Page 118 of Smith

His donations to the Fraternal Order of Police had nothing to do with it. Zane had called in a marker so Aria wouldn’t have to be questioned at the station.

I let that go.

“And Stephanie? Anything with that?”

During Aria’s questioning, she told the detective Billy had mentioned a girl named Stephanie begging for her life. It had taken some deep breathing to remember the man was dead.

I heard footsteps coming from the other room and looked over my shoulder. Captain Lucas Taylor with his hair wet, new pair of cargos on, black tee, held my stare as he walked through the living room. He saw the phone to my ear and jerked his chin in question.

“Zane,” I told him.

“Has my daughter seen your guest bathroom yet?” Lucas bizarrely asked.

“Don’t think so.”

“Advice—don’t let her or she’ll be planning a remodel.”

Three days ago I would’ve taken that advice. Now I’d give my right nut to have my woman fighting fit, wandering my house looking for shit to remodel.

As far as I was concerned, she could redo whatever she wanted to if it meant she never left. Or better yet, we could dump this place and buy something better.

I pulled my phone from my ear and put Zane on speaker.

“Taylor’s here,” I announced. “Finish what you were gonna tell me about Stephanie.”

“Nothing concrete.”

Zane didn’t often evade and give bullshit answers. The man just came right out with it. He had zero filter, and even less bedside manner.

“Why are you being shady?”

“Because you’ve already desecrated a corpse once this week. I’m thinking the cops are gonna let that slide but I don’t think they’d take kindly you breaking into the morgue so you can have another shot at the asshole.”

“If I knew that was an option I would’ve already dragged the motherfucker’s body out of the fridge and set him on fire in the parking lot.”

Taylor’s chuckle shocked the shit out of me.

“I’d pick the lock for him,” Lucas put in.

“And they say I’m the unstable one,” Zane muttered.

Unstable didn’t begin to describe my boss.

“Jesus Christ, what’d they find?”

“Cold case. Stephanie Brinkley, seventeen, COD was a gunshot wound to the head. She was pulled out of Marshy Creek in Grasonville after being missing for two days. Stephanie was a classmate of Billy’s.”

Jesus fucking shit.

“The gun we found?”

“No projectile was retrieved from the victim. They did find a shell casing. They might not be able to prove in a court of law Billy killed her, but they don’t need to; the fucker’s dead. They’re taking his confession, his access to the victim, the pictures they found of her from one of the boxes. Hopefully, the casing is still in an evidence room somewhere. They run that and then close a twenty-eight years old cold case of a murdered seventeen-year-old.”

I was certain the hostility I felt rolling off Lucas Taylor matched my own.

The sick fuck had murdered a classmate after taking his sick fucking pictures, and hid the gun in his best friend’s attic. Then years later got his hands on Aria.

“Do the cops think there are others?” I asked.

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