Page 63 of The Couple's Secret
“Maybe,” he mumbled. “Maybe I didn’t like seeing them together or having a front-row seat to how hurt she was when it ended. But that’s how he always was with women. Start seeing someone, get them all infatuated and starry-eyed over him and then dump them. Every single time. Our neighbor’s daughter when she came home from college. The receptionist at urgent care he went to high school with. A couple of customers. Dad was pissed. When I was fourteen, he dated one of my friend’s moms after her divorce. Lasted a few months. She was devastated. He was fine. My friendship was destroyed. Fast-forward to five years after Dad and Cora disappeared. After all the shit the three of us dealt with, he went after Riley.”
“He pursued her?”
Zane nodded. “I didn’t even know he was interested in her. It took him a while but eventually she went all starry-eyed like the rest of them. It bothered me, okay? She deserves better. I didn’t want her to be hurt any more than she already was by missing her mom.”
“It looks like they were happy together,” Josie said. “Did he cheat on Riley?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“Were you interested in Riley?”
“I love her like a sister, okay?”
“Were you interested in her?” Josie repeated.
Zane abandoned the ice pack on his lap and examined his cuticles, also stained with dried blood.
“Zane,” Josie coaxed.
He let his head loll back against the gurney, squeezed his eyes closed and exhaled through his mouth. “When I was a teenager, yeah. Okay? Happy? Yeah, I had a crush on the girl who was supposed to be my stepsister. I never once acted on it or even thought about acting on it.”
She could tell the admission cost him something and wondered if this was the first time he’d ever said it out loud. Forging ahead, she said, “Even when the two of you were out drinking together?”
Zane blinked, keeping his eyes trained on the harsh overhead lights. “I didn’t bring her with me because I was trying to hook up with her. Even though we weren’t blood-related, it would have been gross, okay? We lived in the same house. Our parents were getting married. It would have been too weird. I invited her to go drinking with me and my friends because she was bored. She caught me sneaking out one night and asked to come. That was it. I never even told her how I felt, much less acted on it.”
But Jackson had. Well after Zane’s crush started, but still. How had it felt for Zane all these years? Him being so careful never to cross any lines with Riley only to have his womanizing brother swoop in and marry her?
Before today, the rift between the brothers had been nothing more than a curiosity but now the woman both of them were in love with was dead. Josie knew what Dougherty had told her about the scene. Knew without yet viewing it that the signs pointed to a medical event. Knew that Riley had a drinking problem and had been under tremendous stress in the past week. Those things might have contributed to said medical event.
Still, deep in Josie’s gut, unease swirled.
How could a family be this unlucky?
Josie asked if she could search his phone. Zane handed it over readily. It was standard procedure. She needed to know if there were inconsistencies in his statement, the timeline he had given or red flags in communications he might have had in the last twenty-four hours. She scrolled through the text messages and the call log. There was a flurry of messages on a group chain with him, Riley, and Jackson regarding the funerals. A barrage of texts from people whose names Josie didn’t recognize offering condolences. A thread between him and Hollis regarding company matters. More messages from that morning between him and Jackson about whether Jackson had located her yet. There were calls to Riley between ten seventeen in the morning and when he had contacted Hollis earlier that day—the same time that Josie and Gretchen had been speaking with him at the company lot.
If there was anything remotely suspicious about Riley’s death, they’d get a warrant for the contents of the phone and serve it directly on his cell carrier. It would give them access to anything he might have deleted in the past several hours. They’d do the same for Hollis and Jackson.
Josie handed the phone back to Zane. He leaned to his left a little, peering over her shoulder in Jackson’s direction.
“You going to arrest him?” he asked tiredly. “’Cause I’m not pressing charges.”
“Then no, we’re not arresting him,” she said. “But you two have to leave the scene. Stay in Denton but try not to beat the hell out of each other.”
“I’m not leaving this city until I know what happened to Riley.”
Thirty-Four
Josie left Zane in the back of the ambulance. His eyelids were drooping, his limbs going loose with exhaustion. She watched as the rise and fall of his chest slowed into an even rhythm. The day he’d found out about Tobias and Cora being murdered, he had shown up at the Denton location of At Your Disposal in tears. As far as Josie could tell, he hadn’t cried since finding out about Riley. She had no doubt that, very soon, the stress and trauma of the day would hit him like a freight train. In the few interactions she’d had with Zane Lachlan over the past week, she was struck by his vulnerability and his almost childlike sweetness. Losing the woman he’d been secretly in love with for nearly ten years immediately after burying his father was a level of devastation she wasn’t sure he could handle.
Turning away from the ambulance, she found Hollis standing patiently near one of the other patrol cars.
He ambled over. “I’ll keep an eye on the boys. I promise.”
Brennan had already taken a statement from him at his home, but Josie asked anyway. “When you saw Riley this morning, was she alone?”
Hollis nodded. Tears welled in his eyes.
It would be easy enough for them to trace Riley’s steps from this morning using the GPS in her vehicle. They could verify the timeline that Hollis had given. Josie knew there were reporters camped outside the home Riley and Jackson had shared. One or more of them should be able to confirm that she’d been alone when she went to get Captain Whiskers’ medication and toys.
