Page 7 of Filthy Liar

To: Melinda Gray

Subject: Request for an interview (background information)

I click into the message.

In the course of an investigation, some of your articles have popped onto my radar…

I scan the rest of the message and type a standard reply.

From: Melinda Gray

To: Detective Kendra Browning

Subject: Re: Request for an interview (background information)

I never reveal my sources. I don’t think I can be of any help to the police in this matter.

But I don’t hit send. I read her message back again, then scowl at the blinking cursor. I drain my glass, go to the kitchen for a refill, then come back.

The cursor flashes at me as if to say,this isn’t the right reply.

Why not?

What am I missing? What is my instinct pinging on, and why can’t Iseeit? I dig out my burner phone, the one with only one contact—Caroline—and fire off a cryptic message. Then I close the laptop. I don’t need to reply right away.

Maybe it’s that I don’t want to reply without disclosing that we know each other from another time, another life. I can picture the good detective from her visits to the Horus Group offices.

I could disclose that prior connection, if need be, but not in writing. I have before, to Taylor Dashford Reid, a former client of The Horus Group and a fellow absconder to the west coast. In the year since I printed her story, I’ve never had any reason to think she told anyone who I am. But a third brush with that past life, and on the same night as a near run-in with Jason?

It’s enough to make an already paranoid investigator think something was definitely up.

A glow of headlights out my window catches my eye. A slow-moving caravan of vehicles is driving down one of the lanes on the property of the Naval Observatory. There’s a story there, in the comings and goings of the property’s most famous residents—and the visitors they get.

D.C. is full of stories, though, and I don’t know if I want to tell them anymore.

Maybe my next project will be my swan song in journalism, and I can silently fade into the night. I’ll reinvent myself as a barista in Kansas or something similarly wholesome.

Maybe one day I’ll even find someone to share all of this with.

I can’t imagine how that would even go.Funny story…

Laughing to myself, I reach for my glass—but I freeze before I pick it up. Why on God’s green acres did those two words pop into my head like that? Jason Fucking Evans.

“Funny story…” is how we ended up crossing the line between employer and employee in the first place.

4

Jason

Five years earlier

I should closemy door and leave her alone.

Alone.

That’s precisely the problem.

Cole is on vacation—fucking his beautiful girlfriend on a beach in Hawaii, I’m sure—and Tag and Wilson are doing a security system walk-through with a client in Arlington.

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