Page 91 of The Past in the Present

“You want to say that again?” Raj asked, half-teasing, half-aggressive.

“Fuck you, Tony.” Hart was annoyed, but there wasn’t any real bite to it. Then he turned to me, and I fought the urge to try to disappear into the pillows propping me up. “What do you think?”

“He’s not a part of this investigation,” Raj interrupted.

“The fuck he isn’t.”

“Not as an investigator, he isn’t. We shouldn’t even be discussing this in front of him.”

Technically, Raj wasn’t wrong. I was the boyfriend of the attempted murder victim and the son of the actual murder victim. And the twin of the prime suspect. And the son ofthe missing-presumed-dead-man who was almost certainly the actual murderer.

I shouldn’t have been anywhere near this case.

And yet, here I was.

“Yeah, well, if Augusta County had even a millimeter of competence, they’d have had their own CSIs actually do their jobs, and I wouldn’t have had to rope Mays into this.”

Raj stopped pacing and ran a hand down his face. “You’ve made a complete mess of this, Hart.”

“It wasn’t me who made the fucking mess,” the elf retorted, his ears turning even pinker.

“You didn’t do anything to clean it up, though, did you?”

“I didn’t see your stripey ass here trying to help,” Hart snapped back.

I didn’t really want to watch this devolve any farther.

“How about we just figure out what wearegoing to do instead of blaming each other for the shit-show that, realistically speaking, is my father’s fault?” I suggested.

They both turned to look at me.

“Any ideas?” Hart asked me, not really willing to give up the fight just yet.

“Hart! Leave him out of it!”

“Do we know who’s listed as next of kin in Elliot’s will?” I asked, suddenly. I didn’t think it was me, but it might very well have been Hart.

They both gaped at me.

I shrugged. “I have wills on the brain,” I replied. “Since my mother’s is what started all this.”

“What do you mean?” Raj asked.

I explained about how my mother had tried to contact Noah, how she’d gone to Humbolt to draw up a new will, and how she’d left property to both Noah and me. I explained about Rachael, who’d gotten sick and died, and how that might have causedmy mother to finally,finallystart defying my father. I told him what I knew about the evidence they had—the DNA that hadn’t matched either Noah or me, but which had been a family match.

And then I offered up the working theory that my father had killed my mother, that he’d then decided that I had to die, too, so he’d used Mosby to run ‘me’ off the road so that I would stop raising questions and trouble.

I included everything I’d gleaned from the knife I’d turned in to the blood tracks to the shrapnel of headlight fragments found on the highway where Elliot had been driven off the road. I also explained how the Community was trying to claim my mother’s body.

“Thepoint,” I concluded. “Is that if everyone believes Elliot is dead—or is pretending he is, anyway—then his will goes into effect. And whoever is next of kin not only should have been notified, but should be able to try to claim his… body.” I’d tried not to hesitate, and failed.

“So who’s his next of kin?” Raj wanted to know.

I turned my head to look at Hart, and found him staring at me. I raised both eyebrows.

“Fuck,” is what he said.

“What?” Raj demanded.

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