwhile she focused on making the drinks, keeping the space clean, and generally not making eye contact.

I’d just returned from making the rounds on the floor, gathering up empty glasses and bussing abandoned tables, when something finally gave and the younger woman let out a long, frustrated sigh.

“I hate bartending,” she told me as I set the stack of glasses in the wash bin. I glanced up, meeting her eye with a surprised expression.

“You seem to be good at it,” I told her, trying to stay as neutral as possible in hopes that would lure her further out of her shell. I’d watched Melody handle several tables of little league players eating pizza just last week, and she hadn’t missed a step tonight while mixing drinks and pouring pitchers.

“I can feel their eyes on me,” she told me, nodding towards the bar in general but not indicating any customers in particular. “The ones that don’t think I’m too young to be serving alcohol think I’m just old enough to start hitting on me. When I’m serving tables during the day everyone is respectful, they don’t stay long, and they don’t get rowdier with every drink I serve.”

I glanced at the three men who were seated at the bar. Two of them were regulars and neither had been anything other than courteous. Then again, they weren’t the only regulars, and lord knew I’d suffered my fair share of customers making a pass at me before. The difference was that I took pleasure in shutting them down before they could even get that far, which was a habit I’d picked up while working as a barista through college.

Still, she shouldn’t have to figure out how to shut down that kind of harassment and the thought that any of the customers here might be giving Melody a hard time had my hackles raised.

“If anyone gives you grief, let me know,” I told her, expression turning serious. She might be old enough to work in the bar but none of the regulars were young enough or single enough to be worth her time and none of them would be getting away with treating her like that. And that wasn’t even accounting for how she must feel after her date in this very bar had nearly turned into a woman’s worst nightmare last week. “And I’m sure Trick can find a different solution than using you as his alternative when he needs a licensed bartender to sub in for him.”

“I was the one who requested this shift, actually,” Melody told me with a grim smile. “I haven’t been sleeping well, and I need the extra cash to hire a lawyer. Ezra made bail.”

“I am so sorry,” I told her, wincing. Not only had she only narrowly avoided being drugged by that young man, but he had managed to destroy the evidence in his foolish attempt to escape. Now, he was back on the streets, and she was here working a job she didn’t enjoy, getting harassed in the very same place she had nearly been the victim of assault. I couldn’t imagine how violated she must feel. “I only know one lawyer in the area, but he was there that night so maybe⁠—”

“No,” Melody said, her gaze darkening. “You’re talking about Mason Campbell, right? That’s the asshole who was supposed to be watching Ezra when he ran, and now he’s defending the bastard and getting him out on the lowest bail possible.”

“Oh,” I said, my view of Mason shifting slightly to the left at this new discovery. Just when I’d started to consider Kenna’s point, I found another reason to put up walls. Not that I’d been planning to take him up on his offer. I was still a fugitive after all. “I had no idea he was a defense attorney. I thought he was prosecution. I’m really sorry I mentioned him.”

“It’s fine,” she told me, her voice weary. It was very clearly not fine, but she also wasn’t holding my lack of knowledge against me. “But thank you for trying to think of a solution, and for jumping in when the customers start trying to chat with me. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“Of course,” I assured her. “You’re better at mixing drinks than I am anyway, so we both win. But I mean it, if any of them start hassling you or even make a flirty comment you tell me and I’ll set them straight.”

“I’m sure Trick would love that,” Melody scoffed. “Sorry boss, we ran off all the customers.”

“He would love it,” I told her, “especially if the alternative is catering to customers with poor manners. I’ve seen him throw a regular out for much less. Trust me, you don’t have to put up with anything you don’t want to and I’m here to help you if you need anything.”

“Thanks, Hale,” Melody said, her voice low and soft as she looked out at the dozen customers who were slowly becoming louder and more rambunctious as the night progressed. “It’s not so bad, when you or Trick are there to do the customer facing work.”

“Well,” I said with a grin, “then lucky you because that’s the part I do best. Come on, we have drinks to serve.”

We worked the rest of the evening side by side, and she talked when she felt like it and was quiet when she needed to be. I didn’t bother with platitudes about how it was going to be okay and that Ezra would face justice because I wasn’t in the business of promising things I couldn’t guarantee.

Between customers and on my breaks, I pulled out my phone, searching methods that Ian could have used to locate a woman who had died of asphyxiation within the same six months as Rebecca.

What I found wasn’t promising.

There are no public databases that Ian could have used to find a body to swap with Rebecca’s. I sent to Kenna while I was crouched down on a milk crate, trying to keep out of the way while the kitchen line served up orders like clockwork.

Are you working while you’re working? Kenna sent back, but we both knew the answer, so she didn’t wait before following it up with another text. From what I can tell, Ian doesn’t have any medical history, but he could have had a contact in the hospital willing to let him do the search he needed.

Maybe. I said, but it didn’t sit right with me. Anyone who was close enough to Ian to give him that access would have also been close enough to realize why he wanted that information once the exhumation became public knowledge. I do think he had to have help to pull this off, in any case.

Kenna didn’t reply after that, and I assumed she probably fell asleep. It was already 11:30pm, after all, and she was right that I was using up my work break to do more work. I wasn’t going to get anywhere tonight, anyway.

Putting my phone away, I spent the rest of my break trying to think about anything other than casework and clues. The only thing that came to mind was Mason Campbell, who Kenna thought I should have gone on a date with. But then there was what Melody had said, about him defending an obvious criminal.

I closed my eyes, hating those two words sitting side by side. Obvious criminal. As if people didn’t look guilty for crimes they hadn’t committed all the time. Even Ezra, who Kenna had seen slip something into Melody’s drink, deserved someone on his side in a legal case.

Though, I knew better than to suggest such a thing to Melody. By the time the last of the customers filed out and we’d cleaned up for the night, she seemed a little lighter, but I felt the guilt of my own thoughts weighing me down even as she sent me a friendly wave as we parted ways.

Chapter Fifteen

When I came into the cottage it was a little after two a.m., but there were still lights on in the living room and Rogue was at my side in a heartbeat. His tail wagged as I quietly closed and locked the front door behind me just in case Kenna was asleep and had simply forgotten to turn off the lights.

But when I stepped into the living room, I caught sight of her sitting out on the back patio, the sliding glass door open and a mug of something steaming in her hands.

“You’re up late,” I called as I hooked my bag and jacket on the coat hanger before crossing the space between us and standing in the open door. Rogue trotted past me, back into the back yard where he had clearly been running around wreaking havoc while Kenna watched him. “I hope it’s not because of him.”

“It’s not,” she assured me. “I was waiting for you to get back.”

“Uh,” I said, taking her in again with a more critical eye. She was dressed in lightweight white-and-red flannel pajama pants and a cream-colored waffle knit sweater with sleeves that were so long they covered her hands almost entirely. From where I stood I could just make out the amber color of the liquid in her mug and the steam coming off it. There was a tension in her shoulders and she hadn’t turned to look back at me this entire time. “Is something wrong?”

“Come sit,” she told me, which was an answer all its own. I did as she asked, moving to the edge of the deck and hanging my legs over the side. It was the kind of raised wooden surface that was great for holding a barbecue and a few chairs but didn’t require a railing or stairs and my now-bare-feet pressed into the cool grass as a way to ground myself as I turned my head to look over at Kenna, catching the expression on her face.

The only word that came to mind was haunted.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, trying not to catastrophize even as terrible thoughts ran through my head, ranging from Trick getting in a car accident to Kenna figuring out who I really was. None of the disaster scenarios I came up with prepared me for what she said next.

“Simon Crawford is still in a coma,” she said gently, still staring out at the yard, her eyes a little unfocused. Her hands shook, reflected in the ripples of the drink she didn’t seem to be paying any mind to.

“Okay,” I replied, because we already knew where he was and if nothing had changed with him then...

“And you’re here now,” she told me, another fact I already knew. But she was saying it like I might need that reassurance. Or maybe she was the one who needed it, with how shaken she seemed.

“I am,” I assured her. “Kenna, what’s wrong?”

“I broke into your old apartment,” she told me, finally turning to look at me. Part of me wished she hadn’t, the way her eyes were wide and watery scared me more than the admission. “I found something.”

“What did you find?” I asked, quickly running out of patience. The studio was too small to hide much of anything and if something terrible had happened there after I moved out, it was like Kenna said, we were each other’s alibis.

“Cameras,” she told me. I wrinkled my nose and she sighed, setting the steaming mug to the side and grabbing her phone from where it sat on the deck beside her. She unlocked it and turned it to show me what was already on the screen. The last thing she had been looking at. The image was strange, dark lines crossing the frame horizontally and everything in the background dark, but I could just make out the shape of a small camera on a stand. “They were in your vents. In both the main room and the bathroom.”

I stared at the image for a little longer, placing the horizontal lines as vanes of a vent. The camera in the image looked advanced, like it could be hooked up to Wi-Fi and transmit the video at a distance. For half a beat, it didn’t click and then it did.

“You’re telling me there were video cameras running in my apartment, watching me from the vents. That whoever was watching me had eyes on both rooms,” I summarized, and Kenna met my eyes as she nodded, the solemn expression on her face telling me just how serious this was. I could feel the hours and hours of footage pressing down on me, the eyes of whoever was watching still lingering on my skin. The full body shiver I experienced had nothing to do with the late-night chill in the air, but Kenna quickly offered me the drink she had been nursing.

I wrapped my fingers around the mug and sniffed at it, surprised to smell cinnamon and alcohol. A hot toddy was exactly what I needed right then, something to warm me up and brace me against the truth of what I was hearing.

“How did you get in?” I asked, focusing on the easier questions. The things that wouldn’t lead me directly into a panic attack. I was holding it together for now, but I knew the minute I was alone my walls would crumble and the horror of this situation would overcome me.

“I fished your key out of the mail drop,” she confessed. “I figured since Simon was mugged only a few hours after you left, he didn’t have a chance to collect the key after you dropped it off. I took photographs of everything, including the model numbers of those cameras, but I didn’t touch any of it.”

“The feed could still be live,” I pointed out, “It could have caught you taking those photos.”

“It could have,” Kenna agreed. Her voice was steadier now that the worst of the news had been delivered. “But I don’t think it will make a difference now. You don’t live there any longer and Simon is in a coma. The cameras might be running but no one is watching them.”

But someone had been watching me.

“Why didn’t you remove them?” I asked, my own voice distant to my ears.

“To preserve the chain of evidence,” Kenna told me. “I know you didn’t want to go to the police about this, but those cameras are way out of line and there’s bound to be fingerprints on them. Crawford didn’t think he would get caught which means he was also sloppy, but BPD throws a fit if I ‘tamper’ with any of the good evidence.”

“I can’t go to the police,” I reminded her, shaking my head and thinking of all the calls I’d taken from Noah in that apartment, the research I’d done on the local FBI agents and the case file that I’d kept after fleeing the interrogation room that had Monica’s name right there on the front page. If anyone in law enforcement watched those videos they would easily be able to put two and two together.

“This isn’t just about you,” Kenna told me. “Simon Crawford has been terrorizing all his tenants, and this is evidence that could put a stop to it for good. Besides, your name isn’t the one on the lease, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, setting the hot toddy down and turning to look at Rogue who was laying in the grass, just a shadow and two reflective eyes staring back at me. How did she know that?

“Trick has me balance his books whenever he can,” she told me as if she had heard me ask that question aloud. “He hates doing it. So, I couldn’t help but notice a rental application fee for your studio, paid two days before you even showed up.”

I scoffed, not bothering to answer the question she wasn’t asking, and bit my tongue to keep from saying anything about the not-so-legal books she might also be helping him balance. Instead, I focused on how she was yet again tracking down clues about my past despite claiming she wasn’t looking into it anymore.

“So he helped me get my apartment,” I told her. “I was still the one paying rent and I’m still the one those cameras were watching the whole time.”

“But you aren’t the only one who’s been affected by what Simon was doing,” Kenna argued.

“No, I’m just the one he decided to escalate with,” I replied, crossing my arms. I wanted to leave, to go up to my room and crawl into bed with Rogue. To finally allow myself to have the meltdown I knew was coming. But I had to be sure that Kenna wasn’t going to take this to someone in the Bend PD. “And it’s like you said. I’m not there anymore and Simon isn’t a danger to anyone at the moment.”

“We could get someone who will keep your name off the record,” Kenna pushed, the dark of a new moon in the middle of the night clearly obstructing her view of the line she was crossing. “Someone who’s already done that once before, who owes you for saving⁠—”

“Absolutely not,” I cut in, unfolding myself from where I’d been seated and snapping my fingers to get Rogue moving. I turned to look down at Kenna, pinning her with a fierce glare. “I don’t need anyone sticking their nose in my business any more than they already have. As far as I’m concerned, this case is closed.”

“Hale,” Kenna started, but I shook my head and waved her off, disappearing back into the house with Rogue hot on my heels.

My hands trembled as I pulled the trigger book for the wall of shelves that hid the staircase in the library, guiding Rogue in first before shutting it behind me and heading up to my room. The whole way, I kept myself going with the indignation that Kenna’s comments had created. But the moment I had my bedroom door closed and locked behind me I felt a crack in the barrier I had erected when I realized what Kenna’s photographs were showing me.

The violation of it hit me harder than anything else. The way he had stood in my kitchen and denied everything with the casual assurance of someone who knew he had already won any court case I could bring against him. The weeks I had spent believing I was safe, that I had enough privacy to be myself, had all been a lie.

My phone rang.

The sharp sound of the factory setting ringtone cut cleanly through my spiral and I flinched before I could stop myself, staring at it where it buzzed against the nightstand with my breath caught somewhere high and useless in my chest. I picked it up and checked the screen.

Then I took one slow breath, and another, calming myself before I answered.

“Noah?” I asked, working hard to keep my voice level and not reveal the emotional turmoil I was currently shoving into a little box at the back of my mind. Noah didn’t need the weight of knowing what was going on with my stalker landlord on top of everything else he was carrying. I needed him to stay focused on solving my case, and any other distractions would only serve to delay that.

“Hale,” he said, a note of apology in his voice. “I’m sorry to call so late.”

“It’s fine, I just got back from work, so I was still awake,” I told him. “Why are you awake this late? Is everything okay?”

“Before I answer that,” he said after a brief hesitation, “do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

I let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I could really use some good news right about now.”

“Okay,” there was a note of concern in his voice, but he didn’t push me to explain and for that I was grateful. “The good news is that the Bureau thinks you fled the country.”

I blinked a few times, processing his words.

“They do?”

“As of yesterday evening,” he confirmed. “Briggs is convinced you crossed into Canada within forty-eight hours of the initial warrant. There’s chatter about Europe too, but that’s less solid.”

I let that settle, trying to digest everything that it meant.

“That is…impressively wrong,” I said, a hint of a laugh in my voice. It felt good to be laughing about this situation for once and I was glad I asked for the good news first. This was exactly what I needed.

“You always did have a talent for being underestimated,” he replied. I could hear the fondness in his voice, and it made me ache for the days before Monica’s death. Noah and I may not have gotten along at the time, but our one-sided rivalry had been so much easier to wrap my head around than this version of him. The version who had believed in my innocence so strongly that he’d released me from an interrogation room and sent me running.

“How committed are they to this theory?” I asked, wondering how long it would be before the FBI realized that I wasn’t stupid enough, or well-resourced enough, to slip out of the country with an APB on my head.

“For now, very committed. They’ve reallocated resources toward border inquiries and international liaisons, which means they aren’t looking for you anywhere near where you actually are.”

“That is genuinely good news,” I grinned, running an energetic hand along Rogue’s back where he lay next to me on the bed. He huffed, but didn’t bother cracking an eye open, clearly tuckered from a long day and ready to get a few good hours of sleep. The rollercoaster of emotions I’d gone through today had me feeling the same, and I knew it wasn’t quite over yet.

“It is,” Noah agreed, and I could hear the ‘but’ in his voice.

“Okay,” I said, shifting back against the headboard and bracing myself. “Hit me with it. What’s the bad news?”

“Phoebe’s been brought in on the Avery McHale task force as an expert on you,” he told me, and my grip tightened around the phone. “The bad news is that Phoebe is convinced you killed Monica, and she’s determined to see you brought in to face it.”

I closed my eyes. Memories surfaced without being asked—shared dorm rooms, late nights, the way Phoebe had always believed in the system above all else and saw morality in black and white, law and crime. Her firm opinion that if you followed the rules carefully enough, justice would follow. I had believed that once, too, but not to the degree that she had.

Noah took my silence for what it was and continued.

“When she found out I’d been added to the task force as well, she blew up and accused me of being compromised. And she’s not entirely wrong considering I did let you walk free.”

“And now she’s watching you like a hawk, which is why you’re calling me at two-thirty in the morning,” I said, wondering if Noah regretted what he had done for me. The risks he had taken didn’t only put his job at risk, but they left him vulnerable to being arrested for breaking the law himself. Aiding and abetting. Not to mention that whoever had framed me for Monica’s murder wanted me to go down, which meant that if it ever got out that Noah was the one who let me go there was every chance that Monica’s killer would come after him as well. We needed to get a handle on this case before they ever had a chance to figure it out. “Any word on Vienna Quinn?”

“I’m working on it.” He sighed, sounding exhausted. “Unfortunately, the pressure Phoebe’s putting on this case is making it difficult to get any time alone to run down other leads. Which is stupid, because she’s getting in the way of the very thing she claims to want.”

“She thinks she’s doing the right thing,” I told him.

“Yeah, well…” Noah replied, and I heard in his voice that he was just as familiar with her black-and-white thinking as I was. There was a shift in his tone then, the one that meant we were moving from the hard part of the conversation to something more practical. “Listen, I can’t just ignore calls when she’s nearby without it looking suspicious, but I don’t want you to feel like you can’t reach me either. I was thinking we could use a code phrase. Something I can say if she’s in the room so you know I can’t talk freely and that you should hang up and wait for me to call you back.”

I tilted my head and considered that for a moment.

“By the book,” I said. “If you tell me you’re doing things by the book, I’ll know what you mean.”

“Good,” he said. “I can work with that. And Hale?”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Phoebe believing you’re a killer doesn’t make it true,” he told me.

“No,” I replied. “It just makes everything a hell of a lot more difficult.”

Chapter Sixteen

The air conditioning left a chill in the living room as I sat on the couch, bundled in a blanket, coffee in hand. The electric fireplace was on, no heat coming from it considering just how hot the day was bound to get. Still, I liked the aesthetic, and the sound was lulling me into a meditative state.

That was as close to a good night’s sleep as I was going to get after both Kenna and Noah’s revelations.

Phoebe thinks I killed Monica.

I hung on to that thought like a life raft. It wasn’t a fun thought to linger on, but it was either that or the cameras in my vents and that was the last thing I wanted to think about right now.

I ran a hand through Rogue’s short silky fur where he was laid out on the couch with his head in my lap. Unfortunately, he hadn’t gotten much sleep either, affected by my tossing and turning, and was determined to take a nap and put as much of his weight on me as I would allow.

Between the dog, the coffee, the blanket, and the fire, I was set up to stay right where I was for a few hours at least. I had watched a documentary at some point that claimed that resting was nearly as good as sleeping if you had insomnia. Though, the coffee was probably doing most of the heavy lifting in helping me feel more awake.

I focused my thoughts on Phoebe, imagining the things she had picked up on while we became friends in the FBI Academy that she could now use to track me down. Had I told her about my mother's maiden name? I never showed her the photograph of my mother’s fractured gravestone that held the name Hale Hastings, but I hadn’t exactly kept the case file under lock and key. She knew I loved coffee, but I wasn’t so much of a snob about grounds that buying a particular brand could blow back on me. We had become friends in that last month of our training, but we had been roommates for the four months before that, and Phoebe was an FBI agent for a reason. She was damned good at putting the clues together to solve a case and I had left five months’ worth of clues in her hands.

Even the fact that she thought Noah was compromised—that his judgement about me couldn’t be trusted—confirmed what I already knew. If there was any agent out there who was going to find me, it was Phoebe Richards.

“Don’t you two look cozy,” Kenna said, stopping at the junction where the hallway let out into the open floor plan living room and kitchen. She leaned against the wall, smiling like the sight of Rogue and I taking up space was satisfying for her.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I told her, as if that wasn’t obvious from how rooted Rogue and I were to the couch. But that reminded me why I couldn’t sleep, at least the part that Kenna knew about, and I averted my eyes. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“I can’t blame you. I’m headed out to get my nails done this morning,” Kenna told me, clearly getting the message. “Maybe take the day off and we can reconvene tomorrow. Take another stab at the Camille Nash disappearance.”

“I don’t need a whole day off,” I protested, whipping my head around to stare at her, daring her to argue. “I should focus more on Camille’s disappearance, actually. It’ll help me...forget.”

“Hale,” Kenna said, and then hesitated, a question on the tip of her tongue that I really didn’t want to answer. The are you okay? she wasn’t saying hung between us and I pressed my lips together in a thin line, silently begging her not to ask. I wasn’t ready to talk about this and if I had to say the words I’m fine I wasn’t certain I could do so without bursting into tears or lashing out. Something in my expression must have translated for her because she frowned but headed towards the coat rack to grab her bag. “I'll be back in a bit if you need…a sounding board.”

By the time I found my voice again, found the words to thank her for not pushing the issue, the door was already closed and she was long gone.

Then it was just Rogue and me in the cottage, the living room filled with the sounds of our breathing, the lazy swish of Rogue’s tail against the couch, and the silence of an empty house. It was the most privacy I could expect in my situation and yet I still felt the goosebumps crawling up the back of my neck as if there was somebody watching me.

Phoebe thinks I’m capable of murder. I thought to myself again, wielding that depressing thought as a shield against the others, but this time it didn’t work. Simon Crawford was mugged before he ever had a chance to find out I was moving, let alone where I had moved to. There was no reason to think he had eyes on me here. The cottage was safe. I was safe.

And yet...

“Come on, Ro,” I said, patting Rogue’s side to signal I needed him to get off me. He lifted his head and I used the window of opportunity to slip out from underneath him. Taking my near-tepid coffee with me, I wandered into the kitchen and refilled the mug from the still-hot carafe, mixing in half and half and syrup, all while telling myself I didn’t need to prove that the cottage was safe and that my privacy was secure.

There was no reason to think that the feeling of eyes on me was anything other than my own imagination pulling tricks on me. The mind could be convinced of a great many things, after all.

Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn’t convince myself of was that Cavanaugh Cottage was secure. I had to be sure. I had to.

I started downstairs first, standing in the middle of the living room and looking around at the cottage in an entirely new light.

I had been trained to look at buildings not as a home or even a collection of rooms but as entry points, line of sight, and hiding places. That training kicked in now, and I eyed the wide-open windows before deciding to draw the curtains.

I recognized that what I was doing wasn’t rational, and even as I got to work, I promised myself I was going to address it properly at some point. But right now, I didn’t have the time or ability to track down a therapist I could trust so instead I would have to settle for leaning into the places that my instincts were leading me and let the paranoia win just this once.

Granting myself that permission, I moved to the front door and began my search. I worked methodically, the way the Academy had taught and the weeks on the run had reinforced. I checked all the vents, fixtures, smoke detectors, the joins between the walls and ceilings where a lens could be hidden.

The living room was clean. The kitchen was clean. The downstairs guest bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, and library were all clean.

I could breathe easier after that, once I was certain that all the spaces that strangers could access were free of any bugs. Still, I took the servant’s staircase to the second floor and scoured my room until I was positive there wasn’t anything surveilling me.

Then I went into Kenna’s room next.

I moved along the perimeter of her space with the same methodical attention I had given every other room, checking the fixtures, the vents, the joins. The room was exactly what it appeared to be—Kenna’s space was precise and personal in equal measure, a made bed and a reading lamp and a small, framed photograph on the nightstand that I didn’t look at directly because I was already in here without permission and looking at her photographs felt like a step too far.

The walk-in closet was to the left, and so was the master bathroom, which surprised me for reasons I didn’t understand right away. Both spaces were slightly smaller than they should have been for a master bedroom. In fact, all the dimensions in Kenna’s bedroom were smaller than I had anticipated, and I stood there for a good few minutes trying to figure out why.

I stepped into the hallway for a moment, looking at the wall that ran the length of the upstairs hallway with its decorative wood molding and its wrought iron light fixtures.

There were seven of them, evenly spaced, serving to remind me that Kenna wasn’t the kind to allow something as disorganized as an incorrectly spaced light fixture, let alone a poor use of her own personal space.

And as I walked the length of the wall, counting my steps, I confirmed a suspicion that the five paces that made up my bedroom matched the length of the five paces of Kenna’s room. And in-between were another five paces of unused space.

Eyes narrowed, I stopped right in the middle of the hallway, in front of the center light fixture, and slowly ran my fingers along the molding the way I had run them along cabinet edges and baseboards all morning.

I felt the difference before I saw it—the slight give in the iron curl at the base, a mechanical quality that I suspected none of the other light fixtures had.

I squeezed it and the door swung inward on silent hinges. And as I stood in the doorway and looked into the secret space behind the wall Kenna’s voice came back to me.

“What’s the point of being rich if you don’t build a secret passage or three?”

First the servant’s staircase, then the bottom drawer of her desk, and now this.

The space was about the same size as both bedrooms, with one window set into the exterior wall covered by venetian blinds, directly opposite the hidden entrance. Thin lines of early morning light fell lazily across the floor in pale stripes. Thick wood beams crossed the ceiling. Below the window a leather couch sat with an end table beside it and a lamp on top of it.

The lamp was either the most expensive or the cheapest thing in the room, and I genuinely could not tell which.

To my right a desk was pressed against the wall that shared with my bedroom, just as neat and minimal as the one at Cavanaugh Investigations. But there was an impression of pen lines in the sticky notes and all the pens were only half-filled with ink.

This was Kenna’s workspace, the place she actually did her thinking, investigating and solving. The Cavanaugh Investigations office was exactly what it felt like, a front, staged to look like her real office.

I looked to my left, to the wall that shared with Kenna’s bedroom, was a row of waist-high filing cabinets and above them⁠—

I stared at the investigation board hanging at eye-level. My own face stared back at me, pinned right at the center the same way I had placed Camille Nash at the center of her own investigation board. Instead of magnets and markers Kenna had filled this board with push pins and red yarn that spooled out to other photographs of me that had been taken from a distance alongside notes in Kenna’s precise handwriting.

There were dates, observations about my behavior, and the occasional question mark where she hadn’t been able to reach a conclusion.

These photos were different from the ones that Simon Crawford had sent to me, the styles and the angles completely focused on the professional job of gathering evidence about who I was and why I was there.

I felt weak as I sat down on the leather couch, trying to come up with an explanation for what I had found that didn’t lead right back to Kenna’s still investigating me.

It was something I had worried about, a possibility I’d already considered more than once, but thinking it and seeing it were two entirely different things. Besides, I had trusted her. I had taken her at her word that she trusted me.

My greatest fear had been that she would figure everything out because she was a good investigator who happened to pick up all the details that didn’t add up and put them together the way I had with Trick and the Boiler Room.

Instead, I was faced with this.

I looked around at the venetian blinds and the light coming through them and was reminded of the photographs Kenna had shown me, the hidden cameras in my bathroom vent.

I knew it was different, that secret cameras and secret rooms did not equate to the same thing. That the slants of the blinds and the slants of the vents were not connected, and yet the parallels between Kenna staking me out in plain sight while hiding this room and a stalker photographing me in my private moments before making themselves publicly known by sending me those photographs was startling. I was trained to see patterns, and sometimes you started to see those connections even when they weren’t actually there.

I wasn’t sure what the parallel between Kenna’s secrets and Simon’s blatant disrespect for my privacy were, but I knew I should get up and leave, to pretend I had never seen the investigation board with my face on it. I was still sitting there on the couch in the hidden office, numb to the world around me as I attempted to sort through everything when I heard the soft shush of feet on carpet in the hallway.

Before I could even pretend I hadn’t been in her secret office, Kenna was already stepping cautiously into the room.

She took everything in—the open door, me on the couch, the board on the wall—still as a statue while she processed what she was seeing. Rogue pushed past her ankles, coming to sit beside me. I had left him downstairs on the couch, but he’d clearly followed Kenna up here to find me.

“How did you find it?” she asked. Her voice was empty of anything I could latch onto to sense her state of mind, but I could see from her expression that this wasn’t good. I was never meant to know about this room.

“I was sweeping the house for bugs and cameras,” I told her, my voice equally hollow. This felt like the calm before the storm, a few moments of respite before everything blew up in my face. “I realized your room was too small, that the dimensions between our bedrooms didn’t add up, and that there had to be something here.”

“You went into my bedroom?” she asked, voice pitching higher.

“I went into every room,” I replied, as if that somehow made it better. “I searched everywhere, just in case. After this morning, I couldn’t—I just—I had to know. I had to make sure there weren’t any other cameras watching me.”

“I didn’t put cameras in my own house, Hale.” Kenna’s voice was harsher now, her outrage causing her to emphasize every single word like she could hammer it into my thick skull if she said it the right way.

“I know that,” I said, putting my hands up. It was then that I realized I was still sitting on the couch, still sitting in the secret office I wasn’t supposed to know about. And that Kenna’s entire body was blocking the door, keeping me from trying to fix what was already broken. Still, I had to try, one way or another. “I know. But someone else could have, and I couldn’t take that chance. I had to be sure.”

“You had to be sure?” She repeated my words back at me as a question, clenching her hands like she wasn’t certain if she wanted to cross her arms or to cross the space between us and strangle me. “You had to be sure that there wasn’t a secret camera watching you in my private bedroom?”

The silence that followed was all the answer either of us needed. I’d already gone into her bedroom, broken an unspoken rule of privacy and taken it a step further to discover a secret I wasn’t supposed to see. I couldn’t regret it, though. Not when the evidence that she had not stopped looking into me was hanging right there on the wall. I wasn’t the only one crossing boundaries, after all.

“Were you ever going to take down my case?” I asked, nodding towards the cork board. “Or did you find something else to add? You forgot to write down that Trick paid my application fee, but you’re making a good case against me here.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Kenna said. “That is not the conversation we’re having right now.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “And what conversation are we having?”

“You went into my bedroom, Hale. My bedroom.” She crossed her arms then. Not imminently planning to strangle me, it seemed, despite the frustration in her voice. “You went through my private space looking for things I was hiding.”

“I wasn’t looking for things you were hiding,” I said. “I was checking for surveillance equipment.”

“So you say,” she scoffed, shaking her head and sending her eyes skywards. “And if there were any to be found, I’m sure you would have found them because you’re so very good at hunting down the truth. Do you know why? It’s because you don’t know when to stop or when you’ve crossed a line. You’re literally sitting in my private office—a secret space I did not tell you about or give you permission to be in—and you’re asking me to explain myself like I’m the bad guy because I haven’t taken down the last case I was working on.”

I stood up, partly because she was right that I was just sitting there and partly because I didn’t like the way she was talking down to me.

“You told me you weren’t looking into me anymore,” I said.

“I wasn’t,” she replied. “I’m not.”

“And yet there I am, in all the photos you took of me,” I waved my hand towards the evidence board again, like she needed the reminder of what we were talking about. “Just like all of the photos that Simon took.”

“You’re the one who literally invaded my privacy and you’re trying to compare me to that man?” Kenna let out a growl of frustration as she threw her hands in the air.

I didn’t reply. Instead, we stared at each other across the small room, the board on the wall sat mostly behind her, but in a way it sat between us as well, a representation of the distrust we both held onto like life rafts in a storm. Because trusting someone wasn’t safe. It only gave them the opportunity to betray you.

“If we are going to start demanding total honesty and breaking down one another’s boundaries, I think it’s time you tell me what’s actually going on with you. What are you running from?” She threw her hand up between us, shaking her head like she didn’t actually want the answer. “No, let’s start with something else. Who are you, really?”

I looked at her for a long moment, thought about the way she had hunched over a hot toddy at two a.m., bracing herself to share the bad news. Thought about those photographs of me all lined up on the kitchen island, showing I was being stalked, and the fierce edge to her voice as she promised to handle my stalker one way or another.

Thought about clinking our coffee cups together, the word partners echoing between us.

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to trust that I could give her this piece of me that I’d hidden away for over two months and trust her to help me with it the same way she helped me with so many other things. But being wanted for the murder of an FBI agent wasn’t the same as being the victim of a stalker.

No matter how much I wanted to trust her, there was no version of this where I gave her the answers she was asking for that didn’t end with the FBI at the door.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Can’t or won’t?” she challenged, green eyes narrowed at me.

“Both,” I replied as I pushed past her through the door to the secret office, not bothering to look back as I rushed down the stairs and out the front door, desperate to escape.

Chapter Seventeen

I always claimed to hate running, both in the physical sense and the metaphorical one. I’d passed my FBI certifications by making it a habit and then taking it one step further and turning my runs into a competition.

If running away from your problems was a competition, I would have won the gold medal by now.

It wasn’t until I was halfway to my car that I realized Rogue was following me and had been the entire time. I looked back at the cottage, taking in my window on one side, Kenna’s on the other, and the one in the middle with the closed venetian blinds.

I should have seen it much sooner, I realized, and in the same moment I felt the crushing weight of guilt over how I’d behaved. Still I couldn’t change what I’d done or what I’d said now.

I patted my pockets, confirming I had the basics. Phone, wallet, keys. Rogue had his harness on, and I had a spare leash in the trunk of my car, but I didn’t have any treats to give him for good behavior. I would have to go back inside if I wanted to collect them. I closed my eyes, already seeing how that would play out.

The moment I stepped foot back in that house Kenna would sense me, sniff me out like a bloodhound, and we would go back to fighting until we either figured out a way forward or broke the tentative bond between us.

No, I couldn’t bring myself to go back. Not now. Not yet.

“Come on,” I said to Rogue as I unlocked and opened the back door of my car. “Load up.”

Rogue jumped into the car, patiently waiting while I clipped the safety belt to his harness before getting himself tangled in it while attempting to lick my entire face. I giggled, a layer of stress already breaking away at his antics.

“You want to go for a ride?” I asked, because getting as far away from Cavanaugh Cottage—and from my problems—seemed like the best course of action. Rogue barked once, right in my face, and I winced before pulling myself out of the back door and wiping his slobber off my face.

I closed the door, cut around to the driver’s side, and paused with my hand on the handle and my eyes on the place I was supposed to call home. Kenna had said there were no strings attached to my living in the cottage, but she probably hadn’t accounted for me finding her private office or going into her bedroom without permission.

I wasn’t sure I had it in me to find somewhere new to live at the moment, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to the studio apartment now that I knew about the cameras in the vents, but nothing felt certain now.

I didn’t know if I should go back inside and work things out with Kenna or if she did better when someone gave her space. What I did know was that I simply couldn’t be here. I needed to go. And if I was lucky, I would still have somewhere to live when I came back.

After stopping at our favorite pet store and getting Rogue all the love and attention he was apparently desperate for and not getting at home, I quickly searched for a moderately difficult trail in the area and drove us out to the middle of nowhere.

There were only three other cars in the parking lot, which made sense for a Monday morning. I hooked my newly purchased treat pouch to my belt loop and filled it with lamb lung and freeze-dried cheese, then switched into the hiking books I always kept in my trunk these days.

Once I was ready, I let Rogue out and clipped the leash to his harness, locking the car door and leading him over to the trailhead. The Whychus Canyon trail was a 4.8 mile loop that ran along the Whychus creek at the base and along the rim of the canyon on the way back. It looked just challenging enough to keep me engaged without putting Rogue and me in any danger.

As I stood at the trailhead, I thought about the danger of solo hiking and glanced down at Rogue for a moment before I pulled out my phone. I bit my lip, trying to make a decision I didn’t want to have to make.

Rogue had been through enough, trying to defend his first owner from being murdered on a trail not all that different from this one. And everyone else in Lexi Tate’s life had suffered for years, wondering what had happened to her while out on a hike she hadn’t told anyone she was going to be on.

The decision I needed to make wasn’t whether I would let someone know I was about to do this hike. It was whether I told Trick or Kenna I was out here.

Trick was the safe option, the person who wasn’t currently angry at me. Texting him my hiking plans wouldn’t be unreasonable and he would understand my situation better than most. He would know better than to get the police involved unless it was truly dire, as well.

But it was Monday, which meant that even though it was my day off Trick had a full shift ahead of him tonight. Not to mention the other part of his business that also ran on Monday nights. I would be surprised if he was even awake right now.

Besides, texting Trick my whereabouts instead of Kenna felt like the coward’s way out, while following hiking safety protocols with Kenna would potentially soften her. It would serve to remind her that even while we were fighting, I still took these things seriously. I knew how much Lexi’s disappearance had affected her, after all, and I trusted Kenna to come find me if I wasn’t back from this hike within a few hours.

Taking Rogue on the Whychus Canyon Loop, going clockwise.

I sent off the text, bracing myself as I watched the message turn from unread to read, and then those three infernal little dots popped up.

And vanished.

And popped up again.

Then, finally, her reply came through.

Be safe. Check in at the 3 hour mark or I’m sending in the cavalry.

I thumbs upped her message and then turned my phone on silent, heading down the path with Rogue trotting happily at my side. I threw myself into the hike, careful as I navigated a few steep sections. Rogue and I made it to the bottom of the canyon without injury, and I paused for a moment, looking out at the little pocket of greenery the creek supplied water to, so different from the pure desert landscape along the rim.

I’d purchased a water bottle and collapsible dish for Rogue while I was at the pet store and I used it, letting him drink deeply before dumping the last remnants of the water bowl onto the ground and folding the bowl back up, shoving it into my back pocket. I took a few sips of the water myself and then spurred Rogue onward down the trail, trying to absorb the beauty around us rather than worry about all the ways my life was currently going wrong or could begin going wrong if I wasn’t careful.

But even as bad as things were, I knew that Trick would have my back and so would Noah. Between the two of them I would make it through this, even if Kenna and I couldn’t find some common ground.

I still felt as socially isolated as I was physically in this canyon, though. Kenna was the closest thing I had to a best friend now that I knew how Phoebe saw me. Noah was doing everything he could to prove my innocence without getting himself locked away for helping me, but Phoebe’s presence meant that chances were low Noah would be available just to talk about the frustrations of a federal fugitive’s interpersonal dynamics.

And even if Trick wasn’t sleeping, he would be preparing to run his weekly gambling night, which I shouldn’t actually know about. If I were being honest, I didn’t have any proof that an illegal gambling night was actually happening. For all I knew, I could have made the entire thing up.

Rogue paused along the trail to sniff at an interesting patch of foliage and I took the moment to close my eyes, remembering that bookie ledger on his desk. Those numbers were real, and so were the initials. I knew from my training with the FBI exactly what that was, but nothing about that ledger screamed in-person gambling so why was I so certain that’s what was going on?

Sure, I had a handful of sly comments I’d picked up from the regulars, and the consistent Monday nights off every week, but that didn’t point to gambling as the only explanation. Yet there was an absolute certainty that sat low in my gut, more sure of this than most things in my life right now.

What was it about those numbers that had me so convinced?

I thought of them again, remembering what I’d seen of the open ledger.

R.T. 2,000.

D.W.H. 4,300.

M.M.P. 6,275.

I didn’t know an R.T., but I knew a D.W.H.

Douglas Whitford-Hall was a regular at Mug+Shots, his long white beard and ball cap combo were ubiquitous with the back corner of the bar on a Friday night. If Trick’s ledger was to be believed, then Doug owed him over four grand and it certainly wasn’t for the drinks that he always paid for in cash.

The numbers were strange, I had to admit. There were no extra dollars here or there, and no cents either. Just whole, large numbers. The kind that added up if you were buying in for the same $5, $10, or $20 over and over again.

Perhaps even $100 a hand, considering how high those tabs were.

But even that didn’t prove anything concrete.

I kept mulling it over as Rogue and I meandered down the trail, passing a massive, strangely square boulder that I had the urge to climb but decided against because I knew Rogue would try to follow me and it was just tall enough that I wasn’t sure he could safely jump up and clear the top without hurting himself.

We kept moving even as my mind wandered, and Rogue kept me on track, never straying too close to the creek’s edge. Other dogs would probably love to play in the water, but mine had a history with water that I wasn’t interested in testing the boundaries of at the moment. Someday we might come back, test out playing in water that wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the Willamette River just to prove to him that he could, but I had more than enough on my mind and the last thing I wanted right now was for my dog to be mad at me too.

It wasn’t until we were headed back up the canyon side, hitting the apex of the loop that would bring us back along the rim towards the parking lot, that it finally hit me.

M.M.P. stood for Mad Marco Plover.

Marco Plover was a name I’d come across during my research into Vienna Quinn—what little research I had managed between Kenna tailing me and confronting me, discovering that my landlord was abusing my right to privacy, solving the murder of Lexi Tate, and discovering that I had a stalker.

Five minutes for a google search here, ten minutes combing social media there, and I still didn’t know as much as I would like to about who Vienna really was. Overall, I’d fallen back on Noah’s intel and the hopes that he would be able to quickly find and question her.

But I had found several articles with her name in them, written by a reporter following the fallout of a murder trial in Seattle five years ago. The articles focused more on a man named Marco Plover who had taken a plea deal for obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence after Quinn had testified against him, throwing him under the bus in order to escape her own charges.

According to that article, the reason they called him ‘mad’ was that unlike his criminal activities which he played close to the vest, his gambling behaviors were erratic and unhinged. He would go all in on bad hands and then throw hands if he lost, taking it out on the people around him and resulting in a bevy of bans from twenty-seven separate casinos across the country.

He was unpredictable, dangerous, and armed to the teeth with lawyers and goons alike.

The idea that he could be right here in Bend, racking up a bill with Trick on Monday nights, made perfect sense if normal casinos weren’t letting him back in. And it made me nervous, thinking about how Trick would certainly throw him out if he started to live up to his nickname while in Trick’s establishment.

I stopped in my tracks, staring out at the canyon below and trying not to smack my hand to my face in embarrassment as I realized two things simultaneously.

The first was that my certainty that Trick was running an illegal gambling night out of the basement of his bar was entirely based on seeing those initials in his ledger.

The second was that Vienna Quinn wasn’t the only fixer in my orbit now—and that the bad blood between them could be leveraged. If the price was right, Plover might be willing to turn on her. Hell, he might even be willing to give Noah something to use against her to force her to admit the truth about who had hired her to pin Monica’s murder on me.

My eyes focused on the distant canyon wall on the other side of the creek, the layers of changing color between the spots where the canyon walls had broken off in pieces scattered along the sloping surface of a softer, vegetation-covered landscape. It was a gorgeous view, and an incredible reminder of the small blessings that I still had.

And now I had something else, another potential door that would lead me to getting the truth out of Vienna Quinn, a way to finally find out who had framed me.

All I had to do was track down “Mad” Marco and get him talking, offer him a chance to get back at Quinn for what she’d done, and tonight I just so happened to know exactly where he was going to be.

When I came back from my hike with Rogue I knew to expect Kenna in the cottage. Her Rivian was in the driveway after all, and she had sent a thumbs up to my message about making it off the trail safely.

Still, I could feel the argument lingering between us as I opened the door and looked past the foyer into the kitchen to find her vigorously scrubbing a heavy cast iron pan. I let Rogue roam free, putting his leash away before I approached the kitchen.

Everything in me wanted to hang a left and duck into the library, to head upstairs and avoid Kenna altogether. I didn’t want to have this conversation and certainly didn’t want to fall into another argument.

But I also knew I was about to do something Kenna would consider crossing another boundary, and I needed to talk to her about it first so that I didn’t blindside her this time.

“How was the canyon?” she asked as she rinsed the wire scrubber that was covered in a nasty black slurry, her soft pink pearl-colored nails flecked in black specks. She didn’t sound angry anymore, but the way she was stripping that pan...I didn’t think you were supposed to treat cast iron that way.

“I shouldn’t have gone into your bedroom,” I said, getting straight to the heart of the matter. I knew what I’d done was wrong even while I was doing it and hadn’t been able to help myself. If she couldn’t find it in herself to forgive me, I would understand, but it was better to know now than to dance around the subject forever and still have a falling out at the end. “Even if I had an excuse, I shouldn’t have violated your privacy. I know how awful that feels and I shouldn’t have done it.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment, and I felt the silence stretch out between us as Kenna paused in her scrubbing and looked over at me, surprise written all over her face.

Was it really so strange that I was apologizing? Sure, I’d stormed out before, but once I calmed down and separated the results of my snooping from the actions I’d taken it had become clear to me that I had crossed a line. I didn’t appreciate her keeping her investigation into me ongoing, but I also couldn’t blame her. I was a stranger she invited into her home and there were a lot of things about me that didn’t quite add up.

“I should have told you about my private office,” Kenna said, her words not quite clicking at first. Because the whole point of a private office was that it was private. She didn’t have to tell me about it, and that office wasn’t the pain point for me. “And what I said—I pushed you for answers because I was angry and it was the sharpest tool available to cut at you. I’m sorry.”

I turned around to find her looking at me, that dirty scrubber still in her hand. Her eyes were wide and she looked like she was near tears, like she really did feel awful for trying to pry into my past.

“Kenna,” I started to say, because this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. “I’m the one who should be apologizing, not you.”

“No,” she said, like I had it all wrong. “You have nothing to apologize for. I’m the one who⁠—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I interrupted. I wanted to assure her that I knew I was the one who had breached her privacy and broken the trust between us. We stared at each other, neither one of us willing to back down from the apology we were trying to make.

Then something in the air shifted, perhaps both of us realizing at the same time that neither of us wanted to keep arguing and somehow we still were. Kenna cracked a smile and I let out a little laugh.

“Are we good?” I asked her, and her smile widened as she went back to scrubbing her pan.

“We’re good,” she assured me. I felt the tension that had existed between us loosened by several degrees. This conversation didn’t fix everything but it was a start.

Unfortunately, I now had to say something I knew was going to cause even more friction between us, but I didn’t have time to put it off or come at it from a different angle, so instead I forged straight ahead.

“I need to tell you something,” I said, my finger tapping against my leg, that old habit I never managed to break, giving away just how nervous I was.

“What?” she asked, still scrubbing, but I could hear the wary curiosity in her voice and the hunch in her shoulders told me she was bracing for bad news. Which, this was, in a way. I certainly didn’t expect her to see it as a positive that I’d figured out what Trick was up to.

“I know about the Boiler Room,” I said, and Kenna paused her scrubbing for half a heartbeat, looking up at me.

“I...don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, averting her gaze back to the cast iron. But I saw that brief moment of hesitation. That flicker of fear that I might actually know more than I should.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I wasn’t looking into him, but the clues just started to add up until I couldn’t ignore them anymore. I know it’s none of my business and I wouldn’t even bring it up except that I think it intersects with our cold case and I wanted to talk to you about that. About how it could help us solve Rebecca’s murder.”

That caught her attention.

“What is this supposed intersection?” she looked over at me again, still cautiously side-stepping any acknowledgement of the illegal activities her brother was involved in.

“Mad Marco Plover,” I explained. “He’s a fixer and a degenerate gambler. He’s the kind of person who would know how to coordinate a body swap without it looking like one—the right transport networks, the people willing to look away at the right moment for the right amount of cash. And he’ll be in your brother’s basement tonight. If Ian Nash had professional help, it either came from Marco or someone Marco would know about. I plan to track him down tonight while he’s gambling and attempt to make an introduction. Suss out who was helping Ian and just how far they went to cover up Rebecca’s murder. If he really did kill her after all.”

“You don’t think he did it?” Kenna asked, narrowing her eyes at me. She wasn’t scrubbing the pan anymore, though, her perfectly manicured hands sitting in the sink covered in a slurry of water and flaked iron as she naturally switched into investigation mode. “He literally confessed.”

“To his current wife, while they were both drunk,” I pointed out. “And that’s according to a second-hand account from her cousin. Until I have evidence one way or another, I would prefer to keep considering all the options.”

“I didn’t even consider that Carmen could be lying about what Camille heard,” Kenna said under her breath, almost like she was cursing herself for not thinking of it sooner. “Though I did wonder if maybe Camille misheard or misunderstood. Wouldn’t that be tragic, to have to live on the run based on a misunderstanding?”

“It would,” I agreed. “Which is why we need to get to the bottom of this one way or another.”

She was quiet for a long moment as she considered what I was really suggesting here. To waltz into her brother’s basement and approach a known criminal while he was gambling illegally, simply for the chance that he might point us in the right direction for our case.

“You really think Plover will talk?” Kenna asked.

“If we ask the right questions in the right way,” I replied.

“You know if you ever reveal what you’ve learned about Trick’s business endeavors to anyone I’ll destroy you, right? I don’t need to know who you were or what you’re running from to ruin you,” Kenna’s tone was playful, but I still felt a thrill of fear at the undercurrent of truth to her threat. I gave her a sharp nod of understanding.

“Nothing I learn about Trick or his business is going to get back to anyone else,” I assured her. “I owe him more than you could know and unless I find out he’s physically hurting someone I have no intention of upsetting his criminal empire.”

“Criminal empire?” Kenna snorted, a sparkle returning to her eyes now. “More like a criminal umpire. Trick may love running Mug+Shots, but keeping the peace between questionable individuals is my brother’s true calling.”

“He’s got a good sense of when to throw out a rowdy customer,” I agreed, grinning now. This conversation had gone much better than I was anticipating. I’d known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that there was always the chance that Kenna would tell me to back off and not go to Mug+Shots tonight and I still would have gone. But it felt good to not have to worry about the inevitable fallout, to have her on my side, and to finally be back on the same page. “What time should we head out?”

“Now,” Kenna said, and I raised a surprised eyebrow at her, glancing outside to the mid-day sun and wondering if there really was a basement of gamblers hidden away during a workday. Kenna caught my expression and cracked a smile. “We won’t turn up to the Boiler Room until after dark, but we have a serious issue to tackle before then.”

“Oh?” I asked, watching as she rinsed the pan, and her hands, before setting it on the stove and turning on the burner. Then she turned back to me with a raised eyebrow, like she expected me to already know what she was going to say. I shook my head, at a loss for what she meant.

“I mean, look at you,” she told me, gesturing towards me from head to toe. “You simply cannot turn up to the Boiler Room looking like that.”

“I was going to change,” I replied, crossing my arms defensively. I was still dressed in the t-shirt and sweat shorts I’d gone to bed—and on a hike—in. I didn’t intend to go anywhere else until I had taken a shower and put on some fresh clothes.

“Oh no,” Kenna shook her head. “Uh uh. I’ve seen your wardrobe, if you could call it that. You don’t even own the kind of clothes that would get you into a place like the Boiler Room.”

I had my mouth open, ready to fire back and defend my limited wardrobe, but I froze as I considered the implication of what she was saying.

When I imagined the Boiler Room, this place that was in the basement of a local bar and cafe and was only open one night a week, I had to admit I’d imagined lightweight card tables, folding chairs, an unfinished aesthetic with pipes along the ceiling and an actual boiler, unused and rusted as it sat in the corner of a room lit only by uncovered bulbs.

If what Kenna was saying was true, though, and I didn’t own anything that would live up to the expectations of the Boiler Room, I was left to wonder what exactly was hidden beneath the bar I had worked at for several weeks now.

“Okay,” I said, pressing my lips together as I realized this shot at talking to Plover was going to cost more than I anticipated. I had a little money stashed away, though, thankfully. And there was the rent money I had saved up to pay for the next month’s rent for my studio apartment that I no longer planned to hand over to Crawford.

I could afford a new dress. I couldn’t afford to miss out on the chance to talk to Plover about either of the cases I was hoping he could help me with.

“Excellent,” Kenna said, taking that one word as agreement and flicking off the stove, the pan dry and unexpectedly gleaming. “I’ll drive.”

Chapter Eighteen

Mug+Shots looked the same from the outside. The same brick walls of a two-story building, Trick’s loft situated above the cafe and bar space. The shades on the windows were drawn, blocking out the last vestiges of daylight from getting inside. I had a fleeting thought that the transition between cafe and bar would be easier if Trick had the same kind of smart glass that Kenna used in her office.

Then, I remembered her words, about how Trick was the one who had been disowned and cut off. Despite my penchant for finding the truth and the trouble that came along with it, I knew a sore spot when I heard one and I’d deliberately chosen not to go digging.

But now that I knew there was another layer to Trick’s illegal endeavors I couldn’t help but wonder which had come first. Had Trick begun the illegal side of his business because he needed that extra income after being disowned or had he been disowned because of the illegal activities?

I couldn’t say, and I knew better than to ask.

“Ready?” Kenna stepped up beside me, dressed in a silver and blush sequin halter-top dress that ended right at her knees, paired with sleek black heels. Her hair was perfectly curled, her nails somehow immaculate despite the scrubbing she had done earlier.

I was also dolled up, wearing a burgundy sleeveless lace dress with a skirt that fell in flowy points and fluttered as I walked. Kenna had used words like bodice and asymmetrical handkerchief hem, but I didn’t need the language of fashion to know what I felt good wearing and this dress left me feeling feminine and confident. It was just glamorous enough to help me blend in without being over the top, and I was able to walk without fear of it restricting my moment.

It wasn’t the only outfit that Kenna had bought for me, either. She had put me through the wringer trying on all kinds of dresses, blouse-and-slacks combos, outfits that were more quirky than chic, and rejecting every one of them while secretly setting aside anything that fit.

I hadn’t found out until we were at the register and three bags of outfits were waiting there for us. She hadn’t allowed me to look at any price tags or see the final bill, either, simply waving me off with a comment about needing to write off as much as she could through her LLC before the charity paperwork went through.

I didn’t believe it for a second, could see right through her to the actual charity she was performing, but by the time I knew what was happening the clothes were already paid for and she was refusing a receipt.

So now I had a closet full of new clothing and the weight of their value registering at the back of my mind. It wasn’t the mindset I would have preferred to start the evening with, but Kenna and I had only just gotten back on the same page. Grappling with the financial disparity between us and the discomfort it caused was a problem for another day.

“Ready,” I told her, turning to face Mug+Shots. Kenna shook her head and wrapped her hand around my bicep, leading me around the side of the building to a set of concrete steps that lined the building next to Trick’s and led to a basement level door.

“No one uses the bar for access,” Kenna told me, “That’s too conspicuous.”

“Then how—” I started to say, following her down the stairs. She paused at the door at the base of the stairs and knocked on it. Had I really been right about the gambling but somehow wrong about where it was being hosted?

The door swung inward, revealing a large black man dressed in a white t-shirt and black jeans. I had once thought that Trick would make a good bouncer, tall and muscular with full sleeve tattoos. Compared to this guy, though? Trick might as well be jumping around in a bounce house instead, because this bouncer made Trick look like a child.

“Kito,” Kenna greeted him, stepping into the building and still guiding me around with a hand on my arm, indicating very clearly that I was with her and welcome to enter. The bouncer narrowed his eyes at me, and I had to wonder if he had been warned not to let me in or if it had never occurred to Trick that I might figure out what was going on. “She’s with me.”

“She know the rules?” Kito asked, and I picked up on a slight accent that I hadn’t expected, telling me this man was another fellow East Coast transplant.

“I wouldn’t let her in otherwise,” Kenna assured him, and that seemed to be confirmation enough for him because he closed the door behind us and gestured down the hallway but didn’t bother to follow as we took a right and made our way to a door at the back. It was set into the same wall as the entrance and if my internal navigation was working correctly, it was facing the space beneath the alleyway between this building and Mug+Shots next door.

Kenna finally dropped my arm and then turned to me, pinning me with a serious expression.

“No card counting,” she said, and I wrinkled my nose in confusion until she continued. “That’s rule number three.”

“And what were one and two?” I asked.

“Don’t get rowdy,” Kenna replied. “And if you do, take it elsewhere.”

“Any other rules I should know about?” I shifted my dress a little, more a habit of fidgeting than any actual need to adjust the seam lines along my waist. Standing on this side of the door with no knowledge of what to expect on the other side except gambling had me anxious to cross the threshold. I didn’t like not knowing things. We’d discussed our plan before arriving, though I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure it would work.

“Mind your own business,” Kenna told me, which hit home a little too hard and she must have seen it in my expression because she smirked a little and shook her head. “That’s not advice from me to you, Hale, that’s an actual rule. A lot of the people in here are upstanding members of the community and if it gets out that they come here it could damage their reputation. Oh, and one last thing. The drinks are only free if you’re betting more than $50 a hand.”

“Well, I have some tip money,” I said, reaching for my small clutch.

“Take this,” she replied, opening her purse and pulling out a massive stack of bills, trying to hand it to me.

“Uh,” I raised my hand and pushed the wad of cash back towards her, shaking my head. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to have this conversation, but you can’t keep trying to give me money.”

“Hale,” she protested, still holding out the cash, but I shook my head. Paying for things on my behalf was one thing but handing me what looked like thousands of dollars to gamble with as if it were mere pocket change was going too far. Especially considering I wasn’t well versed in these kinds of games. I could bluff with the best of them when it counted, but that didn’t matter if I didn’t know what hands I was supposed to be bluffing and which ones were genuinely bad.

“I can’t take your money, Kenna. I’m going to lose all of it.”

“Good,” she said. “I want you to. Listen, not only will it help you blend in with Marco but everything you lose to the house goes straight to my brother. He won’t let me gamble my own money here because he knows I will lose on purpose. But if you’re the one losing, he can’t complain.”

“I don’t know,” I said, still eyeing the stack of cash. I didn’t like the idea of having that much money on me. Then again, if the point was to lose it—like some twisted reverse money laundering scheme—I wouldn’t have it on me for long.

“Please,” Kenna said, trying to hand me the bills again. “It’s my fault Trick was cut off and now he won’t let me help him directly. Half the money I have would be going to him anyway, if our stupid parents hadn’t—just, let me do this for him.”

“Okay,” I said, taking the bills and trying not to calculate how much money I was holding as I tucked it away in the purse looped around my shoulder. If this really was meant to be Trick’s money, I didn’t see any harm in getting it back to him, or using it to blend in while I did so.

But now Kenna had me more curious than ever to understand exactly how Trick had been cut off, and how it was somehow her fault.

“Thank you,” Kenna said, oblivious to my burning curiosity. I shoved that curiosity down as she turned to face the door, twisting the knob and pulling it open.

The sound of background jazz and dozens of conversations reached me as my eye was automatically drawn to a massive five-tier cascade chandelier hanging from the center of the vaulted ceiling. The chandelier did most of the work lighting the place, but there were also a dozen diamond shaped art deco sconces that lined the walls as well, including the one directly across from us that was made up of the same brick as Mug+Shots.

The center of the room contained six game tables; two blackjack, two poker, a roulette, and a craps table. Just enough to keep the customers here busy and entertained without leaving any of the six dealers twiddling their thumbs for too long. There were approximately thirty people in the room, dressed up the same way Kenna and I were, either actively gambling or sitting down with a drink and a conversation partner.

I took in the plush cream seating areas that lined the room and the smokey, dim lighting with awe. The smoke held the scent of cigars and cigarettes which I fought the urge to wrinkle my nose at. I supposed if there was one place you could still smoke indoors it would be an illegal mini casino hidden beneath the quirky bar of a disowned heir.

“Did you help him design this?” I asked, catching sight of the gold stanchions and velvet ropes blocking off a few of the seating areas. Kenna grinned, nodding. “Of course you did. I mean, look at this place.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kenna said, and then gestured towards the center of the room. “Come on, we can’t just stand here all night.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I laughed and followed her over to a blackjack table that had two seats free, looking around for any sign of Plover. I’d researched him before coming here, just to make sure I had his face memorized, but he didn’t appear to be anywhere in sight, so I settled in and prepared myself to inevitably lose.

By the time I had gone through half a dozen hands I was starting to get the hang of things. Just as we went for round seven a young man in a tux appeared from no-where and handed me an Old-Fashioned before passing an Algonquin over to Kenna. I raised my eyebrows at that, looking around the room for any sign of who might have ordered them for us.

The answer was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, staring us down. Trick was dressed in a dark green shirt with a black blazer and black slacks, black dress shoes just as shiny as his slicked-back hair. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who might have once run a motorcycle gang or worked as a bouncer anymore. He looked like a crime boss, and the way he pointed at the two of us with two fingers and gestured us over with a stern expression only served to complete the picture.

“God, he’s so dramatic,” Kenna muttered, rolling her eyes and intentionally losing even as she took a sip of her drink. I followed her lead, leaving the table and heading over to where Trick stood waiting for us.

“Having a nice night?” he asked, an undercurrent in his voice and his lack of greeting telling me that the two of us were in deep shit with him.

“We were,” Kenna replied, equally pleasant on the surface but with that same edge underneath that reminded me the two of them had grown up together, that they were twins. “Thank you for the drinks.”

“You’re welcome,” Trick replied. “Free drinks to anyone betting $50 a hand or more. What kind of businessman would I be if I didn’t uphold my own rules? Every single one of them.”

“I wasn’t counting cards,” Kenna’s voice turned defensive and I fought back the urge to snort because when she told me ‘no counting cards’ was a rule it hadn’t even occurred to me that rule was in place because of her. “Besides, I’m just here as a guest and guide for your lovely new bartender.”

“Speaking of, how exactly did you find out about this place?” Trick asked, switching his focus to me. I stared right back at him, my answer held entirely within a single raised eyebrow. He knew I was days away from being sworn into the FBI before I went on the run and that I’d solved a seven-year cold case within weeks of being in town. Realization dawned on him after a moment. “Oh, of course.”

“Of course?” Kenna asked, glancing between the two of us. It was then that I remembered she didn’t know that he knew my past. The effort of keeping so many secrets, juggling all the information, and remembering who knew what was exhausting.

“A few customers slipped up, made comments within earshot that I wasn’t supposed to hear,” I told her. Which was technically true, it just wasn’t the whole picture.

“Your customers are getting sloppy,” Kenna told Trick, glancing around at said customers like she could spot which ones had spilled the beans. “Do you need me to clean up any problems while I’m here?”

“You being here is the problem,” Trick snarked and Kenna gave him a look that said really? I’m the problem? Something akin to twin telepathy passed between them then and Trick’s shoulders slumped as a conceded defeat. “Actually, could you come upstairs for a moment? I have a financial dilemma I’d love for you to take a look at.”

“You realize you could just as easily pay for an accountant,” Kenna said. “I have a girl who is very discreet.”

“So do I, and she doesn’t charge me anything,” Trick shot back, and then glanced over at me like he had only just remembered that I wasn’t supposed to know the inner workings of his criminal empire. I shrugged, making it clear that I didn’t care about any of the obvious crimes I was seeing and hearing about tonight. I only had one thing on my mind and that was tracking down Plover.

I glanced around the room again and caught sight of a set of shoulders I hadn’t noticed when I first walked in. His back was to me, but the back of that waxed head could very well be the man I was looking for.

“You okay alone for a minute?” Kenna asked, and I turned back to look at her, realizing that she and Trick were both watching me, waiting for me to make the call.

“Of course,” I replied, maintaining the façade for Trick. This hadn’t been part of the plan, but maybe it would work better without Kenna looking over my shoulder. Plover might open up a little more. “I was just going to see if I can’t turn my tips into a little extra cash. You guys go ahead.”

Trick looked uncertainly between me and the door in the back corner that I assumed would lead into the actual boiler room and up a flight of stairs into the bar itself. But Kenna was more than happy to distract him from my seven-game losing streak by dragging him away.

Besides, this was going to be a hell of a lot easier if I didn’t have to balance both Plover and Kenna while I tried to figure out a way to use him against Quinn.

“We’ll be right back,” Kenna told me. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”

Then they were gone and I was left to my own devices. And I turned them directly on my target.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked, walking right up to the poker table where Marco Plover was sitting and setting my stack of black chips on the table. My heart thumped harder. Blackjack was fairly straightforward. Poker was an entirely different matter.

Plover’s eyes lifted slowly from his cards, taking stock of me and lingering at my waist. I pretended not to notice. There was one other person, an older woman, sitting two seats down from Plover. Besides the dealer in front of us, this was about as private as I could expect to get, and knowing the kind of people that Trick associated with and the kind of place this was, I wasn’t terribly worried that the dealer was going to say anything about our discussion if there even ended up being something worth overhearing.

“Please do,” Plover replied, eyelids lowering as he gave me a hooded stare. I did my best not to shudder and slid into the seat beside him. He was on the heavyset side but held it like it was more muscle than fat. And his bald head was so shiny I could practically see myself in it. A scar sat near the base of his skull though I couldn’t figure out how it got there.

As the dealer cut and shuffled the deck I watched Plover from the corner of my eye, trying to imagine the kind of behavior that would lead to his nickname. He glanced back at me, our eyes meeting as the dealer began passing out cards.

“Haven’t seen you in here before,” Plover said, not even looking at his hand before making a bet. I followed his lead, betting blindly as well. “Because I’m damn sure to remember a figure like that.”

Inwardly I shuddered but did my best not to let it show. “Heard this was the best place in town for some fun.”

Plover gave me an appreciative nod before taking a sip of his drink as the dealer flipped over the first three cards on the table. A three of clubs, a jack of hearts and an ace of hearts. I hadn’t even looked at my hand yet, something Plover seemed to notice as he quickly checked his own hand. He added a bet to the pile.

I thought back, trying to remember all the different types of hands in poker. I hadn’t had much time to study between making plans on how to approach Plover and Kenna putting me through my paces as she made me try on virtually every piece of clothing in the store. Not that it really mattered. It wasn’t as if I was trying to win. I just needed to keep the conversation going. Again, without looking at my cards, I mimicked Plover’s bet.

Plover raised an eyebrow as the dealer moved on to the woman.

“You’re Marco, aren’t you? I asked, dropping my voice lower, like I was admitting to a secret simply by knowing his name. If the man was surprised, he didn’t show it. He did give me a wary look, though, and quickly glanced towards the exit. “Sorry, it’s just that…you’re kind of famous.”

“Am I?” he asked, cautious.

“Your name has come up more than a few times,” I said.

“From whom?”

“Vienna Quinn,” I said.

The reaction was immediate and unambiguous. He fully recoiled from where he had been leaning into my space, his lips curling in a sneer that told me I had hit a sore spot. Good, the animosity between Quinn and Plover was exactly what I was hoping for, if I could keep him talking long enough to make use of it.

“You don’t keep very good company,” he sneered, turning towards the table, his body language telling me I’d completely lost any interest he had in leaving with me tonight. Thank God.

“Tell me about it,” I said, allowing a little of the venom I felt towards Vienna seep into my voice. “That’s exactly why I wanted to speak to you. Quinn and I had something of a falling out. She stabbed me in the back. Left me for dead.” Technically it wasn’t a lie.

“That’s little Yenna for you,” he said, and the nickname surprised me almost as much as the fondness in his voice. Despite the bad blood between them, it felt like there was more than met the eye when it came to their dynamic, which left me second guessing my play here. “But why come to me?”

“Because she always said not to trust you,” I told him, testing the waters and hoping I didn’t miss the mark too much.

“Oh?” He eyed me carefully but didn’t appear to be too suspicious of my cover story. “That’s rich, coming from her.”

Everything in me wanted to keep pushing his buttons, keep talking about Quinn’s betrayal, but that nickname and that fond tone left me on the backfoot. What if I was wrong and by playing up their rivalry I lost the chance to find out what he knew about Rebecca’s body swap? No, I had to prioritize here, and there was every chance I would have another shot at getting to Quinn through Plover in the future.

For now, I needed to get in good with him and use what he could tell me to get answers about what happened to Rebecca. Then, maybe next Monday, I could come back and see what else he was willing to tell me.

“Exactly,” I said as I leaned in a little closer, hoping he was getting a whiff of my perfume. He was leaning back in as well, which was a good sign, if not a disturbing one. “Which was why I was hoping you might help me. Sort of an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing.”

Plover downed the rest of his drink in one gulp. “We’re friends now?”

“Could be,” I said. “I’m looking for information. For a fee, of course.”

“Of course,” he replied, raising a brow at me. I considered just how much it would cost to get him talking versus how pissed Kenna would be if I redirected some of the cash she had positioned me to give to Trick.

Then, I selected five of the $100 chips I still had and passed them over to Plover. His shoulders relaxed slightly and he motioned for me to continue.

“Hypothetically,” I said, “If someone needed a body swapped out of a grave before the police exhumed it—how difficult would that be?”

“That’s an expensive ask,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

“So I’ve heard,” I told him. “I have a potential friend who may need that kind of service in the future. Would you say it’s possible?”

“Nearly impossible,” Plover corrected. “You’re talking permit acquisition, perfect timing, a chain of reliable people who won’t go talking or start asking questions they shouldn’t. There are a hundred moving parts and every one of them is a liability. Hypothetically, of course.”

“So, you wouldn’t take that kind of job, if you were me,” I said, watching his face for any sign that he was lying. He shook his head.

“Miss, I wouldn’t take that job if I were me,” he told me. “Jobs like that are how you get caught, not how you make a fortune.”

The dealer had come back around to us again, having flipped over another card. A six of hearts. Plover tossed another chip on the pile and the dealer moved to me. I followed suit, still ignoring my cards on the table.

“What if I were simply to leave the body where it is, let the police do what they will, and change what’s written about it after the exhumation?” I pressed. The look he sent me was calculating. He glanced at my cards, which were still face down.

“You’re not very good at this,” he said, straightening even more and peeking at his own cards before looking back at mine like it infuriated him that I wasn’t checking. Like my refusal to know if I needed to bluff or not was throwing off his ability to play the game.

“I’m a risk taker,” I replied, passing him another two black chips. He took them but the air of casual intrigue was gone, replaced by a competitive streak that I recognized and knew how to match.

Inside, I was gleeful, knowing that it must be driving him crazy that he couldn’t figure me out. When I lost, that would boost his ego even further. And as competitive as I was, it was easy to lose when that was the goal.

“Clearly,” he said, looking at the pile of chips I’d given him. He pushed the lot of them to the middle of the table, adding them to his bet. “Mad” indeed. I had no choice but to match his bet, exhausting most of the funds Kenna had given me. He smiled as if in approval. “If I had your job, I would make sure the person writing the reports was on my payroll and knew exactly how that report should be written to fly under the radar. Any other scenario leaves you and your client both open to points of failure.”

“Good to know,” I said as the dealer flipped the final card. A nine of hearts.

“Well, look at that,” Plover said, flipping over his cards. He showed two aces, one of diamonds and the other a spade. There was an ace on the table, which made three of a kind.

He narrowed his eyes toward my cards. The woman at the end had flipped hers over, showing a jack of clubs and a three of spades. She’d had two pair, but Marco’s three of a kind beat hers.

“Miss,” the dealer said, indicating my cards.

I had no idea what was under there, my main purpose for being here nothing more than pumping Plover for intel. I flipped my cards over, already accepting the loss.

“What the…” Plover said, an incredulous look on his face.

I stared at my cards a moment, confused. All I had was a nine of diamonds and a four of hearts. It was nothing. Not even a pair. But then I recalled that five of one suit was something special…a straight?

Oh, I’d won.

The dealer paid out my winnings, making my pile larger than the one I’d started with, despite giving almost a thousand dollars in chips to Plover.

“Now how the hell did you do that?” he asked, going red in the face. I recalled what happened to him when he lost. I might have just caused the flashpoint of a brawl. His hand balled into a fist, but as I glanced towards the door that Trick and Kenna had left through his gaze followed mine and he scowled.

Rule number 1: Don’t get rowdy.

My heart was ready to explode out of my chest, but I did everything I could to keep a straight face.

“Trade secret,” I said, gathering up my chips and quickly returning the eight black chips to him. Plover’s eyes widened at that, like he expected me to make off with all the money I’d just bribed him with.

“Guess I was wrong about you,” he said, his color returning to normal as he calmed, giving me a considering look. “You know, I have a place here in town. Maybe you’d be interested in showing me your magic trick.”

Rule number 2: if you do, take it elsewhere.

I didn’t know if he was propositioning me or subtly trying to get me somewhere he could do damage without repercussions, but I wasn’t about to risk it either way. I just wanted to get out of there before I made things worse between us.

“Sorry,” I said, pushing away from the table with my pile of winnings, and heading towards the back exit with one last comment left behind me. “I’m more of a one and done kind of girl.”

Kenna and I got back to the cottage around ten, earlier than either of us had expected. The fresh night air had cleared out the heady fog that the smoke in the basement created, and I stood in the living room, my mind still spinning around thoughts of Mad Marco Plover and Vienna Quinn while Kenna shrugged off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair.

“I still don’t see how the hell you actually won money.” She collapsed into the couch with the air of someone who was completely wiped out, and she hadn’t even done the investigative work. “I leave you alone for five minutes and you nearly wipe everyone out.”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to win.”

After I’d excused myself from Plover and made my way through the actual boiler room and into Mug+Shots, I had found Kenna in Trick’s office going over P&L’s with him. She looked relieved to be rescued, and we had quickly made our exit before a short and quiet drive home. It was then that I’d told her about the game.

“Ugh. At least your blackjack money went to Trick,” she said as I walked over and handed her my winnings. “What’s this?”

“For the clothes? The rent? Take your pick.”

“Hale—”

“No,” I said. “You’re taking this. End of discussion.”

She sighed and took the wad of cash from me, tucking it away in her purse. “This isn’t over.”

“Whatever you say.” I was just glad to finally be able to give her something in return for everything she’d done for me. Things no longer felt so lopsided.

Rogue appeared from wherever he had been hiding, assessed the situation, and then wandered over to the back door and nosed at it until I let him out. I left the door open far enough that he could come back in when he was ready and moved to sit on the couch across from Kenna.

“I feel like I failed,” she lamented. “We weren’t even there for two hours. I shouldn’t have left to work on Trick’s bullshit. I could have kept us out longer, made it feel more like—I don’t know. Like a girls’ night on the town.”

“So that’s what the shopping was for,” I said. “We didn’t need a girls’ night, anyway. We needed information.”

“And did we get it?” she asked, sending me a sideways look.

“For the most part,” I replied, “I was able to confirm that if a swap happened, it happened at the documentation level, not the physical one. And as far as I could tell, the specific scenario I was describing didn’t trigger any alarms for him. I don’t think Plover was part of the switch. Which means whoever did help Ian Nash had to have institutional access, either the person who wrote the exhumation autopsy or someone else in the chain of command between the examiner and the police.”

“So let’s recap,” Kenna said. “We have a potential witness to a murder confession who won’t come out of hiding until Ian is proven to be a killer,” she said. “A second-hand account of that drunken confession, and a conspiracy to doctor the records of an exhumation that we can’t prove.”

“It’s not much,” I admitted. “Even if Camille did reappear and take the stand, it would be her word against his. If he did this, we need evidence. Something solid and irrefutable.”

“We could try to get another exhumation, control the variables. Have someone take a look at Rebecca’s remains again and confirm that they match the details on the second autopsy,” Kenna suggested. “If there are discrepancies it could be enough to get a third look from the police.”

“The family would never agree to another exhumation,” I replied. “The only one even willing to talk to me is her half-sister. No, what we actually need is proof that the autopsy report from the exhumation was doctored in the first place, and then we can figure out who had the institutional access to do that.”

“How do we prove something like that?” Kenna asked, but I could already see her mind spinning and we came to the same conclusion at the same time. “Gracie.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Let’s get her perspective on the exhumation differences and then work backwards from there.”

Kenna nodded slowly. “Even if she can just confirm that the second autopsy wasn’t done on the same body as the first, or that the paperwork was altered in some significant way⁠—”

“Then we have a case,” I said. “Not a complete one, but enough to start building something that doesn’t rest entirely on Camille’s testimony.”

“I’ll call Gracie in the morning,” Kenna said, kicking up her bare feet on the coffee table and yawning dramatically. “Does Wednesday work for you? I have brunch with my mother tomorrow and I’m always wiped out afterwards.”

“Wednesday works fine,” I agreed. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Gracie the details of the case just yet. I’d like to see her read the reports without bias first. It will make our suspicions that much more legitimate if she comes to the same conclusion independently.”

“You know,” Kenna said, lolling her head to the side to peer at me through narrowed eyes, “for someone who insists she’s just a volunteer with no professional experience, you’re very good at this.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I replied with a wink. “It’ll ruin my reputation.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Okay,” Kenna said as she came down the stairs the next morning in a full face of makeup with her hair intricately braided. She was wearing a tweed skirt set. Rather than the traditional boxy silhouette that I’d seen on older women, Kenna’s version included a pleated skirt, a black turtleneck, and a custom fitted blazer that was buttoned up but cropped short. She was actively putting a large silver hoop earring in her ear as she spoke. “I called Gracie and confirmed that we’re on for tomorrow afternoon. She sounded a little frazzled, but I think that’s just the funeral planning.”

“Makes sense,” I replied, staring down at my phone, distracted by the article I’d come across that claimed I had been spotted in South America. The photo that went along with the article showed a pale woman with red hair from behind, sunning herself on the beach. Did anyone really think that I was out there vacationing after supposedly murdering my mentor in a fit of passion?

“Speaking of the funeral,” Kenna continued, moving to the shoe rack to pluck the same sleek black heels she’d worn the night before, sliding them on. “I think that skater dress will be perfect. It’s all black, it’s subtle so it doesn’t scream ‘look at me’, and yet it fits you well enough that I’m sure a certain D.A. will notice how ravishing you look.”

“Sorry, what?” I asked, looking up at her from where I was still staring at my phone.

“The funeral, on Saturday,” Kenna explained patiently. “You should wear the black dress we bought yesterday. The one with the skirt that flares out a little and stops at your knee. You liked that it has pockets?”

“I didn’t realize I was going to a funeral on Saturday,” I replied. Kenna frowned.

“The invitations came in the mail yesterday. I set yours on the counter.”

I glanced over at the spot she had indicated and realized it was the same spot where the empty hot toddy mug was still sitting. I frowned harder, going over to find that there was in fact a card of paper sitting beneath it, addressed to me.

This whole time I had thought that the mug just hadn’t been put away in the whirlwind of our argument and subsequent investigation into Marco Plover and all the while a much weirder and more passive aggressive thing was happening.

I glanced back at Kenna, wondering if she even realized how weird it was to use a dirty dish to placemark important mail, like she simply expected me to put the dish away and find the invitation there. Was that how she’d grown up, with her family communicating important information in strange ways?

Gracie had done a lovely job with the invitation, the cream cardstock and dark green ink leaning towards a formal style while the hint of green leaves in the background made for an interesting pattern that reminded me of the logo Lexi Tate had created for her ‘Tate of the Wild’ YouTube channel.

“Okay, I guess I’m going to a funeral?” I said, shaking my head in bewilderment. I hadn’t known Lexi myself, after all.

“You’re the one who solved her case,” Kenna pointed out. “And you saved Hadley. Of course you’ll be there.”

“Of course,” I echoed, recalibrating. “And while I’m there, I’m apparently going to seduce a local D.A.?”

“You’re going to keep your options open,” Kenna replied. “Mason Campbell is sure to be there. He and Lachlan were⁠—”

Kenna stopped her explanation and pulled out her phone, frowning for a moment before she slid the answer button over and turned the speaker phone on. “Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity, this is Kenna speaking.”

“Mrs. Scott,” the voice on the other end of the line was professional, but stern, and there was something about it that I instinctively didn’t like. “I’m Detective Blake Trivet, returning your call about the Camille Nash cold case.”

“Oh, excellent,” Kenna said, beaming. “I was hoping to talk to you. The case file is a little light and I thought you might be able to explain some of your thought processes and theories?”

“Have you considered that the case file is light on purpose?” Trivett asked, condescension filling his voice and confirming my first instinct was right. “I’ve been working on this case for over three years, Mrs. Scott. What makes you think your little hobby is going to do what I haven’t done?”

“Sometimes a new perspective—” Kenna started, meeting my eye across the kitchen island and grimacing as she was cut off, both of us shocked by this man’s animosity.

“I have plenty of perspective, thank you,” Trivett said. “Here’s what I know, I just got back from a lovely vacation and now some nosey Nancy Drew is getting her fingerprints all over my investigation, calling a grieving husband and getting his hopes up. Camille’s entire family has called and emailed me asking who the hell you are and why you’re bringing up all their most painful memories.”

“We’re simply trying to help,” Kenna said.

“You want to help?” Trivett asked, his voice rising a little. “Help me by keeping your nose out of my business and let me do my job.”

The call ended with three sharp beeps and then Kenna and I were left to stare at each other from across the room.

“I guess that was a no.”

Trick was already leaning against the counter when I came through the employee entrance later that night, one hip braced against the wood, waiting. He didn’t bother with a greeting. No friendly nod, no half-smile, none of the easy warmth he usually deployed. He just looked at me like he expected me to start the conversation.

I hung my jacket on the hook by the door and raised an eyebrow.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he replied, his voice was quiet and controlled in the way that took effort to maintain, and underneath the control was something layered—anger, concern, the particular irritation of someone who had been caught off guard by a person they thought they had a read on.

“You’re pissed,” I said, putting my hands in the pockets of my apron and trying to keep my body language as open as possible. If I was honest, I had been so focused on getting a conversation with Plover that I hadn’t even considered how Trick would feel about one of his clients who happened to have nearly been an FBI agent wandering around in his blatantly illegal business.

“Of course I’m pissed,” he blurted out, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. “What were you thinking?”

It wasn’t a question that needed an answer, in my opinion. I hadn’t put myself or his business in any danger by going into his secret speakeasy casino. He just didn’t like that I’d figured out what was going on.

“I was thinking that the fixer I needed to talk to is a known gambler and that I happened to know of a nice, quiet place to gamble without having to pay taxes on the gains,” I explained. An oversimplification, but it was close enough to the truth.

Trick sighed and pushed off the counter, closing the distance between us and folding his arms across his chest. Up close the tension in his body was clearer—the set of his jaw, the way his eyes moved even when the rest of him was still.

“Hale,” he said. “I’m not even going to ask how you knew that Marco Plover would be in the Boiler Room. But you had to know that going there was a bad idea. You walked in there with no plan, no backup, and then sat down at a table next to a man who would sell out his own mother for an extra stack of poker chips like it was nothing.”

“Actually I did have a plan and backup before you whisked her away,” I said, not pointing out that my plan hadn’t gone anywhere near like I’d hoped.

“You were playing with fire,” he said. “Marco Plover’s not going to just forget you. As soon as you left, he asked me who you were.”

“And what did you tell him?” I asked.

“Nothing he couldn’t find out for himself,” Trick told me.

“Good, then there’s nothing else to talk about,” I replied. “I needed to ask him a question and I couldn’t get to him any other way.”

“What was so important that you had to talk to him?” Trick asked. “What could he tell you that you couldn’t come and talk to me about first?”

“For one thing, he knew the woman who helped frame me and I learned something about her—about the two of them—that I didn’t know before,” I replied. “And for another, I needed a criminal contact. A real criminal contact. There’s a woman who was murdered, and now another one’s gone missing.”

“Who?” Trick asked.

“Camille Nash,” I replied, watching him carefully.

Trick flinched just a little. It wasn’t so noticeable that it would draw anyone else’s attention, but I was watching for it. There was a hitch in his breathing, shoulders pulling fractionally inward, the delayed blink of someone who hadn’t realized they were hit with something until it was too late to hide their reaction.

I held the flinch in my mind—Camille Nash had meant something to him, or to someone he was connected to, and either way it was a thread I was going to have to come back to. “Jesus,” I said. “Do you know every missing woman in town?” The fact that he’d known about Lexi Tate hadn’t surprised me, given how often Gracie intersected Kenna’s personal circle. But as far as I knew, neither Camille Nash nor her family had ever stepped foot in Mug+Shots.

“It’s a small town,” he said, avoiding the question. “Camille Nash went missing three years ago.” That flinch—that had felt far too personal. “Did you think you were going to find her in the Boiler Room?”

I shook my head. “No, but I did get the information I needed to potentially solve the other side of this investigation. The other murdered woman, her name was Rebecca, and now I have a lead on how to prove her husband killed her.”

“At least I know you won’t rat me out to the feds.” He sighed, and he said it like it was an irrefutable fact. “But I still wish you had come to me first. I could have warned you not to bother. Now, if Marco decides you’re a problem, that becomes my problem, and I can’t manage threats to my operation that I don’t know about.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should have talked to you first. Next time, I’ll loop you in.”

“Next time, there won’t be a next time,” Trick said. “You’re banned from the Boiler Room until further notice. Got it?”

“Got it,” I replied, irritated but not particularly heartbroken. It was smart to keep the almost-FBI agent away from the definitely-illegal gambling den. Plus, if I needed access again, I’m pretty sure Kenna wouldn’t care about Trick’s little tantrum or his rules. But his reaction had said more than all his denials. He knew Camille Nash personally. The question was how.

“Good.” He reached behind him and grabbed a dish towel from the counter and tossed it at me without ceremony. “Now get to work.”

Chapter Twenty

I approached the door, taking a deep breath. This was going to go one of two ways, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I was ready for what might happen if I was wrong. But given the way Trick flinched at the sound of her name on my lips, I had a strong feeling I was right. I’d just missed it the first time.

Ever since seeing his reaction, I hadn’t been able to get the thought out of my mind. I needed to know. I needed to see her again in person. Because if what I suspected was true, it would change everything about this case.

I rang the doorbell, stepping back. Carmen Gibbs opened the door, her eyes moving to the street before returning to me. Without being able to help it, I glanced at her hand on the door jamb, her thumb wrapped around the wood.

And there it was. The freckle next to her nailbed, as plain as day.

I’d missed it the first time because she’d been wearing gardening gloves, but maybe if I’d stuck around longer she would have pulled them off. But there’s no telling I would have spotted it because I hadn’t been looking for it. It was a small spot of color, the kind of thing you would never notice otherwise. But it matched the description Ian Nash had given to me over the phone.

Something in my expression, in the way I could see her for who she really was now, must have registered because she moved to slam the door in my face. I shot a hand out, holding the door in place, though she was stronger than I’d anticipated.

“I’m a friend of Trick Cavanaugh’s,” I told her, trying to keep my voice easy, conversational, the tone of someone sharing information rather than presenting evidence. “More importantly, I’m a customer of his as well. I’m not here to make trouble for you. I just want to help.”

“Just leave me alone,” she said, staring at me with wide brown eyes, terrified.

“Please, can we just talk for a second?”

She looked me up and down again, letting go of her grip on the door. “You’re a friend of Trick’s?”

I nodded. “He helped me with an ID. Got me out of a jam. I’m…hiding too.”

Her shoulders dropped and she stepped back, motioning me in.

I cautiously made my way into the room and let her close the door behind me before I spoke.

“I know what it’s like to live behind someone else’s name, to be terrified that someone will realize the truth if they get too close. It’s the worst kind of pain I could ever imagine. Never being able to fully live without looking over my shoulder.”

“Yes,” she said, and when she spoke her voice barely carried across the space between us. “What do you want?”

“I want to make it so at least one of us can go back to our lives,” I said. “What happened to you wasn’t right. You deserve to get your life back.”

She watched me for a moment, as if she was trying to evaluate whether I was a threat or not. She was understandably jumpy. If someone showed up at my door telling me they knew I was Avery Hale, it would probably send me into a coma. This was going to be a slow process.

“Camille,” I said her name and she took a step back, and then another. I swallowed down the guilt I felt at inflicting this on her. “I’m doing everything I can to get to the bottom of Rebecca’s death; I’m on your side. But I need your help. Can I ask you something?”

“What?” she asked, eyes trained on me like she was a spooked animal and if I put one toe out of line, she would pick up her whole life and go back on the run.

“Does Detective Trivett know who you are?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she replied, far too quickly. That was answer enough, but I had to be sure. If there was any chance that Trivett’s suspicious behavior around this case meant that he was helping Ian instead of Camille I had to know.

“I’m not going to get him in trouble,” I reassured her. “In fact, I can’t. I’m like you, remember? I have a friend in law enforcement who is keeping someone from finding me. Is it the same way for you?”

“He’s not—” Camille started, shaking her head. “He knows, but he isn’t keeping the case open because of me. He’s trying to prove that Ian did it, and he’s keeping tabs. Just in case Ian decided to come back to town. He warns me when Ian starts talking about visiting Rebecca’s grave and I go on a nice long vacation. Just in case.”

“That makes sense,” I nodded along. “I’m glad. For a bit there I was worried that Trivett was helping Ian look for you.”

“No.” Camille shook her head. “Blake Trivett is a good man.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I told her. “I’d like to hear the rest, if you’re willing to talk. I know how hard it is, keeping everything locked up all the time. And maybe somehow, together, we figure out a way to solve this, and you can go back to being yourself.”

She looked like she was considering it, wavering on the edge of uncertainty, and I stayed quiet. I didn’t want to sway the balance in the wrong direction. That seemed to be the right move because after a moment her uncertainty turned to determination and she drew a slow breath, and then another.

Then the words began to flow.

She told me from her own perspective about the night she and Ian had gotten drunk, about not realizing just how little food and how much beer he’d had. How he had whispered, almost proud, about how he knew she would stay in line because if she didn’t he would do the same thing to her that he’d done to Rebecca and that he’d get away with it all over again.

How, when she had asked what he did to his first wife he had willingly confessed to slipping exactly the right number of pills into her wine and waiting until she was too sluggish to fight back before he placed his hand over her mouth and nose.

How she had sat there, too drunk to run and too scared to stay, listening to a confession that would change the trajectory of the rest of her life.

She’d spent the next few days terrified that he would remember what he’d told her and snap, deciding she was a loose thread that needed to be cleaned up. Once she realized he didn’t remember telling her, she knew there was only one way out.

She found Trick through a contact she wouldn’t name, and Trick had built Carmen Gibbs from the ground up—identity documents, credit history, the small careful architecture of an ordinary life that wouldn’t attract attention if anyone thought to look.

She deeded the house she inherited from her grandmother back to herself through Carmen’s identity—she’d had to. It was the only way to avoid paying the exorbitant fees associated with selling. Fees she didn’t have. She had used the place as a rental, gathering just enough money over the course of three months to feel secure. Then, one night, she simply left her car in a school parking lot and walked away.

“I went to Mexico first,” she said. “Underwent a few elective surgeries. And I stayed there for almost two years before Detective Trivett reached out to ask about the house. Once I realized that Ian had moved to Arizona, I came back to tell the detective everything, but when he told me that they’d already done an exhumation on Rebecca and didn’t find any evidence of foul play, I felt foolish. After everything I put my family through, he didn’t do it.”

“But your family knows you’re alive now, don’t they?” I asked and she nodded. It made sense now, why none of them would talk to me. “And you’re still scared, which means you still think he did it.”

“I don’t know how he got away with it,” Camille told me. “But I remember what he told me. The look in his eye. He was so proud of himself.”

“Then we find the evidence,” I said. “Because he’s not going to get away with it, Camille. I promise.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“I think we should go to the office before we head over to meet with Gracie,” was the first thing Kenna said when I came back from Camille’s, the door not even closed behind me before she was slipping on her shoes and jacket. She looked like she had been waiting for me to get back, and considering I hadn’t mentioned where I was going I had to wonder just how long she’d waited. “Now that we know about the cameras in your vents, I think it would be stupid not to sweep it for bugs before we use it again.”

“You think someone got in?” I asked.

“I think that it’s better to play it safe than to be sorry we didn’t,” she replied, which was a convoluted way to say yes, but enough to have me turning right back around and heading for the door.

We brought Rogue with us, and he immediately installed himself in what had become his chair the moment we entered the office. In contrast, I stood in the doorway, staring at the small but obvious change that had been made to the room.

“You got me a desk,” I said, and Kenna grinned.

“They delivered it yesterday,” she replied, moving over to the desk in question, which was pressed up against Kenna’s so that we would face each other if we were both sitting down. She pulled out the chair that was tucked under it. “Along with this. It’s a crisscross chair, so you don’t have to sit like a corporate drone like I would. I noticed you don’t like using chairs the way they were meant to be used.”

“Nothing gets by you, does it?” I asked, marveling at the strangely shaped chair and wondering just how I was supposed to use it. But Kenna’s thoughtful attempt at making a desk work better for me was worth the time I would spend online researching how not to fall off the thing.

“I also had the glass on the door updated,” she said, grinning. “Check it out.”

I turned, looking at the frosted window set into the door. The writing etched into the glass was backwards, but I could already see it had been changed. I moved to the door and opened it again, looking at it from the hallway to find that it had C4 in big letters in the center of the window and underneath were the words Cavanagh Cold Case Charity.

“Some detective I am,” I said, stepping back into the room and closing the door behind me. “It looks really nice, and you were right, the whole space does feel more like ours now that I have my own desk and our name is on the door.”

“Good,” Kenna said, a slight smile on her face. Even as she said it, though, she gestured around the room and mouthed look for bugs.

I nodded, silently moving towards the door again. I worked the space the way I had worked the cottage—methodically, surface by surface, fixture by fixture, checking the vents, the joins, and any other place where something small could be slipped into the cracks and sit indefinitely without drawing attention.

Kenna watched from the desk, following my inspection with her eyes but letting me do the heavy lifting. A part of me wondered if she actually thought the place could be bugged or if she had suggested this as a way to clear the air between us, to put my panicked search of the cottage into a professional setting where it belonged.

Either way, the office was clean. Every fixture was exactly what it appeared to be and every vent unmolested.

“I think we’re good,” I told her, and Kenna let out a breath.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now, let’s get to work.”

But contrasting her words, she made a beeline for the coffee machine on the credenza. I watched her as she popped a pod in and started a cup, smiling to myself. I was realizing that Kenna made drinks the way other people paced or tore up bits of paper while they were thinking. From coffees to hot toddies, mix drinks to mocktails, there was something about the physical process of making something to drink that gave her hands something to do while she organized her thoughts.

“I went to see Carmen Gibbs this morning,” I said.

Kenna turned away from the mug in front of her looking startled. “You did? What did you find?”

“That Carmen Gibbs didn’t exist until three and a half years ago,” I replied. “She was built from scratch by someone who knows how to do that kind of work.”

“You mean my brother. If he created the Carmen Gibbs identity then that means...” Kenna began, pouring a creamer pod into her coffee and stirring it. I waited, letting her work herself through it rather than hand her the answer. “That means the person who became Carmen didn’t feel safe. Maybe someone whose husband confessed to killing his first wife?”

“Bingo,” I replied, grinning at her. “She confirmed it for me herself."

Kenna set her mug down carefully, eyes narrowing. “She told you that she was Camille?”

“She told me everything,” I replied. “She’s been hiding in plain sight this whole time.”

Kenna stood and moved to the whiteboard, uncapping a marker and writing Carmen Gibbs with a short definitive arrow pointing back to Camille Nash at the center of the board. Then she stood back and looked at what we had, and I watched her work.

“Well,” she said, turning to look at me with a grin. “I know we still have some work to do to solve Rebecca’s murder and put Ian behind bars, but I think technically that means you solved the case.”

“No,” I shook my head. “I won’t consider this one solved until Camille can go back to her own life without feeling afraid.”

“Well, then I guess it’s time we got back to work,” Kenna said. “Come on, Hastings, we have an appointment to keep.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Gracie’s office door was half open when we arrived and she was standing behind her desk when Kenna pushed through it. Gracie had her phone pressed to her ear, one hand braced against the edge of the desk as if she needed the support. She was dressed in a deep emerald blouse that caught the light when she moved, and her expression had the exhausted patience of someone begging the universe for a level of patience she no longer had.

“If this is about the flowers,” she said into the phone, “I already approved the lilies.” A pause, then a soft exhale. “Yes, Mom, of course they’re white. Okay. I’m working now. I have to go. Love you too.”

She hung up and turned towards us, looking a little startled to find us there.

“Sorry,” Kenna said. “We can come back later if now isn’t a good time.”

“No—no, it’s fine.” She gestured us in. “I’m just dealing with funeral logistics. Everyone means well, but they all have opinions and none of them seem to share the same ones.”

Her office smelled faintly of cleaner and the smell contrasted sharply with the lingering sweetness of the bakery box Kenna had brought as a ‘thank you for taking a look at our case’. The windows were cracked, letting in a summer breeze and the sound of nearby traffic murmuring outside. A cup of tea sat beside Gracie’s laptop, cold and untouched.

We settled into the chairs across from her and Kenna nudged the box of pastries in her direction. Gracie gratefully opened the box and pulled out a massive, flakey monstrosity that looked like a cross between a croissant and a cinnamon roll but instead of white icing there was a syrupy, honey glaze. The whole thing smelled heavenly and I noted the name of the bakery on the side. Wherever Sparrow Bakery was, I was going to have to get one of those for myself.

“Okay,” Gracie said, looking between the pastry and the two of us. “Why don’t you tell me what this is about while I eat this?”

“It’s pretty simple,” Kenna replied as she took a bite, her eyes staying on us to show she was listening. “We have two autopsies, one from the original burial and one from an exhumation four years later. We were hoping you could take a look at them and tell us if you notice anything out of place.” She pulled the reports from her satchel, setting them on the desk.

“Is there anything specific I should be looking for?” Gracie asked, setting aside her pastry and sucking the syrupy crumbs from her fingers before pulling a wet-nap from her purse and cleaning off her hands completely.

“We’ll go over that if your initial review doesn’t identify what we think we’re seeing,” I replied. “I’d like an unbiased opinion first, if you don’t mind.”

She reached across the desk and pulled the reports toward her, looking at them side by side with the unhurried attention of someone who had spent years learning to read what bodies left behind.

“So,” she said slowly. “There are clear inconsistencies here. This hardware would have had a serial number, so it should have been noted in the second autopsy, but it wasn’t. The height difference is a bigger gap than I would have expected as well.”

Kenna and I glanced at each other, vindicated right off the bat.

“What do you think it means?” I prompted.

“I can’t say for sure, but something’s off here,” Gracie said, looking up at me. “You’re sure these autopsies are for the same woman and not two women with the same name?”

“Unless they had remarkably similar social security numbers and a really unfortunate typo in one of them, yes,” I said, leaning forward.

“That’s highly unlikely,” Gracie shook her head, looking back down at the paperwork. “But honestly, there are a lot of discrepancies here. Enough that I’d like to talk to the examiners who did these autopsies and figure out why they’re so different.”

“Would that be possible?” Kenna asked, leaning forward.

“Possibly, but it would take a little work,” Gracie told us. “I know Enid Scarborough, the first examiner. She’s young, but she’s pretty thorough and would have made note of a few things this second autopsy mentions if she saw them. Like this fiber under the nails. Enid absolutely would have noticed that. The second examiner, Dr. Fred Maxfield, has years of experience, but he retired and moved to Malaysia last year.”

“Do you think he could have made a mistake with that exhumation?” I asked, but Gracie was already shaking her head ‘no’.

“Fred was an excellent Medical Examiner,” she explained. “He was also a tenured professor and my pre-med advisor at OSU-Cascades. He graded his biology classes harshly. He wouldn’t have made these kinds of mistakes.”

“What if he made them on purpose?” Kenna suggested.

“If he made them on purpose he wouldn’t have been this sloppy,” Gracie replied. “No, it seems more likely that you have two entirely different bodies here.”

I bit down on my bottom lip to keep a shout of vindication from escaping me.

“We thought that at first as well,” I told her. “But we wanted to get an expert opinion.”

“And there’s no M.E. I trust more than you,” Kenna added, nodding along. “What do you think? What are the chances of getting that second body to match this closely to the first, including cause of death and decomp rates?”

“That would be a significant switch to pull off,” Gracie’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You think it was intentional?”

“We do,” I told her. “We’ve started to chase down the logistics of it, but it’s starting to feel like we’re chasing our tails instead. There are too many moving parts, too many accomplices required and too many things that could have gone wrong but didn’t. So, if it wasn’t the body that was swapped and it wasn’t a coverup by the examiner, then maybe the paperwork was changed after the fact?”

Gracie leaned back in her chair, still looking at the reports, a small crease between her brows.

“That would be just as difficult as a body swap,” she said. “An exhumation isn’t a routine autopsy. If there were any signs of foul play, Fred would have spoken directly to the investigating officer. You don’t just file that kind of finding and then walk away.”

“It seems like every path leads back to someone who should have noticed or spoken up, but didn’t,” Kenna said, shaking her head.

“Well—” Gracie began, but she was cut off by a knock at the door. Gracie looked up and sent us an apologetic glance.

“Yes?” she said.

The door opened to reveal Mason Campbell standing there in a charcoal suit with his jacket folded over one arm and his briefcase in hand. His expression was composed in a way called for courtrooms and conference tables. His composure flickered for just a moment when he spotted Kenna and me sitting there. Then his attention moved to Gracie and something in it shifted in a way that didn’t quite match the professional register of the way he carried himself into the room.

“Gracie,” he said. “I can come back later, if you’re busy.”

“I wish you had scheduled an appointment,” Gracie replied with a tone of voice that suggested she would very much prefer if he came back later. It was as if the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees. Given Mason’s role in the upcoming case, I couldn’t exactly blame Gracie for her demeanor. She closed the binder on her desk with a decisive snap. “Unfortunately, I do have another appointment right after this so⁠—”

“I tried calling earlier,” he cut in. “You didn’t pick up.”

“I have a busy schedule,” she replied. Every word out of her mouth was like a dagger of ice. Designed to cut and slice. “But we might as well get this over with. How can I help you, Mr. Campbell?”

Mason adjusted his grip on his briefcase. “I have a requisition form here for the Lexi Tate autopsy.”

Beside me, Kenna froze, and I felt my own pulse jump though I didn’t know why until Gracie spoke, and it clicked why a defense attorney would be requesting those records.

“I see,” Gracie said. Her voice was soft, which only made it worse. She looked at Mason as though she were seeing him for the first time and finding the view unbearable. “Defense attorneys. Bloodsuckers, the lot of you.”

“My client, Dr. Lombardi, is innocent until proven guilty,” Mason replied, though his face didn’t match his words. His eyes were drawn to the floor, almost apologetically.

“Of course he is,” she said. “And he’s going to get away with it, because you’re so very good at what you do.”

“Gracie—”

“Doctor Tate,” she snapped, pointing at him with the controlled fury of someone who had been holding back for far too long. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Standing in my office asking me for documentation so you can make a small fortune off minimizing what happened and helping your client escape justice for what he did to her.”

Kenna leaned forward across the desk and placed a hand on Gracie’s arm, but Gracie didn’t look at her.

“You knew Lexi,” she said to Mason. “Not well, but you knew her. You know what she meant to this town, to me, to Hadley. And you took his case anyway.”

Mason’s jaw tightened. “That’s not fair.”

“No,” Gracie said, louder now, the words hitting the office walls and coming back sharp. “What’s not fair is that I’m planning a funeral for a woman whose body was brutalized even after she was already dead. What’s not fair is that I had to explain to my daughter that her favorite aunt is never coming home. What’s not fair is what he tried to do to Hadley. What he would have done if⁠—”

She stopped herself, her voice breaking off in a way that was worse than the fury had been.

“I’m sorry, Gracie,” Mason’s voice softened. “I know how”

“You know nothing,” she said, and her hand came down flat against the top of the desk with a resounding smack that cut through the room and caused all of us to flinch. “If you knew what it was like to run your hands over the bones of someone you loved, if you touched the holes he’d left in them—then you would know. Then maybe you could understand. And as much as I hate you, I pray you never feel that pain.”

I watched Mason recalculate—the attorney part of him fighting against the personal history he couldn’t set aside—and I felt a flare of indignation on Mason’s behalf. This man was defending a killer that I had identified and put a stop to before he could do any further harm.

And yet I couldn’t find it in myself to blame him for that. Not when he said that phrase and sounded like he meant it.

Innocent until proven guilty.

Wasn’t that what I’d been asking for this entire time, an assumption of innocence that the FBI hadn’t bothered to afford me?

“Gracie, he’s just doing his job,” I said before I could think better of it. Both of them turned to stare at me.

The words felt inadequate and childish the moment they left my mouth, but the reflex that had produced them was older than my better judgment and I had never quite managed to kill it.

“I don’t like it either,” I continued. “But defense attorneys are an important part of due process and they don’t get to decide someone is innocent or guilty. That’s not their job. Their job is to force prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. Otherwise, innocent people would end up in prison while criminals walked free and the system would truly be broken.”

Gracie stared me down with an expression that suggested it might have hurt less if I had simply foregone words and slapped her in the face instead.

“I don’t need you to explain the system to me,” she said quietly.

“I know,” I said, raising my hands in surrender. “I just⁠—”

“No,” she cut in, louder now, her voice as sharp as a blade. “You don’t ‘just’ anything. You come in here asking about how someone could have exploited the system and then turn around and defend the man who helps people exploit the system? You don’t get to have it both ways, Hale.”

“That’s not the same,” I said, but Mason stepped forward then, as if he had registered that I was absorbing the friendly fire that had been meant for him.

“This isn’t personal, Gracie,” he said, and her head whipped around as she laughed—a short, jagged sound that had nothing to do with humor and scraped along the edges of the room as it dispersed.

“Is that the lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?” she asked. “Everything is personal, Mason.”

She turned then and grabbed her bag from the hook behind her desk and slung it over her shoulder with the decisive energy of someone who had made a decision and intended to honor it.

“I’m done for today,” she said flatly. “You’ll get what’s legally required through the proper channels, and not a moment sooner.”

“Gracie,” Kenna said, taking a step towards her, concern etched in every line of her face. Gracie held up a hand without turning around.

“Do not follow me,” she said.

The door closed behind her. It wasn’t a slam exactly—but it wasn’t gentle either. Her heels were sharp against the hallway tile and then even that sound was gone and the three of us were left in the office, at a loss for what to say.

Kenna stood frozen near the window with her arms crossed tight against her ribs and her jaw set in the way that told me she was holding herself together by sheer force of will. Mason was still in his spot near the desk, posture composed, hands loose at his sides. It was his eyes that revealed just how agitated he was. They darted around the room like he was looking for an escape route that didn’t exist.

I was the first to move, mostly because simply standing in Gracie’s office now that she was gone felt pointless.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have tried to intervene.”

“Don’t apologize,” Kenna said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And if anyone’s allowed to be angry right now, it’s Gracie, but that doesn’t mean she was right.”

Mason glanced at her, something like surprise moving briefly across his face. “Thank you.”

“I don’t like defense attorneys.” Kenna shrugged, not looking at him. Still staring out the window. “But I like bad process even less. Don’t fuck this up.”

That earned a faint, rueful smile from him—it seemed genuine and briefly unguarded in a way I didn’t think I’d ever seen from him before. The tension in the room didn’t dissipate exactly, but it shifted into something quieter and more manageable. I shifted my weight and Mason’s attention moved back to me.

“You didn’t have to step in like that,” he said.

“I know,” I replied. “But I meant what I said. You were just doing your job and as much as it sucks the defense has a right to all the same information as the prosecution. People love the idea of justice until it gets complicated. Until it applies to someone they don’t like. But you don’t get to pick and choose when the system is used and try everything else in the court of public opinion.”

Mason studied me for a long moment and then he reached into his inner jacket pocket and produced a card, holding it out between two fingers towards me.

“If anything—or anyone—starts to cause you legal trouble you should call me.”

I hesitated for only a beat before I took it.

“Thank you,” I said, ignoring the way Kenna arched an eyebrow at me from across the room.

“I’ll see you soon,” Mason promised, like he thought it was inevitable that I would call him. Then he picked up his briefcase and headed out the door, vanishing from sight and hopefully not running into Gracie in the hall. Kenna waited until his footsteps had carried down the hallway before she turned fully toward me with a mischievous grin.

“He was absolutely hitting on you,” she said almost gleefully.

“It sounded to me like he wanted me to hire him,” I replied, shaking my head and deflating all her fun. I knew she was planning to wheedle me about the apparent undercurrent she was picking up between us, but I had more important things to worry about than whether or not the local defense attorney was interested.

We left Gracie’s office together after gathering up the autopsies we’d brought to show her. Kenna walked beside me across the parking lot without speaking, which with Kenna meant she was either thinking deeply or plotting something devious, and I hadn’t had enough experience yet to tell the difference.

She stopped as we reached my car.

“Okay,” she said, leaning against the driver’s side door and crossing her arms. “Out with it. Why are you so certain he’s not interested in you?”

“That’s not it,” I told her. “I’m sure he’s into me. I just don’t have the bandwidth to be giving a guy the kind of attention he’s looking for. Besides, don’t we have a case to solve?”

“Fine,” Kenna grumbled, pushing off the door and gesturing me towards it before moving around to the passenger side of the car and buckling in. “But if I’m standing up there at your wedding in a year giving your maid of honor toast, I reserve the right to say I told you so.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kenna and I were sitting at our desks, facing each other. On the drive back over I’d surreptitiously looked into how I was supposed to use this fancy new chair she’d bought me, and I found that she was right. It was exactly the kind of thing that made sitting at a desk less uncomfortable for me.

“So either Ian Nash performed a complicated magic trick or we’re missing something,” I said. Kenna opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again when we heard a knock at the door.

We both looked over, Kenna’s nose scrunched up as she eyed the office door suspiciously. There was a silhouette on the other side, but the frosted glass worked both to give us privacy and to blur the details of whoever was knocking.

Surely we didn’t have any potential new clients, did we? We weren’t advertising our services, but maybe Kenna’s reputation had drawn someone in.

Kenna stood up and strode over to the door, opening it just a little at first and then a lot more once she knew who was on the other side. Detective Lachlan Shepherd stepped into the room.

I stared at him, standing in the doorway, my heart racing even as I reminded myself that the chances of Shepherd arresting me all on his own without any backup from the FBI were slim to none. Whatever he was here for, it wasn’t related to me. That didn’t mean I was any more comfortable palling around with law enforcement—even the one whose daughter I had recently rescued.

“So, you’re a charity now?” he asked, pointing his thumb at the new logo on the glass even as he moved over to the client chairs, taking one look at the dog hair covering them, and deciding to stand.

“Yes, but I am still a licensed P.I.,” Kenna replied, positioning herself across from him and a little in front of me, like she could somehow hide that I was also in the room. “So if there is anything that I can do for the Bend PD I’m happy to help.”

“A P.I. and a charity, you never fail to impress me.” Lachlan shook his head, hands sliding into his pockets as he took a wider stance, clearly planning to stick around for a few minutes at least. “And I do have a case I need a little bit of help with. You see, I have this John Doe who was in a coma, they found him on the street, and he’d been beaten pretty badly. We thought he might have been mugged.”

“Oh?” Kenna asked, feigning ignorance, but our eyes met across the room. Lachlan was talking about Simon, and he wasn’t really paying attention to me, but what were the chances that he’d come here to take me in for questioning?

“He woke up this morning,” Lachlan continued, seemingly oblivious to how those words affected me. Kenna was not oblivious, her attention shooting over to me and our eyes locking.

“From what we were able to get out of him, the attack was personally motivated,” Lachlan continued. “According to him the altercation happened because a tenant didn’t like that he’d entered the apartment to address some maintenance requests for the apartment above them.”

My heart raced, hands shaking as I heard the exact words I knew Simon would say if he were ever to be confronted about what he’d done. But why was he claiming that this so-called attacker was his tenant? He couldn’t actually believe that I’d attacked him, and maybe he was trying to get ahead of any accusations I brought against him, but he had no reason to think that I had gone to the police.

The room spun as I was thrown back to two months ago, sitting at an interrogation table hearing that the evidence was mounting against me. And now I was being framed the second time. I had to leave. I had to get up and walk out the door before Lachlan realized that I was the tenant Simon was talking about.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, squeezing, and realized Kenna had shifted just enough that it would look natural to rest her hand on me. I looked over at her to find that her focus was still on Lachlan, but she cut a quick glance in my direction before subtly shaking her head.

She didn’t think this was something to panic about, but then again, she didn’t know my past. She had no idea just how quickly a case could turn on you.

“Was this man able to identify his attacker?” Kenna asked, ever practical.

“All he said he could remember was that the man who attacked him was the boyfriend of one of the tenants,” Lachlan replied, and I knew Kenna must have been able to feel all the tension releasing from my shoulders because she dropped her hand back to her side. It wasn’t what it looked like, Simon wasn’t trying to frame me at all. Instead, his habit of invading other people’s privacy had blown back on him from another tenant’s distress.

“Okay, how can I help you, detective?” Kenna asked, leaning back against the spot where the two desks were pressed against one another, crossing her legs at the ankles and placing her hand on her chin while supporting that arm with the other. “Did you need me to track down that boyfriend for you?”

“No, I do know how to do my job,” Lachlan said, a hint of a smirk at the edge of his lips, like this was familiar banter between the two. “But while canvassing the apartment complex to track down which tenant’s boyfriend did this, I discovered that my favorite private investigator has been canvassing the same complex and talking to all of the tenants about the invasions of privacy that my victim says he was attacked over. Care to explain?”

“I have a client,” Kenna said simply, not even glancing in my direction or giving any indication that I was a part of this case. “They felt like somebody was entering their apartment without permission and asked me to look into it. I discovered a pattern of behavior I didn’t like, but there was no proof I could bring against the landlord, so I changed angles and looked into the apartment’s finances instead.

“You’re telling me there’s more than one person claiming that Simon Crawford was entering their apartments illegally?” Lachlan asked.

“No,” Kenna replied. “I’m telling you there’s an entire complex full of low-income renters with no proof that their privacy is being invaded but at least half of them are reporting the same experiences. The smell of cigars in their rooms when they come home, items that have been moved, electronics unplugged, and food just vanishing from their fridge.”

“Do any of these people have proof of what you’re claiming?” Lachlan asked. “We’ll still need to track down the boyfriend and charge him for assault, but it sounds like we have a case against the landlord as well.”

“There’s no solid proof,” Kenna replied. “At least, nothing that a good lawyer can’t laugh out of court. But in the process of researching the issue I can tell you that I found something else you might be interested to know. Because I had no way of proving his criminal intent in entering those apartments, I decided to simply buy the complexes from him. And while I was looking at the finances do you know what I found?”

My eyes went as wide as dinner plates.

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” Lachlan replied. I still hadn’t said anything, and now it felt impossible to speak. Kenna was planning to buy the apartments out from under Simon just to take away his power? She hadn’t told me anything about that.

I had told her to let it go, and instead she’d kept going, but she’d respected my wishes not to take the case to the police and instead she’d taken care of the problem a different way.

“While studying the numbers to prove that the complex was a profitable purchase to my lenders, I found that Simon Crawford has been embezzling money from his property management company.”

“Well, I’d love to see those numbers myself. If what you’re saying is true then we might be able to book him on financial crimes much faster than we can build a solid case against him for breaking landlord-tenant laws,” Lachlan said, shaking his head. “I’ll look into these claims of privacy violation as well, and in the meantime, I’ll make sure that he’s cuffed to his hospital bed just in case. He won’t be invading anyone’s privacy again anytime soon.”

“Thank you, Detective,” Kenna said, “I’ll send over the paperwork that proves his embezzlement and I’ll let you know if I hear anything about this boyfriend while I’m renegotiating rental agreements with my new tenants.”

“Are you sure you have time to manage a property?” Lachlan asked, nodding his head towards the board where the details of our current cold case were displayed for anyone to see. “It looks like you have your hands full with cases as is.”

“That’s what my colleague here is for,” Kenna replied, tilting her head towards me, and Lachlan looked over at me like he was only just realizing I was there. I hadn’t said anything during their conversation, but I couldn’t help feeling a little insulted that his attention had completely glazed over me until now.

“Oh, Ms. Hastings,” he said, and at least he knew my name. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Detective Shepard,” I replied, keeping my tone cordial. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t find me memorable. Between tackling Ezra and rescuing Hadley, I would have thought he’d be more focused on me, but both scenarios had been high stakes, and Lachlan hadn’t seen me pull Hadley from that SUV. He’d only seen Kenna and I leaving, and Kenna telling him we’d never been there.

Still, he was a detective, he couldn’t be that oblivious to the part I’d played in Lexi’s case, could he? I’d given him the evidence of a chloroform rag in a doggy waste bag the same way I’d tied the loose bits of Lexi’s hair in another waste bag and tied it to a stick to mark her remains before fleeing the trail and calling it in.

“Gracie is having a hard time,” Kenna cut in, glancing between the two of us like she was nervous to let us talk and felt the need to distract him. I sent a mental wave of gratitude her way as she redirected his focus off me. “She and Mason got into an argument earlier today. You might want to check on that.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” Lachlan said, grimacing and turning back to the door. “Don’t forget to send over those financials.”

“Sure thing, Detective,” Kenna replied, following him to the door and closing it behind him. She turned back to me, leaning against the door like that would somehow keep any other news from getting in. “Well, I’ll be damned. It sounds like Simon Crawford got what was coming to him. What do you say we get out of here and celebrate?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror at the 10 Barrel Brewing company, fixing my hair and trying not to grin like a lunatic. Simon Crawford was handcuffed to his hospital bed and I no longer had to be afraid that he was going to wreck my life in one way or another.

And Kenna....Kenna had gone above and beyond to eliminate him as a threat. She’d bought an entire apartment complex, which I was having complex feelings about.

On the one hand it was an extreme way to handle the situation, and a lot of money to throw around. On the other, she’d given me a basic rundown of the numbers, and it was pretty clear that the complex was a solid investment once the finances earmarked for maintenance, insurance, and mortgage weren’t being siphoned off to pad someone’s bank account.

And once we were done here, Kenna and I were going to meet back at my old studio and pull those cameras out of the vents and make sure there weren’t any backup videos to worry about. Then this entire stalker landlord business would be over.

Finally, things were looking up.

Smiling, I exited the bathroom and headed back to our booth. I slowed before I reached the table, all that positive energy siphoning away from me as I took in the way that Kenna was sitting.

She was still where I had left her, but the relaxed and triumphant version of her that had been sitting there when I walked away—loose, one arm draped over the chair back, weight settled into the ease of a meal that had done its job—was gone. Now, she was sitting upright, shoulders squared, spine locked into the posture of someone befitting her social standing.

“You don’t like your beer?” I asked, sliding back into the booth across from her. She didn’t answer. Her eyes didn’t move toward me and her hands stayed flat on the table. She might as well have been carved from stone.

I turned, following her line of sight to the televisions above the bar.

The bright red chyron caught my eye before anything else.

BREAKING NEWS it said in white letters that scrolled across the bottom of the page. Then the camera panned over to reveal what this breaking news was all about, centering on a podium that held the FBI insignia on the front.

And in the right-hand corner of the broadcast they had layered an image over the screen. An image of me with my strawberry blonde hair pulled back the way I used to wear it when I needed to feel competent and keep my hair out of my eyes. It was the photo I’d taken for my NAT ID.

Three people moved into frame. Special Agent Phoebe Richards stepped up behind the podium. She looked exactly as I remembered her, but now she was wearing a dark suit and a gold badge on her hip.

Briggs stood just to her right, nodding at appropriate intervals as she began to talk. And to her left was Noah, hands folded in front of him, shoulders back, his face carefully neutral. He wasn't speaking and I got the sense that he wasn’t meant to. He was only there to lend additional legitimacy to the thing being said on screen.

This was a press conference, I realized, the silent question that a reporter asked scrolling along the top of the T.V. through closed captions.

— the alleged killer of Monica Park. Authorities confirming today that Avery McHale fled the country and is currently wanted on several outstanding warrants —

The room tilted slightly, and I found that my hand was on the edge of the table, fingers pressed into the scarred wood, without any memory of having moved it. Somewhere nearby a set of glasses clinked together. Someone laughed, too loud and half a second behind the rest.

Phoebe leaned into the microphones with the ease of someone who had prepared for this. She fielded questions with grace. She talked about poor character, about deception, about how no one ever really knew what someone else was capable of until it was too late and the damage had already been done.

The air in the brewery felt thin and I could hear a buzz in my ears as I looked back at Kenna. She wasn’t watching the screen anymore.

Instead, she was watching me, and I could see it in her eyes that she knew with complete and terrible clarity that she was sitting across from a fugitive wanted for murder.

The television kept talking about the case and the brewery kept moving around us. Plates arrived at other tables and someone argued with a bartender. The baseball game continued its indifferent progress in the corner, and between Kenna and I the world had quietly ended and neither of us had made a sound.

Kenna glanced once more at the screen and then she picked up her glass and finished the entire beer, chugging like a college frat bro before setting it back on the table. Then she reached into her bag and produced her wallet, placing enough cash on the table to cover the bill, the tip, and then some.

Then she stood up and walked out the door.

I raced after her and caught up to her in the parking lot. She was standing at the driver’s side door of her Rivian, keys already in her hand and lights blinking on in response to her presence as she unlocked it.

“Kenna,” I said before she could get into her vehicle. “Please.”

She turned to face me, and I wished she had kept her back to me instead, because the look on her face was far too composed.

“What,” she said evenly, “do you want?”

I stopped a few feet away, instinctively giving her the distance.

“I didn’t plan for you to find out like that,” I said. “I didn’t plan for you to find out at all.”

“Evidently.” She spat the word out, and then her composure broke a little, her eyes darting back and forth as she searched my face for something I wasn’t sure I could provide. Proof of my innocence or an explanation that didn’t turn her entire world on its axis. “You told me you were running from something dangerous. That you used my brother’s services to escape a toxic relationship, but that’s not the truth, is it?”

“It was a version of the truth.” I told her. “I warned you that my past was dangerous. I couldn’t tell you everything, but I told you what I could.”

“No, you told me what you thought would get me off your back,” she corrected. “And in the meantime, you put me in the position of aiding and abetting a wanted fugitive. You completely took the choice away from me.”

“I told you I was running from something,” I argued, but it was semantics and we both knew it. “What would you have done in my situation? I didn’t know how you’d react and I didn’t want to put you in a position to have to decide.”

Kenna let out a slow breath through her nose, the kind that was doing the work of keeping everything else in. Because despite what I did or didn’t want, that’s exactly where we were now. She would have to make the choice of whether she would tell someone who I was or live with my terrible secret.

“You don’t get to decide what risks I consent to,” she finally said. “You should have told me who you were.”

“I never lied about who I am,” I replied. “Not at my core. I’m not violent. I didn’t kill anyone. And not knowing about my past gave you plausible deniability. I wasn’t trying to hurt you or betray your trust, you have to believe that.”

“I believe that you believe that,” she said carefully, but her phrasing still felt like a punch to my solar plexus. “It still should have been my choice, plausible deniability be damned. I trusted you enough to loop you into my business, my home, my entire life. And the whole time⁠—”

“I hated every minute of it. I didn’t want to lie to you,” I said, and my voice cracked on the last word despite everything I did to prevent it. Kenna looked away, out over the rows of parked cars and the hospital rising beyond them against the dim sky, and when she looked back her eyes were bright but dry. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or more frightened by it.

“I’m not calling the police tonight,” she said, and the relief that moved through me was physical, a loosening in my knees that I fought to keep from crumpling under.

“Thank you,” I breathed out, but she only shook her head.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t still turn you in,” she said. “I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet. But I’m going to take some time to think before I do anything I can’t take back.”

“Whatever you need,” I said.

“I need space. I’m going to stay with Alistair for a bit.” She said it without any room for negotiation, not that I was planning to argue when she had my entire future in the palm of her hands. “I need distance from this—from you, right now.”

My chest tightened around the words, but I nodded anyway, unable to find any words left in me. She opened the car door and then paused with one hand on the frame and looked back at me with the expression of someone who had one more thing to say and was going to say it clearly.

“Don’t run,” she said. “And do not disappear. If you do, I will assume the worst and I will act on that assumption. Understood?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

She studied my face for a long moment with the particular attention of someone committing something to memory. Then she got into the Rivian and drove away.

I stood in the middle of the parking lot and watched her taillights until the distance swallowed them. For the first time since I came to Bend, I truly felt alone again.

And I had absolutely no idea what came next.

Chapter Twenty-Five

My head hurt and my eyes burned and I knew that if I focused on either of those things for too long the reason why would tip me over whatever edge I was currently standing on. So I got into the Camry and pulled the door closed, sitting in the sudden quiet of a sealed car as I waited for my hands to stop shaking enough to drive.

I wrapped them around my phone instead and looked at the screen without seeing it for a moment. Then, finally, I hit the phone app. Kenna’s name sat at the top of my recent calls. I had promised her space, and I intended to keep that promise even though every part of me wanted to call her and say something to change her mind or convince her she didn’t know what she knew.

My thumb hovered over Noah’s contact instead.

Noah, who had been in that press conference with his hands folded and his face carefully neutral and his jaw tight. Noah, who had believed in my innocence when nobody else did and had been paying for the consequences of that belief ever since.

If anyone could tell me whether I had just detonated my life and needed to run, or to wait it out and pray there was a solution that didn’t end with Kenna calling the FBI, it was him.

I trusted his judgment better than I trusted my own at this particular moment, which was not a difficult standard to meet, if I was being honest.

I hit the call button and he picked up on the third ring.

“Special Agent Delgado speaking,” he said, with the slightly distracted quality of someone who hadn’t looked at the screen before answering.

“Hey. It’s me.” I said. “I think I just⁠—”

“Yeah, Mom, I left it by the book,” he cut in, talking over me. “On the bedside table.”

I closed my eyes.

Phoebe was close enough that he couldn’t speak freely. Of course she was. The press conference hadn’t been live but it had been recent, which meant they were probably together right now, going over the case or getting coffee. I thought involuntarily about how Phoebe took her coffee and hated that I still knew—two sugars, no cream—hated that the small domestic knowledge of a friendship I had apparently lost was still just sitting there, taking up space in my brain.

The same thing would happen with Kenna eventually. Every small thing I knew about her that she hadn’t asked me to notice would become evidence of a version of my life I could no longer call my own.

I opened my eyes.

If Noah couldn’t talk then I had to make this decision without him, which meant I had to trust myself. That was not something I was feeling particularly equipped to do in a brewery parking lot with shaking hands and burning eyes. But sitting here waiting for the situation to improve on its own was not a strategy. It was just fear with better posture.

“Can you call me later?” I asked. “When you’re available.”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “I will.”

“Okay.” I paused, then said it quieter. “It’s important.”

“I know,” he said. And then, because he was careful and kind and trapped in a set of circumstances I had pulled him into whether I’d meant to or not, he added, “Try to enjoy your evening.”

Something that was almost a laugh moved through me and came out cracked and twisted.

“Sure,” I said. “I'll do my best.”

Then, the call ended and I sat with the phone in my lap, looking out at the parking lot as I waited for something—a text, a sign, any small indication from the universe about what I should do next. Nothing came, because there was nothing else left to do. There was no going back, and no changing what had already happened, and the only way forward was through.

Mason Campbell’s office sat above a bakery on a street that smelled like burnt sugar and coffee even through closed windows. The hallway carpet was worn thin, and the light was the kind that made everything look slightly more serious than it was.

I stood outside his door longer than I needed to, hand near the knob but not touching it, running through the version of this conversation where I turned around and went back to the car.

But if I was headed into a shitstorm then I needed backup, and I really only had one option.

I stepped into the office to find a sparse waiting area and an open door that led to the office in the back. Mason was sitting at the desk in that office, but he had a full view of the waiting area and the moment I walked in he was standing up and striding over to me.

“Hale,” he said, sounding pleased to see me. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon. How are you?”

“I need representation,” I said, skipping the niceties. He raised an eyebrow but waved me into his office and closed the door behind me.

“Let me be clear,” Mason said as he moved around the desk to sit at it. I sat across from him, knee bouncing. “By coming in here and seeking representation you’ve already initiated a type of attorney-client privilege. This will allow you to tell me the details of your situation without fear of incriminating yourself. However, that does not extend to future crimes and if you indicate plans to break the law going forward, I will be honor-bound to report them.” He smiled. “Now that that’s out of the way, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

I opened my mouth, at a loss for a moment as I figured out what to say, where to begin. My name, I decided, was the best place to start.

“I’m Avery McHale,” I told him. “And I’m wanted for murder.”

I kept talking then, the words pouring out of me. When I finally stopped my throat was raw and my hands had gone numb where I’d twisted the fabric of my shirt around my fingers anxiously.

Mason did not interrupt once in the entire time it took me to empty everything I had been carrying for the better part of two months, simply making notes on his legal pad every so often.

When it became clear that I’d finished my tale, explaining how Kenna had pieced everything together and how I wasn’t certain what that meant for my future, he sat back in his chair and looked at me.

I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but he looked like he was working through a puzzle in his mind so I waited, hoping against all hope that he would have some way out of this that I wasn’t seeing.

"Okay," he said. "Here's what we're going to do."

I felt the prickle of tears at the corners of my eyes at that phrasing. Not at the words themselves but at the we, which was a word I hadn’t realized I had desperately needed to hear right about now. I’d felt the same way only a week ago, when Kenna had said us like our partnership was inevitable.

There was a difference, though, because Mason knew everything now.

“I’m going to represent you,” he continued, unaware of the small internal meltdown I was having. He leaned forward and began to type on his computer as he spoke. “As of now, you are formally my client. We’ll need to draft the paperwork and I’m going to write it using your legal name, but don’t worry, it won'’t be shared anywhere publicly yet. There’s no need to draw the ire of the FBI early, after all. We have an advantage here. Until they know where you are, we have all the time in the world to put together a compelling defense case and make sure you never see the inside of a prison cell.”

He hit a final button on his laptop and the printer behind him came to life. Plucking the papers from the printer, he slid a stack of documents across the desk and turned it toward me. My real name looked back at me from the top of the page, and for a moment it felt dangerous just to see it written down somewhere other than a wanted poster.

“How much is this going to cost me?” I asked, mostly resigned and a small part of me wishing I’d taken Kenna up on getting paid for my cold case work. I would have to talk to her about renegotiating that, if she ever decided she was willing to talk to me again.

“May I be crass?” Mason asked, which was such an odd thing to say that I nodded, blinking. “Frankly my dear, I’m not going to charge you a fucking cent. Your case is going to be national news, and once it gets out that I was the one who defended you I’ll have my pick of clients going forward. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, and signed the paperwork with a hand that only trembled slightly. Mason gathered the pages and clipped them together, placing them in a drawer which he locked with a key.

“Now you have something you didn’t have this morning,” he said, meeting my eyes across the desk. “You have counsel. My only job is to protect you. Your FBI friend, Noah, may be on your side but he has conflicting priorities. The same goes for Trick Cavanaugh. If you need anything, if anything at all happens, you have my number and I need you to call me.”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you, Mason. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied with a small nod that managed to be both professional and warm. “For now, you can go home. Don’t discuss the case with anyone else. If Kenna reaches out, you can answer, but don’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know and keep in mind that anyone who isn’t your ally is your enemy. What you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, even if you’re saying it to a friend. I’ll reach back out if I need any other information, and in the meantime, I’ll start working on your defense.”

I gathered my jacket and my bag and walked towards the door.

“Avery,” Mason called. My real name felt like it belonged to a stranger now, but I still looked back.

“You made the right call,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

When I got back to the cottage Kenna’s Rivian was conspicuously missing and the foyer felt like it echoed more than it should, reminding me the house was empty aside from Rogue and myself. I could tell he sensed something was wrong by the way he nudged my hand as I came in.

“It’s going to be okay,” I told him, echoing Mason’s words. They had made me feel better and I hoped they would do the same for Rogue.

Working on autopilot, I let Rogue out and back in again, poured his food in his dish, and then stared around the cottage, trying to find it within myself to accomplish something. Anything. Instead, I ended up curled up on the couch with the pint of vanilla ice cream that Kenna kept stashed in the freezer and a soft, warm dog in my lap.

And once I was down for the day, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get up again.

Pulling out my phone, I dialed Trick as I scooped another bite of ice cream into my mouth. I wasn’t normally one to eat my feelings, but I figured I would let myself have this one. It had been a hard couple of days.

“Hale?” Trick’s voice reached me through the speakerphone, an edge of worry in it.

“Hi,” I said, feeling bad for what I was about to do. “I’m not feeling too great tonight. Is there any chance I could get the night off? I know Melody said she was looking for extra shifts.”

“Sure,” Trick replied, and then paused. “Technically, as your boss, I’m not allowed to ask you why, but seeing as I pay you under the table and I’m asking as your friend, are you okay?”

“Not really,” I replied. “The short version is that your sister found out who I am. You’re welcome to share what you know, by the way. I imagine she’s going to be pissed at you too, if she finds out that you knew this whole time and kept it all from her.”

“Kenna understands that my line of work comes with a certain expectation of discretion,” Trick told me, and then switched tracks immediately after, lowering his voice to a hiss. “Wait, she knows you’re wanted for murder?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Not all the important details, like how I was framed. But you’re right, she understands discretion and said she would hold off on turning me in until she understood the situation better.”

“That’s Kenna for you,” Trick said. “I still can’t believe she knows.”

“Tell her anything you like,” I told him. “That was really my only secret and now that it isn’t sitting between us all I want to do is talk. But I’m going to give her space for now. The last thing I want is to push her into tipping off the FBI.”

“Good strategy,” Trick said.

“Speaking of strategies, you may want to find someone to cover my shifts going forward,” I suggested. “I don’t want to quit and leave you high and dry but if this goes south, I won’t have much choice.”

“Understandable,” he said, though he sounded like he didn’t like the prospect of looking for a new bartender. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

“And, Trick?” I added. “If something bad does happen, would you look after Rogue for me?”

“Of course,” Trick replied easily. “But nothing’s going to happen, so I expect to see you at work tomorrow just like always.”

“Sure thing, boss,” I said, grinning to myself even as I said it, knowing how much he hated that phrase.

“Go get some rest, Hastings, before I change my mind and decide I don’t believe in sick days.”

“Will do,” I replied, and hung up, shoving another spoonful of ice cream into my mouth staring at the blank fireplace, wishing we’d never gone out to celebrate the downfall of Simon Crawford.

There was a voicemail waiting for me when I woke up.

Putting my phone on silent had been the only way I could convince myself to fall asleep, the anticipation of Kenna calling had left me twitchy, and I’d had to commit to the idea of missing her call if I wanted to sleep.

I sat up in bed when I saw the voicemail icon on my screen, going from a resting heart rate to one that felt like I’d just been running. I almost threw my phone across the room once I saw that it was from an unsaved number, though.

The only people I was interested in talking to were already saved in my phone. Noah, Trick, Kenna, Mason. That was just about everyone.

Still, I could use the distraction so, I decided to press play instead.

Hello, Ms. Hastings. A voice I faintly recognized said from the recording. This is Eloise Walton. I’ve come across a box of things that were removed from the coffin when Rebecca was exhumed. I thought you might want to take a look. Call me if you’d like to meet.

I sat with the phone in my lap for a moment, considering, and then realized that despite everything going on I still couldn’t turn my back on this case.

I called her back, figuring out a spot to meet, and then I piled Rogue into the car with me and headed to the address she had provided.

Eloise was waiting on her front porch when we arrived, holding a small unremarkable box carefully and at a slight distance, as though she wasn’t sure how to handle it. She had no problem handing it over to me.

“This is everything that didn’t go back in the coffin after they exhumed her,” she said, biting her lip like she wasn’t certain this would even be helpful to the case. “The family chose to cremate her after the exhumation, so these items are all that’s left besides her ashes and an empty grave. I convinced her mother that if she wasn’t going to look at what was inside, she might as well let you. I hope it helps.”

“Me too, thank you,” I said, and carried the box back to my car before heading to the office.

I slowed as I turned onto the block, scanning automatically for the Rivian. Not because I was avoiding Kenna—I wasn’t, or at least I was trying not to be—but because showing up in her space without knowing she was comfortable with me being there felt like exactly the kind of assumption I had already made too many of.

The street was clear though, so I pulled into the small lot and sat for a moment with the engine off, looking up at the fourth-floor windows. The smart glass was opaque from the outside either way. There was no reading the room from down here.

I got out, clipped Rogue’s leash, gathered the box, and took the elevator up. In the hallway I stood outside the door for a moment with the key fob in my hand, wondering if it still worked. If I was still allowed to use it.

I had work to do, though, so I pushed past the swirling guilt in my gut and pressed the fob against the reader.

The lock clicked.

I exhaled slowly and pushed the door open, letting Rogue go through first. He trotted over to the windows and installed himself in his chair with the authority of prior claim.

I followed him in and closed the door.

I wasted no time in going through the contents of the box.

There were many little things, mementos that must have been placed in the open casket before her burial. A folded handkerchief with an embroidered monogram worn soft at the edges. A cracked compact mirror. A ribbon from a gift bag complete with the little aglets at each end. A small ceramic figurine with a chip out of its base.

I laid everything out on the desk as I removed it, trying to find anything that looked like a clue rather than a remnant of a memory of the dead. Most of it felt sentimental rather than forensic. The kind of things that ended up in coffins, the physical representation of how the person who had passed had taken something of each mourner with them.

Near the bottom of the box, was a strange little electronic device, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand, roughly rectangular, with a small grill on one face and what appeared to be a light, and a recessed button with space for a 9-volt battery on the other side.

There was no brand marking and no obvious explanation for what it might have meant to Rebecca or the mourner who had put it in there. At first I’d hoped it was a recorder of some kind, but it looked more like a radio receiver.

The battery compartment on the back was empty, but I figured if I bought a battery for it I might begin to understand what it was for. I set it on the desk in its own space, separate from the other items, and made a note to look into it.

And then, in the corner of the box, half-hidden under a sheet of hotel stationery that had a hand-written poem on it, I found a wallet.

It was made of black leather, soft with years of use. I opened it and noted the absences before I noted anything else—there was no driver’s license, no credit cards, no identification of any kind. The only card I found was a library card for Rock Springs, Wyoming that had expired two years ago.

As I turned the inner pocket inside out, a scrap of paper fell loose. I caught it before it hit the desk and unfolded it, spreading it out on the table.

It was a cafe receipt from an address in Sunriver, which I recognized as another small town nearby. The logo was printed at the top and the date was printed at the bottom, aged and faint.

I read it once and then I read it again just to be sure, because the date on the scrap was March 16th, 2019, two days after Rebecca Nash’s funeral. Which meant it couldn’t have been buried in there with her.

Could this wallet have belonged to someone else? The person that Ian had replaced Rebecca’s remains with, maybe. A person that Kenna and I had been convinced could only exist on paper.

I sat back in the chair, floored.

Rebecca Nash had been pronounced dead at least a week before this receipt was printed. Her funeral had taken place on a Thursday morning. There were photographs, a printed program, and a burial record. She had been lowered into the ground and covered with earth on March 14, 2019, surrounded by family and friends, neighbors and colleagues who had all come to pay their respects.

It was an open casket, anyone could put items inside. But none of them could have added this wallet that contained a receipt from a date marked two days later.

I thought about the mismatched autopsy records, and the bone pin that should have been present and wasn’t, and about how Ian wouldn’t have any reason to replace his wife’s body with a decoy only two days after he put her in the ground.

The wallet being in this sealed box just didn’t make any sense.

Pulling the library card from Rock Springs closer, I flipped it over and peered at the half-faded signature line, trying to make out the letters. Opening my phone, I typed in what I could make sense of.

Lau cato.

It wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d had before.

I added ‘Rock Springs’ to the search as well and hit enter. The search attempted to redirect me to a La Quinta, which wasn’t any help, so I added ‘missing’ to the search. When nothing came up, I cleared the search bar and tried a different tactic, searching instead for missing women from Rock Springs who had vanished the same year that Rebecca died.

And there, right at the top of the page, was a picture for Laura Decator.

The photograph showed a woman with dirty blonde hair and a brilliant smile. It was close up and impossible to tell just how closely she might match to either of the autopsies, but I had to admit there was a similarity between Laura and Rebecca that any medical examiner might mistake one for the other after more than a year of decomposition. Especially if the embalming process was rushed or poorly done.

I clicked on the article, reading like the words might disappear from the page if I didn’t move fast enough. Laura had been nomadic and carefree, but she had regular check-ins with her family. She was last known to be headed to meet an acquaintance in Oregon, and her last regular check-in happened the same day as Rebecca’s funeral.

My eyes went unfocused as I began to put it all together.

Rebecca Nash had been buried in that casket, according to friends and family, but she hadn’t stayed there. And now, I was certain that the body in her grave was Laura Decator.

And whoever had put her there had legitimate access—at least two days after the burial.

This wasn’t a manipulation of paperwork or a decoy to evade murder charges. This was the story of three women who had been forced into a complicated game of three card monte.

Rebecca Nash, dead but her remains somewhere other than her grave. Camille Nash, alive and hiding from the man who had told her, drunk and careless, what he had done. And Laura Decator, buried under another woman’s name in a cemetery in Bend, Oregon, while her family continued to wonder what her fate had been.

I looked over at Rogue and he looked back at me with the steady attention of an animal who didn’t understand any of what was going on. His tail moved hypnotically, and the office was very quiet around us. The opaque windows blocked the view of a city that went about its ordinary business with no idea what was sitting on the desk of the Cavanaugh Cold Case Charity and the discovery I had just made.

I wanted to call Kenna, to tell her everything, but I knew better. She needed her space and I had promised her that. So instead, I pulled the exhumation autopsy back onto the desk and forced myself to start from the beginning, now that I knew whose name should have been on the cover.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The question of Laura Decator continued to plague me. I had a name, and wood fibers under her fingernails, and the receipt from a café in Sunriver printed two days after Rebecca Nash’s funeral. I didn’t have much else beyond that.

Just like I’d done with the two other women connected to this case, I decided to take a trip to the records office and see if there was anything there to pull up under Laura’s name.

I left Rogue in the office, content to nap in the client chair with the half-opacity of the windows allowing the perfect amount of heat to beam down on him. Walking to the records office left me jittery, glancing over my shoulder every few seconds.

I passed a woman walking the opposite direction, offering a friendly wave and a smile while silently marveling at how so much had changed in a single day. The rest of the world was still completely unaware of the murder suspect in their midst. It was only Kenna, who knew me so well and who had seen Noah at both my apartment and at the Fourth of July BBQ before seeing him on the screen next to my wanted picture, who had enough information to put all the pieces together.

Kenna, who told me she wasn’t calling the cops until she cooled off but hadn’t promised to give me a head start if she did decide to reach out to the FBI. I pulled out my phone as I walked, dialing Noah’s number again. I knew he would call me back when he could talk and that by not calling me back it meant that he hadn’t gotten that opportunity, but I had to warn him one way or another.

His phone went right to voicemail, though, and the last thing I wanted to do was incriminate him by leaving a recording of my voice on his phone. Instead, I switched to our text conversation, the last message from him letting me know that he had landed in D.C. I paused outside the records office to type out a message that would warn him without getting him into trouble if his phone was taken into evidence.

My roommate tore the cover off my book. She hasn’t thrown the cover away, but it’s in her possession for now.

I didn’t know if Noah would understand what I was trying to say, but if nothing else it would make him curious…and cautious. Hitting the send button, I tucked my phone in my back pocket and headed into the public records office. The lobby was quieter than usual, the particular midday quiet of a building where half the staff had gone to lunch and the other half were making the most of the reduced foot traffic.

Unfortunately for me, it was Mark who was working the counter.

“Ms. Hastings,” he said as I approached, barely looking up but apparently remembering my name from the one interaction we’d had before. “What can I help you with?”

“I’m looking for county records on a woman named Laura Decator,” I told him, spelling out her last name for him. “She would have been in Bend approximately three years ago, only for a few weeks. Any documentation you can pull—a lease, a utility connection, a library card, anything that puts her here would help me out.”

He turned to his computer without a word and began to type.

I waited.

The office was very quiet. Somewhere deeper in the building a door closed, and then there was nothing but the faint mechanical hum of the building’s systems and the soft click of Mark’s keyboard.

“There’s nothing in our records,” he said, without looking up from the screen.

“Could you check adjacent counties?” I asked. He typed again. The same careful keystrokes. The same quality of stillness.

“Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head.

I nodded slowly, looking at the counter rather than at him, working through what that meant. Laura Decator had come to Bend with so little intention of staying that she had left no record of having been here at all. The article had said she was nomadic. What it probably meant was that she was the kind of person who existed between the documented moments of other people’s lives, invisible to the systems that tracked the rest of us.

Which was exactly the kind of person you chose, if you were looking to make someone disappear without drawing any attention. But if Laura was living the “hashtag vanlife”, or if she was a vagrant, the chances were high that she hadn’t been targeted personally.

However she had ended up in Rebecca’s grave, she had likely been a victim of opportunity.

“Thank you,” I said and Mark looked at me then—his eye contact was too direct, holding it just long enough that I began to feel a little uncomfortable. His expression was neutral except for the small twitch at the corner of his left eye.

“Of course,” he said after a long moment. “Any time.”

My phone buzzed as I turned away from the counter and I pulled it out without breaking stride, already moving toward the door and the next step in my investigation.

Glancing at the screen, I felt my heart begin to race when I saw that the text was from Kenna.

I’m willing to listen.

I stopped in my tracks, staring down at those words.

Where and when? I asked, immediately ready to switch tactics. It hadn’t taken Kenna very long to cool down, and I couldn’t help but wonder what Trick had said to her to convince her we should talk.

Riverfront Park. Noon. The Riverfront Park was public, and a wide-open space. If she was planning to send a battalion of FBI agents after me, that would be one way to do it. The park was just big enough to lull me into a false sense of security while SWAT and the local FBI hid on the outskirts or moved about undercover as local joggers and paddleboarders prepping for a few hours on the river.

The smart move would be to argue for a different location, another time. If Kenna was willing to negotiate the details that could mean that she wasn’t running those plans by an entire ambush team. But pushing back might also be what pushed her over the edge if she was genuinely just looking to talk.

And as foolish as it was, pushing Kenna away when there was a chance for reconciliation and understanding felt far more dangerous than walking into a potential sting. Maybe it was the way she had gone so above and beyond, incorporating me into her life and her work or maybe it was simply wishful thinking, but some part of me believed that Kenna meant it. That she was willing to at least listen to my side of things before making a decision.

I have to collect Rogue from the office first, but I’ll be there.

Kenna simply reacted to my message with a thumbs up and I let out a breath of air that it felt like I’d been holding from the moment she realized who I was.

Every part of me wanted to run. Not away from something but towards it, which was an entirely different sensation than the last time Kenna and I didn’t see eye to eye and one I had almost forgotten it was possible to feel.

Straightening, I tucked my phone in my pocket and strode towards the front doors, on a mission. I’d walked the short distance to the records office, but it was only 11:15 a.m., and I had plenty of time to get back to Rogue and then get to the park.

I walked at a brisk pace, the sun warm on the back of my neck as I ran through what I planned to say to Kenna in my mind and prayed that she would believe me.

Just as I reached the first intersection, I felt a hand on my shoulder, squeezing tightly. I started to turn, my self-defense instincts kicking in as I prepared to knock this person off their feet, when I felt the searing pain of something sliding into the side of my neck. I barely caught sight of neatly folded shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow and then everything went dark.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The world came back to me in fragments.

The pain arrived first—a deep nauseating throb blooming behind my eyes and roiling in my stomach, making me want to puke. I clenched down on the feeling, not wanting to throw up and then aspirate on it.

What had I taken?

Where was I?

I opened my eyes to darkness, and I could feel it pressing in all around me. I lifted my right hand to rub at my eyes but my knuckles scraped against a surface four inches above me. The sound was dull and unforgiving.

Kenna. I was supposed to be meeting Kenna. We were supposed to talk, but I didn’t remember reaching the park. All I remembered was getting her text, and then nothing. Had I even replied to her?

She told me not to disappear, but if I hadn’t replied to her she might think the worst of me.

Panicked, I wriggled around, checking my pockets for my phone. I found it in my back pocket, right where I’d left it, and I felt a thrill of elation. Whoever had placed me in this coffin hadn’t thought I would have a chance to wake up. They’d been arrogant, leaving me with my phone.

Pulling it out, I raised the phone in front of my face and hit the power button. But when I tried to turn it on with a click of the power button, the screen stayed dark.

A brief flash of light blinded me after the suffocating darkness, but the afterimage of my phone’s screen was seared into my eyes. The fractures in the glass revealed a 0% battery warning and an intentional attempt at destruction. I’d had at least 40% battery when I was abducted, which meant that either I’d been out much longer than I thought or something else had drained my battery. Maybe the same something—someone—who had attempted to break the device completely before leaving it with me.

And as the blinding white afterimage faded I realized I had seen a flicker of the space around me, only for an instant, the light revealing dark wood stretching out around me in every direction.

A coffin, I realized sluggishly. The shape and the angles of the wood were unmistakable. I was in a coffin and my phone was dead. Depending on when I had been put in here, it wouldn’t be too much longer before I was dead too.

I pushed through the cloud of whatever cocktail I’d been injected with, remembering that flash of a hand on my shoulder and another coming up to my neck, the piercing pain that followed.

Had no one seen what happened and tried to stop it?

I could feel the quality of the air changing with each breath I took from it, turning the oxygen around me into poison. My heart slammed hard against my ribs as I realized I was going to suffocate if I didn’t get out of here. The air immediately felt thinner once I realized and my breath hitched, shallow and rapid, panic clawing up my throat.

Okay.

Breathe. I have to breathe.

In for four, hold for eight, out for eight. My thoughts swam as I tried to count the seconds, something as easy as counting becoming impossible. I swallowed, the sound obscene in such a small space, too intimate and too loud.

Instead of counting, I fell back on instinct, forcing my breathing into the pattern I had been trained to use and had practiced every morning since a Hogan’s Alley actor had gotten his forearm around my throat and the world had gone briefly dark around the edges.

I reached up, pushing against the lid of the coffin, hope sparking in my chest as it shifted a little. Then, the smell reached me at the same time the lid stopped moving, damp soil falling in through the small crack I’d created in the seal of the lid.

There was soil above me, the weight of it sitting between me and the surface, and the threat of it caving into what little space I had keeping me from pushing at the lid any further.

My thoughts jumped to Laura Decator before I could stop them, and my stomach turned with nauseating clarity. I knew what it felt like to want to reach up and claw at the wood four inches from your face, what would cause chemicals and fibers gathering under your fingernails.

I had to get out of here, I knew that, but with the weight of the earth above me and drug still in my system I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it myself. I needed help. I needed to call⁠—

The soft glow of a small green light flicked on near my left elbow. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if I was hallucinating, before I reached over with my right hand and picked it up. The light wasn’t much to go by, but I could feel the grill, the recessed button, and the slide of the battery compartment cover.

This was the thing that I had picked out of the box of Rebecca’s effects, turning it over and setting it aside because I couldn’t identify what it was.

This one was different, though. It had a battery, and the little light on the front glowing green in the darkness allowed me to see a bit more of the coffin that surrounded me.

Seeing my circumstances didn’t help, the reminder only causing me to begin breathing harder, heart and mind racing as I tried to calculate just how much effort I would need to put into pushing the lid the rest of the way off with possibly six feet of dirt above me, how long I could hold my breath as I tried to crawl my way to the surface.

And then, from the speaker in my hand, came a voice.

“Hello, doll,” he said, his whisper echoing in the small space. “Can you hear me?”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Who are you?” I asked, but my voice came out wrong—too thin, and raspy. Too dry. The silence on the other end stretched out, but I could hear him breathing and knew he was still there, my only lifeline back to the surface.

“Don’t worry, Dolly, I’m here to take care of you,” the man’s voice came through the speaker again, calm and gentle, like he had done this a dozen times before. I knew that voice, didn’t I? The drugs were affecting my memory, keeping me from putting the pieces together. I wasn’t as sharp as I should have been and the answer evaded me. “Are you comfortable in there?”

“No.” My throat tightened as I wondered who I was speaking to. I knew the answer, somewhere in the recesses of my mind. I’d recognized him, in those moments before he knocked me out. I needed to breathe, to think, to be just clever enough to convince him this was a bad idea. Instead, I went with the only thing I could think to say. “Let me out.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he did sound apologetic, like he hated to tell me no. “You have to stay in your box. Mother says so.”

I shifted the radio closer to my ear with a shaking hand. It immediately felt worse, like he was breathing directly into my ear, but I needed to hear every sound I could just in case it gave me any clue on how to get out of here.

The fear was there, the knowledge that whoever was on the other end of the radio transmitter had put me in a coffin six feet underground, but I pushed through the fear and the fog, determination filling me.

“What do you want?” I asked, hoping to keep him talking long enough to identify him. To figure out anything I could about him or the situation I was in.

“You’re calmer than I expected,” he said in lieu of answering and I knew that voice. I was certain of it now. “Most people would start with screaming."

“I’m not most people,” I told him, ignoring the way my skin crawled listening to the breathy way he spoke.

“No, you aren’t like most people,” he agreed. “I like that about you.”

“How long do you plan on keeping me in here?” I asked, closing my eyes. It blocked out that little green light, but the color was burned into my retinas now and with the darkness surrounding me it was almost like I hadn’t closed them at all.

“Oh, you aren’t getting out,” he replied mildly. “We wouldn’t want to risk damaging you by taking you out of your packaging. No, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

Had he just called this coffin my packaging?

“Are you sure you have the right doll?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking and still keep my breathing shallow. To preserve as much air as possible. “I don’t think this package was meant for me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he told me, “I matched you to the perfect package. This one has been empty for too long, but now you can fill it. Besides, it doesn’t matter if you’re out of place as long as no one ever finds out, and no one else will ever know. I’ve made sure of that.”

I stayed quiet, letting him keep talking. People who did things like this always wanted to explain themselves. Especially when they were so rarely given the opportunity.

“No, Ms. Hastings,” he continued. “No one will ever find you down there. You’ll be perfectly preserved and you’ll never get a chance to tell anyone what I’ve done. How did you figure it out anyway?”

“Why are you so sure I did?” I asked, screwing my eyes shut tight as I fought to place that voice, to make the leap of logic that would tell me who was going to be the reason for my death. It was infuriating, knowing the information was on the tip of my tongue and not being able to access it.

This had to be connected to the cold case I’d been working, I knew that much. But I still didn’t quite understand how it all fit together. Ian Nash had killed Rebecca Nash and gotten away with it. He’d drunkenly threatened to do the same to Camille, who had fled from her own life and escaped into the identity of Carmen Gibbs. Then, somehow, Laura Decotar had been the one exhumed and had cleared Ian of any suspicions about how Rebecca had died.

Was Ian the one on the other side of this little radio?

“You asked about the one that got displaced,” he said softly, and no, I was certain that wasn’t Ian’s voice. We’d only spoken on the phone once before, but I remembered his register was much deeper. Of course I could remember that, but I still couldn’t place the voice of my abductor as he continued to speak. “They were never supposed to open the packaging, but they did. I chose the wrong package for her, but that’s not a mistake I’ll make again.”

I froze, eyes still closed, trying to tie all the loose threads together. Dolls and packages, women in the wrong graves, and at the center of it all was this man who was so sure I knew who he was.

But I didn’t have any evidence of someone treating their victims like dolls. I had a woman hiding from her husband, another who had shown up in the wrong grave, and a third missing corpse.

What had happened to Rebecca? If Laura’s body was found in her grave then whoever killed Laura had to have removed Rebecca’s remains.

And now I was in a grave that didn’t belong to me, just like Laura had been. Is this how she’d died, drugged and suffocating while this man whispered in her ear?

It must have been. There had been a receiver in that box of mementos, after all, and the exhumation showed fiber and chemical compounds under her nails.

From scratching at the lid of her coffin.

The man who had put me in the ground had done the same to Laura, treating us like playthings. Like little dolls.

“That’s where he gets it, I think. The need to tuck everything in its own little box.”

My eyes shot open as I remembered what Rose had said. I stared into the darkness, the face of her co-worker Mark swimming through my mind and my memory of his voice matching the one in my ear.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered.

“For the same reason I always have,” Mark said, and a chill ran down my spine. There were others, an unknown number of women who he had gotten away with putting in the wrong coffins and taken pleasure in listening to them die.

Which made him a serial killer and made me his next victim.

“Please,” I whispered, feeling the desperation clawing at my throat. I hadn’t planned to beg, but that was before I knew exactly what I was facing. There was no way out of this. Not unless I convinced him to let me go. “Please you have to get me out of here.”

“I can’t do that,” he told me. “You aren’t supposed to take the girls out of the box once they’re inside. They have to stay where they belong.”

“But what about the women you switched them with?” I asked, the flaw in his logic glaring to me. “Are they in the wrong boxes now?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Those are the ones that are most pristine. I like to keep them on display.”

At first, I couldn’t imagine what he meant by that, but then I remembered what Rose had said, about Mark’s mother and the dolls she kept in boxes in the basement.

About how that seemed to bleed into everything else he did.

Including, it seemed, serial murder.

There was a high probability that there were custom display boxes out there somewhere containing the remains of all the women he had displaced, neatly labeled in a ‘guest book’ just like his mother taught him.

If I ever got out of here, I wouldn’t stop until I found where those boxes were hidden and every one of those remains were returned to their rightful resting place.

“Why not just kill me, then?” I asked. I knew before I even started trying to navigate this twisted logic that it would never end with him letting me go. I was already exactly where he wanted me and a threat to him if he let me free. Still, I had to try.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Mark replied, clucking his tongue. “I’m not trying to kill you, I’m trying to preserve you. Oxygen, or rather the lack of it, will freeze you in time. And then, you’ll be perfectly preserved just like all the rest. Every box checked and everything in its right box.”

“This audio device is short range,” I told him. “Which means you’re nearby. You could still let me out. That’s why you listen, isn’t it? Because you know it gives you the power to let me out if I don’t belong in here. And Mark, I don’t belong here.”

“You’re wrong,” he replied. “I’ve never taken any of the girls out of their packaging and you won’t be the first. No, the radios are so I can hear it happening.”

“The screaming?” I asked.

“The breathing,” he replied. “Eventually it will stop, it always does. Don’t worry, it won’t be long now.”

I gritted my teeth as his words dug into me, but I kept my breathing soft and steady. I had to stay calm or I would use up the remaining air too quickly.

Instead, I thought about Kenna at the Riverfront Park, checking her phone as she waited for me to arrive. About Rogue, locked away in the office, also waiting for me to come back. Neither of them would see me again, but that didn’t mean I had to allow this man to get his sick satisfaction from listening to me die.

The battery indicator on the radio glowed a steady green as I held it between my fingers. It was the only thing illuminating the small space and it infuriated me. I threw it towards the base of the coffin, as far away from me as I could get it and thought about all the other women who had died this way. They had been frightened, alone, with no hope of rescue.

And now I was one of them.

I had no power left in this scenario except to take away this twisted man’s toys. So, I positioned the radio under my boot and then stomped down, shattering my only connection to the outside world.

Chapter Thirty

The light from the receiver hadn’t done much to illuminate the small space, but as soon as it went dark, I felt that darkness close over me completely, consuming me.

I’d chosen to cut off contact with my killer, but as soon as I did I began to regret it. There was nothing else to focus on now, nothing but my own shallow breaths as I was forced to lay there on my back and wait.

For death, or rescue, whichever came first.

I held onto my phone like it was a lifeline despite the lack of power. The fact that I still had it on me meant that I would be found, eventually. Even after it was dead, I knew it gave off a signal that could be tracked if anyone was looking for me.

But the chances of someone getting a warrant to track it in time to come and save me were exceptionally low. It was more likely that they would find my corpse in a day or two, once they could prove I’d been missing and hadn’t simply decided to split town again.

Wouldn’t that be a headline for the ages?

Monica Park’s Murderer Found Dead in the Wrong Grave.

I scoffed, shaking my head at the ridiculous thought. I was probably suffering from hypoxia by now. It was hard to tell with the lingering effects of whatever drug he’d injected me with still in my system.

I had a fleeting thought that I hoped Kenna was looking for me, that she hadn’t simply assumed I decided to go back on the run. If not for my sake, then for Rogue. Surely she would go back to the office sooner rather than later and find him there. Trick had promised to take care of him.

It was like Mason had said. It was going to be okay.

I ran his voice saying those words through my mind over and over again as I lay there with the dead phone pressed to my chest, wishing I had some way to turn it back on. All I needed was a few seconds to call someone, to tell them what was happening.

Even when I was at my lowest, living out of my car with no outlets to charge my new burner phone and desperate to keep searching the news outlets for details about Monica’s case, I’d spent some time in a public library and found a website that explained how to charge it using batteries and paperclips.

My eyes popped open as I remembered that. I tightened my grip on the phone, my only lifeline, like it might slip away from my sweat-slicked palm.

And with my foot, the same one I’d used to crush the little radio that Mark had put in here with me, I began to nudge the pieces back up the narrow space of the coffin towards my other hand. It took a few tries before I realized it would be easier to do without my shoe on. So I toed off my boot and then felt around the bottom of the coffin until I found the jagged edges of the crushed plastic.

With my tongue stuck out between my teeth, I closed my eyes so I could better visualize what I was trying to do, and then I clenched my toes around the sides of the radio and began to bend my knee, crossing my right foot under and behind my left until I could reach down with my left hand and just barely feel the edges of the radio.

I grasped at it, heart racing, knowing I was using up more air than I should be. But this was it. My one chance. If I didn’t take it I might as well just sit back and let myself die.

I let out a shout of triumph as I finally grasped the damned thing in my fingers and then wondered if he could hear me through all that dirt. If he was still up there, fuming over how I’d thwarted his plan to listen to me suffer in the last moments.

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that I was going to get out of here. All I had to do was pull out the battery and connect it to the phone with—what? I didn’t have a paperclip.

I had a battery, and a phone, and no way to connect the two.

Setting both the phone and the battery in my pants pockets, not wanting to lose time by trying to track down either, I started to pry the radio apart. It wasn’t easy, but it was made easier by the fact that I’d already crushed the plastic, one side of the speaker jagged where little pieces had broken off.

I savagely tore into the tech, feeling blindly for any wires.

They weren’t difficult to find, but they were difficult to pry out of the plastic casing, and I cursed under my breath as I felt part of the plastic slice along the side of my hand. But I also felt the wire finally give on one end and I put all my strength into disconnecting it from the other.

Then, I tossed the casing to the side, pulled the battery and phone out of my pocket and got to work stripping the wire with my teeth before wiping any potential saliva from the metal. Wrapping one end around the 9-volt positive node, I connected the other end deep into the charging port, trying to fish around for any point of connection.

For several long moments I kept at it, trying not to think too hard about how much time was passing, how much air I was using. And then, finally, the charging symbol lit up on the screen.

“Yes!” I shouted, not caring if Mark could hear me now. What was the worst he could do, unbury me to check if I was having a good time or not? I held very still as I waited for the 0% to turn to 1%, and then to 2%.

I knew I should at least wait for 3%, that booting up my phone would take some of the charge I’d managed to get into it, but I also knew I didn’t have very long left and if I didn’t get a message to someone I was going to pass out and then no one would ever know how close I came to getting help.

So, I pressed the power button. For one long, horrible second, nothing happened. Then the screen sputtered back, the cracks in the glass telling me that Mark had stomped on it. That he thought he’d broken my phone enough that it didn’t matter if he put it in the coffin with me.

That was his first mistake.

His second was allowing me to regain consciousness, because the moment I got out of here he was going to face a level of wrath never before known to mankind.

“No, no, no, no,” I said as the charge went back down to one percent as the notifications began flooding in. I shifted the connection between the battery and the phone again but couldn’t get it to connect and I had to make a decision here and now.

I hit the first notification I saw, a missed call from Mason Campbell, and called him back. My eyes stayed on that little 1% at the top right and I felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.

“Please pick up,” I whispered, choking on my own fear. “Please.”

“Hale?” Mason’s voice strained, tight with worry. “Where are you? Kenna and I are at the cottage⁠—”

“I’ve been buried alive,” I told him.

“That’s not funny,” Kenna said in the background, and her voice was already moving closer.

“I’m not joking,” I said. “I’m in a coffin. Underground. I don’t know where.”

“Hale.” Mason’s voice again. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t have much air left,” I replied. “And I think I was drugged. It was Mark.”

“Who?” Kenna asked. She sounded worried about me too, instead of angry. God I hoped she wasn’t angry. I’d missed our meeting at the park, and she’d told me not to run. Did she think I’d chosen to run when I didn’t show up?

“Mark, from the public records office,” I said, and the frustration of the situation was sharp as it cut clean through me. But she wouldn’t have known who Mark was. I had handled all the public records office visits and he hadn’t even been on our radar. “I only have 1% battery left.”

“Give me the phone.” Kenna’s voice came again, demanding, and then more immediate as Mason passed it over to her. “Hale, can you hear anything that might give us a clue where you are? Machinery, traffic, water—anything?”

I held my breath and strained against the silence of the coffin, listening past my own pulse. Nothing. The wood was thick, the soil above it thicker. Whatever sounds existed in the world above me weren’t reaching this depth.

But then I thought back to Mark’s voice in my ear, his breathing, and in the background⁠—

“A railroad,” I said. “He’s got me in a cemetery close to a railroad.”

“Okay,” Kenna said, and the word was loaded with hope. “I can work with that. We’re going to find you, Hale, I promise.”

“I don’t think I have much time,” I said as the screen dimmed further, a warning flashing across it.

“Hale,” Kenna’s voice again, the control in it cracking for the first time. “I need you to⁠—”

But I never found out what she needed me to do because the call dropped and the screen went black. Complete and total darkness returned, indifferent to my plight. I lay there in it with the dead phone against my chest again, my heart racing. I made myself count my breaths instead of the seconds, praying there was enough air for me to stay conscious long enough for Mason and Kenna to find me.

And as I drifted into the darkness, I had one last incoherent thought, wondering why Mason and Kenna were both together at Cavanaugh Cottage.

Chapter Thirty-One

I woke to the sound of knocking.

I groaned, dizzy and disoriented. The dull rhythmic thud rocked through my entire body, and I realized after a moment that I wasn’t hearing the knocking but feeling it through my back. For a moment I thought it might be coming from within my own chest. It matched my heartbeat too neatly at first and I faintly recalled a story about a heart underneath a wood floor.

Beating, beating, beating.

But no, I wasn’t beneath a floorboard. I was in a coffin, waiting for Kenna and Mason to come find me.

I was afraid to believe it was anything other than my own pulse amplified by the enclosed space, hope manufacturing evidence where there was none. I had been in here long enough that my mind would have been willing to do that.

The air was very thin now, each inhale requiring more effort than the last, the burning quality of oxygen that was running out rather than being replenished. If I moved and the sound stopped I didn’t know if I could survive the confirmation that I had invented it.

Then it came again.

A thud and a scrape.

My eyes shot open and I sucked in a massive breath, but it didn’t feel like I was getting any oxygen. There was no air left in the coffin and I was actively suffocating. I had to get out of here, now.

I pushed myself up a little, putting my hands on the lid of the coffin above me and pushing upward with all my might. I felt the vibration of it through my palms as the scraping sounded again and hope filled me.

Someone was digging. Someone was out there, working to get me free. I pushed harder, the lid of the coffin shifting and dirt sliding in, but I wasn’t afraid of being buried beneath the weight of the soil this time.

All I wanted was to get out, to get one more lungful of fresh air.

“Hale? Hale, can you hear me?” The voice came through layers of dirt and wood, warped and muffled but I recognized it, and it filled me with the strength to keep pushing against the lid.

“I’m here,” I said, and my voice was hoarse, but I could feel the lid coming free. So I gave it one last push, and it flung open, dirt raining down on me as I felt the fresh air of freedom closing in around me and sucked in a massive, life affirming breath.

“I’ve got you,” Mason said, jumping down into the coffin with me and pulling me to my feet, holding me upright as I gasped for breath.

My body tried to take in as much oxygen as possible, all at once, and it left me coughing hard as the world tilted at the edges, my vision tunneling.

“Easy,” Mason said as he held me to him, keeping me steady. “Easy. You’re okay. Breathe.”

Light followed the air, thin at first and then everything at once, and I squeezed my eyes shut against it and felt tears track through the dirt on my face without caring even slightly.

I reached back without thinking, fingers fisting into the fabric of his shirt as he shifted a little, wrapping one arm around my back and another around my knees, lifting me out of the coffin entirely and raising me over the edge of the grave. I tilted, rolling onto the grass and laying there, staring up at the bright pinpoints of light above me. Stars. I hadn’t realized how much I would miss them until I was seeing them again.

How long had I been out before Mark put me in that grave? It hadn’t even been noon when he initially took me but...my thoughts scattered as I began to attempt the math and then I giggled as I realized just how absurd it was.

I was safe, alive, and my first thoughts after escaping certain death were to calculate how long I’d been missing. I tried to sit up, but the movement made the world tilt badly. I would have fallen back in the grave again if it weren’t for Mason pulling himself out and catching me, dragging me away from the edge.

The night air was cold and damp and smelled of turned earth and grass. Mason helped me to sit upright and then just stayed there, holding me as I pressed my face into his shoulder and breathed.

Each inhale came easier than the last, the burning in my lungs gradually receding as my body began to trust that air could be available in any quantity it required, that it did not have to be rationed or hoarded or worried about.

“You found me,” I said. The words were slurred, but they were the best I could do, and he seemed to understand regardless.

“There was never a version of this where I didn’t come for you,” he said, low and certain, his hand at the back of my head. “I told you, it’s you and me, Avery. It’s going to be okay.”

I soaked in the moment, covered in dirt, shaken but alive.

It was cut short as Kenna’s voice reached my ears.

“Mason, do you have her?” she called. “Is she okay?”

“I’m okay,” I called back, my voice weak but certain.

“Oh, thank God,” Kenna said, and then she barked an order I didn’t understand until I peeked over Mason’s shoulder to look at her. “Don’t you dare move. Stay exactly where you are.”

Kenna stood over the prone form of my abductor. He was on his stomach a few yards away, face pressed into the disturbed earth, one arm wrenched up behind his back at an angle that made me wince even after everything I knew he’d done.

Kenna’s weight was centered over him, her grip absolutely secure, her breathing hard but controlled. She had the look of someone who could hold that position for any length of time and intended to keep him there as long as necessary.

Mason looked at me, checking, really checking, that I was okay.

“I’m okay,” I told him, drawing back a little and taking another deep breath before saying it again with the full force of my chest. “I’m okay.”

He squeezed my shoulder once and then got up, moving to take over the hold Kenna had on Mark with the clean efficiency of someone trained to do so. Kenna released the moment she felt his weight replace hers and stepped back and rushed over to me.

“Hale,” she said, crouching down beside me and grabbing my hands in hers. Her eyes darted to and fro, searching my face like she might find something wrong with me that she could fix.

“I didn’t run,” I whispered, insistent. Her eyes widened and she shook her head.

“I know,” she said. “I know you didn’t.”

“He’s a serial killer,” I told her, because I was certain that was something she didn’t know. “He’s been doing this to women for years. We have to call the police.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding vigorously and pulling out her phone. She dialed three numbers and waited for someone to pick up. “Yes, this is Kenna Scott. I’d like to report an attempted murder.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

The next morning I jerked awake with a start, my lungs seizing and every muscle locking with the animalistic certainty that I was still in that coffin with both air and time running out.

The bright light streaming through my bedroom window and the smell of Rogue’s dog breath in my face served to reassure me that wasn’t the case. He cracked an eye open as I sucked in another breath, trying to slow my racing heart, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about getting out of bed even though it was clearly almost midday.

“What time is it?” I asked him, but naturally he didn’t answer. I reached for my phone, only to remember that the Bend PD had taken it in as evidence. The screen had been broken, anyway, and I hadn’t had the strength of mind to change out of the clothes from the previous day.

I definitely wouldn’t have thought to charge it, even if I still had it.

I continued to lie there for a little while longer, remembering the red and blue flashing lights, the way the paramedics had tried to insist I come into the hospital. But hospitals meant potentially taking blood, and my blood showing up in any database would lead the FBI right to my front door.

So instead I’d promised them I would come in if I had any lingering side effects. I’d allowed them to bandage the cut on my hand from where I’d sliced it against the broken radio, and I’d taken the shock blanket with me as I walked over to where Kenna and Mason were explaining the situation to the police.

Lachlan Shepherd had been there, and once I explained everything, he’d sent a dozen uniformed officers off to check out Mark’s basement. With any luck they would find all the displaced women, and once they had them identified it would only be a matter of exhuming their graves in order to find all of Mark’s previous victims.

Once Kenna brought me home, still bundled up in that shock blanket, Rogue had all but tackled me to the ground. With tears in my eyes I thanked her for making sure he got home.

“Of course,” she said, as if there really were no other possibility. “Hale, you have no idea how worried I was. When you didn’t show up, I knew something must have happened. I went right to the office, and with Rogue there without you I knew something was wrong.”

“How did you and Mason end up back here together?” I asked, remembering that question lingering at the back of my mind even as I was dying.

“When you didn’t show up at the park I got a terrible feeling,” Kenna explained, pulling me up off the floor and tucking the shock blanket back around my shoulders. “The same feeling I got when Lexi…when she didn’t show up to our coffee plans. I called Trick first, to see if he’d heard from you. If, maybe, you’d decided to go back on the run. But we agreed that didn’t make any sense after you had just agreed to meet with me and talk things out. He suggested the FBI might have caught up with you and that I should check with your attorney. Who, by the way, I said you should date, not hire.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, but the serious expression Kenna shot my way had me quickly backtracking. “Joking, sorry. Please continue.”

“Well,” Kenna said, even as she pulled one of her protein bowls out of the freezer and popped it in the microwave, clearly intent on feeding me after I’d gone nearly twelve hours without eating. “I called Mason and once I explained everything he became just as worried as I was. So I brought Rogue back here, Mason came over, and we started tracking down every lead we could think of to figure out what happened to you—without blowing up your spot if we didn’t have to. I was just about to call Lachlan and officially report you missing when you called.”

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. Not that Kenna and Mason would work together to find me, but that Kenna had been so sure I didn’t simply change my mind about telling her and run away. “I’m lucky you were together. Even with how fast you managed to figure out what cemetery I was in, I don’t think I would have made it if you had to fight off Kinsman and dig me out.”

“Finding you was pretty easy, actually,” Kenna said, looking distressed at the idea of not getting to me in time or not having someone else there to help her drag me out of my makeshift grave. “There’s only one cemetery close to the rail line and it just so happens to be the same graveyard that Rebecca was originally buried in.”

My stomach dropped, realization washing over me.

“He put me in her grave?” I asked. I hadn’t even thought to check whose grave I’d crawled out of, overwhelmed by the return of oxygen to my lungs. I had thought it must be a fresh grave, that someone would have found my body if I died. But Rebecca had been removed from her grave, and Laura had been exhumed and cremated as well. That plot of land seemed cursed to never serve as a grave for very long, for which I supposed I ought to be grateful, but if I hadn’t managed to call for help that would have been my final resting place.

“Try not to think too much about it,” Kenna advised. The microwave dinged and she pulled the food out, stuck a fork in it, and handed it over. “You survived. That’s what matters.”

I accepted the food gratefully, feeling ravenous. And as I ate, I stared down at the island countertop, and the cardstock that held the information about Lexi Tate’s funeral. It was being held on Saturday at the Greenwood Cemetery, which sounded familiar to me and my heart rate ratcheted up as I wondered if that was the same graveyard I’d just come from. But no, after staring at it for a few more moments I remembered the sign for that cemetery from running past it most mornings while I was still living in the studio apartment closer to Pilot Butte.

When they put Lexi to rest, they wouldn’t be putting her in the same ground that I had just crawled out of.

Laying upstairs in bed, I opened my eyes, shaken from the memory of the night before as I realized that today was Saturday. Today was Lexi’s funeral. And the house was too quiet, which probably meant that Kenna had decided to let me sleep off my terrible experience and attend the funeral on her own.

That wasn’t happening. Not after everything Kenna had done for me. Scrambling out of bed, I quickly pulled on the dress that Kenna had recommended, along with a pair of black flats. Rogue was sitting up now, watching me as I hurried to get ready.

“Come on, let’s go,” I told him, shooing him out of the bedroom and down the stairs. I let him out to go potty as I wracked my brain for how to get to the cemetery. Without a phone I couldn’t call a ride-share, and I’d left my car at the office.

Except my keys were hanging where they always did and when I poked my head out front, I realized my Camry was neatly parked in its space. How Kenna had gotten both cars back to the cottage was beyond me, but I wasn’t about to complain.

Serving up Rogue’s breakfast much later than usual, I called him back in and then headed out the door. The drive to the cemetery was thankfully short, and thankfully not the one I’d spent most of last night in.

Even still, as I pulled up and parked along the curb behind a long procession of vehicles I felt a wave of trepidation. I didn’t have the time for it, or the patience. Kenna was putting one of her closest childhood friends in the ground today and I was going to be there for her even if it killed me.

Cutting the engine, I got out of the car and hurried across the grass to where a group of black-clad mourners were gathered. I only recognized a few people in attendance. Lachlan, Gracie, and Hadley all stood up near the front.

I just reached the back of the crowd when I realized the mechanical sound of a coffin being lowered into the ground shut off. I cursed under my breath. I’d missed it.

As the tight formation of the mourners unspooled into something more social, I scanned the faces around me for Kenna’s and found her up near the front in a black sheath dress and a matching fascinator, complete with the black mesh veil.

She turned, and it was like she had an internal homing beacon because her eyes immediately met mine. I slowly approached her, still not sure where we stood but determined to figure it out.

“What are you doing here?” Kenna asked as I reached her. She kept her voice respectfully low, but there was a strain to it that told me she was alarmed to see me here.

“I was invited,” I told her. “You said it would be rude not to come.”

“That was before you were given a traumatic experience in a graveyard,” Kenna replied. “You did not have to come to this, Hale. I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

“You’re one to talk,” I said, “It’s your best friend’s funeral.”

“But you were literally in the ground not twelve hours ago, don’t you think you—” Kenna started to argue, and then cut herself off as Gracie approached us.

“Hale, I’m glad you could make it,” she said. There were tear tracks down her face, but she looked good regardless. Lighter than she had the last time we talked, at least.

“I am so sorry,” I told her and she gave me a benevolent smile.

“Thank you,” she said. “It means a lot to me that you’re here.”

“I’m sorry about last Wednesday, as well,” I added. “It wasn’t my place to step in like that, and I can’t imagine the pressure you’ve been under. I should have reached out, I should have asked you if you needed anything.”

“I would have said no,” Gracie told me. “I can admit I’m a stubborn woman at times, and especially when I’m under stress. But seriously, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” I replied, and then Gracie drifted away, but before Kenna and I could say anything to each other, Lachlan came over with another man dressed in a dark suit. He had jet black curls and a crooked smile.

“Ladies,” Lachlan said, motioning to the man beside him. “This is Detective Blake Trivett. He asked me to introduce him to the two of you. Blake, this is Hale and Kenna.”

“More like I asked you to be my shield so I would have enough time to apologize,” Trivett said, turning all his attention on Kenna. “I owe you an extra apology as well. I called you a nosy Nancy Drew and accused you of using a charity as a hobby to open old wounds. But I was wrong, you cracked open details on this case that I never even considered.”

“All I did was figure out that my best friend had been abducted,” Kenna replied, waving off his apology and gesturing to me. The words best friend echoed in my ears, and I shoved down everything that phrase brought up, not ready to address any of it. “She was the one unravelling it all.”

“And I was not even close to having everything as figured out as Mark thought I was,” I added.

“Speaking of Mark Kinsman, we’re going to keep this under wraps for now,” Lachlan said. “But he already confessed. He was all too happy to tell us about how he acquired a ‘mint condition’ collection, and how he swapped them out with counterfeits. Which explains why Laura Decotar passed under the radar during Rebecca’s autopsy.”

“We found the bodies of thirteen women in glass displays in his basement, just like you said we might,” Trivett told me, shivering a little in disgust at what he must have seen down there. “One of them was Rebecca’s.”

“We’ll be performing an autopsy on Rebecca in the morning,” Lachlan added. “If anything incriminating shows up we’ll have our friends in the Flagstaff PD ready to take Ian Nash into custody.”

“Maybe you could be there,” Trivett said, “When I let Carmen know.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I think I’d like that.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Ms. Cavanaugh,” Mason said, looking over at Kenna as he addressed her by her legal last name, apparently aware that she had divorced Alistair. “I need to know if you’re going to be a problem.”

“I’m always a problem,” Kenna said, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow at him. “The real question is whether I’m a problem for you, or a problem for the FBI.”

“I like the way you think,” Mason said approvingly.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Kenna shot back, “I haven’t answered yet, because I haven’t decided. I don’t know enough to make that decision and someone got kidnapped so she could avoid giving me any answers.”

“You know that’s not—” I started to say and then stopped as I caught the teasing expression on her face. I rolled my eyes and made a face right back at her. “Right. Yes. Just casually getting kidnapped to avoid telling you I’m not a murderer.”

“From what Trick told me, you were framed?” Kenna said it like a question, and I nodded. I could see the gears turning in her mind, ready to poke as many holes in my ‘case’ as she needed to, to feel secure that she had all the answers. “And instead of trusting the system you went on the run, somehow escaped custody, and decided to take up an entirely new life in my city, working for my brother and living in my home. Do I have that right?”

“I was never trying to put you or your brother in danger,” I said. “I really believe the person who killed Monica doesn’t know where I am. And I’m still trying to figure out who that is and clear my name, but I was going to tell you once I did—if I did. And I figured plausible deniability would protect you from the rest.”

“I am not a plausible deniability kind of person,” Kenna told me. “I like to know all the facts so I can make an informed choice.”

“As it stands, I cannot allow my client to divulge every last detail in order for you to make a decision here,” Mason jumped in. “We have an advantage right now, in that the FBI doesn’t know we’re mounting a defense, but that changes if you plan to tell them where Avery is. So I need to know, right here right now. Do you plan to tell them?”

“No,” Kenna said, a moue of distaste wrinkling her upper lip at him cutting into our conversation. “I don’t know the whole story, but I know Hale and she’s not a killer. If you say we can get her charges dropped, then I won’t face any charges for sheltering her. And if you fail to get her charges dropped, I’ll know better than to hire you to get my own conviction reduced.”

“You know your legal risks here. Good. Between the two of us, I’m certain we can clear her name,” Mason said. “And the longer the FBI stays in the dark, the easier everything is going to be. When we’re ready, Avery will turn herself in, and when that happens we are going to stay ahead of the optics of this case. With any luck, the FBI will be issuing Avery an apology by the end of the month.”

“I like the way you think,” Kenna said. “What if we⁠—”

But she didn’t finish whatever she was planning to say, as a loud and insistent knock came at the door. We all turned to look towards the foyer even as Rogue started to bark loudly, drowning out the next round of knocking.

“I’ll get it,” Kenna said, standing up and walking over to figure out what was going on.

“Do you think you can trust her?” Mason asked me, taking the distraction as an opportunity to check in. I looked between him and Kenna, eyebrows raised in surprise that he even had to ask that question.

“After everything we’ve been through?” I replied. “Of course.”

“Uh, Mason?” Kenna called from where she was standing at the door, keeping it partially closed and blocking our visitor from view. “Can you come here for a second?”

Mason stood up and walked over to the front door. I let go of Rogue’s collar now that he’d stopped barking, and stood up to follow him, staying a few paces back.

Kenna stood at the open door with her back straight and her face composed, but she still wasn’t moving out of the doorway. Her body language made it very clear whoever was on the other side was not welcome to enter.

As Mason arrived to stand next to her, she shifted just enough that I could see who was at the door, and when I did, I felt like I was in that coffin all over again. Like there was no air left in the room.

In the early evening light stood Noah with his hands folded and his shoulders squared and his face doing something carefully neutral, refusing to broadcast any of the thoughts I knew had to be racing through his mind.

And beside him stood Phoebe Richards.

Her suit was dark and her expression darker. She was looking past Kenna, peering into the house, and I knew there was no way she wouldn’t see me.

I looked to Noah again, wondering why he hadn’t warned me or if his warning had simply come while I was incapacitated in another woman’s grave. He looked back at me, and for a fraction of a second his neutral facade dropped and I saw the apology in his eyes.

“It looks like we’re doing this by the book,” he said, that damned phrase telling me all I needed to know. He was still on my side, still fighting to prove my innocence, but his hands were tied.

Then Phoebe followed his gaze, her eyes landing on me and turning cold. She wasn’t surprised to see me, she was ready for it, her hand moving to her hip even as she spoke.

“Avery McHale,” she said, “You'’re under arrest for the murder of Special Agent Monica Park.”

Ready for Hale’s Next Adventure?

Hale Hastings is done running.

She has spent the past two months fighting to stay ahead of the FBI, clear her name, and keep her cover. But when federal agents finally arrive at her doorstep, Hale only has one option left.

Surrendering on her own terms is only the beginning. For the first time, Hale is inside the system and the chances of being found innocent has never felt further away. All of the evidence points back to her, and if Hale can't convince the FBI that someone else killed her former boss and mentor she'll spend the rest of her life in prison.

When she's barred from investigating her own case, Hale has no choice but to trust the people closest to her with the most important fight of her life — and turn her attention to a cold case she's been carrying since before she went on the run. Working it isn't a distraction. It's the only thing keeping her sane. But when details about the case emerge, she begins to suspect that nothing about where she ended up is accidental.

What started as a frame job runs deeper than Hale could ever have imagined — through the ranks of the FBI, through decisions that have been made for her, all the way back to the beginning.

And the mastermind at the center of it all has been very careful to make sure nobody ever looked their way.

Before She Knew is a twisting, relentless thriller about a woman caught in the grip of a complicated past she can't outrun and one that's not done with her yet.

To get your copy of Before She Knew, CLICK HERE or scan the code below with your phone.

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What Happened to Hale at the Academy?

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The Hale Hastings Mystery Thriller Series

(with Ash Mercer)

Free Prequel - Away From Her (Hale Hastings Bonus Story)

In Her Bones - (Hale Hastings Series Book One)

Over Your Grave - (Hale Hastings Series Book Two)

Before She Knew - (Hale Hastings Series Book Three)

The Emily Slate FBI Mystery Series

Free Prequel - Her Last Shot (Emily Slate Bonus Story)

His Perfect Crime - (Emily Slate Series Book One)

The Collection Girls - (Emily Slate Series Book Two)

Smoke and Ashes - (Emily Slate Series Book Three)

Her Final Words - (Emily Slate Series Book Four)

Can’t Miss Her - (Emily Slate Series Book Five)

The Lost Daughter - (Emily Slate Series Book Six)

The Secret Seven - (Emily Slate Series Book Seven)

A Liar’s Grave - (Emily Slate Series Book Eight)

Oh What Fun - (Emily Slate Holiday Special)

The Girl in the Wall - (Emily Slate Series Book Nine)

His Final Act - (Emily Slate Series Book Ten)

The Vanishing Eyes - (Emily Slate Series Book Eleven)

Edge of the Woods - (Emily Slate Series Book Twelve)

Ties That Bind - (Emily Slate Series Book Thirteen)

The Missing Bones - (Emily Slate Series Book Fourteen)

Blood in the Sand - (Emily Slate Series Book Fifteen)

The Passage - (Emily Slate Series Book Sixteen)

Fire in the Sky - (Emily Slate Series Book Seventeen)

The Killing Jar - (Emily Slate Series Book Eighteen)

A Deadly Promise - (Emily Slate Series Book Nineteen)

No More Chances - (Emily Slate Series Book Twenty)

At All Costs - (Emily Slate Series Book Twenty-One)

The Ivy Bishop Mystery Thriller Series

Free Prequel - Bishop’s Edge (Ivy Bishop Bonus Story)

Her Dark Secret - (Ivy Bishop Series Book One)

The Girl Without A Clue - (Ivy Bishop Series Book Two)

The Buried Faces - (Ivy Bishop Series Book Three)

Her Hidden Lies - (Ivy Bishop Series Book Four)

One Dark Night - (Ivy Bishop Series Book Five)

The Oak Creek Thriller Series

The Darkest Game - (Oak Creek Thriller Book One)

Never Strike Twice - (Oak Creek Thriller Book Two)

Standalones

The Forgotten Wife

About the Authors

Alex Sigmore writes gripping mystery thrillers with heart. Known for strong, complex female leads, Alex’s stories blend edge-of-your-seat suspense with emotional depth, exploring the costs of justice and the bonds that hold us together. Whether unraveling secrets in Her Dark Secret, tracking a killer across the New Mexico desert in The Passage, or going undercover in Blood in the Sand, Alex delivers stories where empathy is as sharp as the detective’s mind.

Each book stands alone but is part of a larger, multi-book arc, offering readers the satisfaction of a complete case and the thrill of an evolving mystery. The Emily Slate Mystery Thrillers and Ivy Bishop Investigations have become reader favorites, known for their layered characters, psychological twists, and immersive storytelling.

When not writing, Alex dreams of a quiet home in the hills of California with a view, a couple of rescue pugs, and a life full of books, travel, and good friends. But for now, it’s all about the next page-turning mystery.

Ash Mercer writes character driven mystery thrillers with a pug in her lap and a coffee in hand. She has a deep love of the Pacific Northwest, and spends her weekends hiking the trails and hunting down waterfalls.