Behind me, Rafe muttered under his breath while he rifled through the desk drawers. I didn’t bother telling him to take iteasy, to leave everything the way we’d found it. Vic would know we’d been here when he discovered Lilah’s car and purse — if we found it — missing, and I wasn’t above rubbing in his face the fact that we’d broken into this dump.
Nolan was quiet — and a lot more careful than Rafe— as he rifled through the papers on the desk. Nolan was always careful. It was what had made him a great medic, what made him a good foil to Rafe’s feral chaos, my own tendency to go with the flow.
Nolan rode the line between us.
I closed the last drawer in the first filing cabinet and moved to the second.
“There’s nothing in here,” Rafe said, slamming the bottom desk drawer. “I’m going to check the bar, see if that asshole put it there.”
“Maybe he took it home,” Nolan said, studying a piece of paper from Vic’s desk.
I opened the third drawer in the second filing cabinet and felt the thrill of discovery when I laid eyes on the black bag lined with fringe. “Nope. It’s here.”
“Are you fucking with us?” Nolan asked.
I turned around with the purse in my hand. “Not unless Lombardi is in the habit of hoarding women’s purses.”
Rafe snatched it from my hand.
I scowled as he opened it. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Making sure it’s hers,” he said.
“99% chance it’s hers,” Nolan said. “We shouldn’t violate her privacy.”
“Fuck her privacy,” Rafe said, removing a green suede wallet that had seen better days. “We’ve risked our asses more than once over the past couple days. I’m making sure this is the right bag before we leave.”
I wasn’t buying it. He was curious about Lilah, wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to peer into her life. Maybe it waswrong — okay, it was definitely wrong — but I understood. I was curious too. Lilah Abbott had been an out-of-focus painting for the last six years. The picture had become a little bit clearer over the past two days, just enough to make me hungry for more.
Rafe opened the wallet and withdrew a driver’s license.
“Well?” Nolan asked.
“It’s hers,” Rafe said.
“Good, let’s get out of here.” Nolan reached for the bag but Rafe swung it out of reach and dug inside.
He emerged with a small prescription bottle and peered at the label. “Are these for the heart thing?”
I knew he was asking Nolan even though he was staring at the bottle.
Nolan leaned in to look at the writing on the bottle. “Yeah.”
“Can it kill her?” Rafe asked.
Nolan sighed. “It could but lots of people live with it when it’s well managed.”
Rafe furrowed his brow and put the meds back in the purse, then withdrew a ring of keys, a lip gloss, workout gloves, and a small pocketknife. “Interesting.”
“So she works out and carries a knife for protection,” Nolan said. “Can we get the fuck out of here now?”
It said a lot about Nolan — and about how well I knew him — that I knew he was worried less about Vic returning and more about invading Lilah’s privacy. How he’d ever gone along with Rafe’s plans for Lilah in high school was a mystery.
Rafe dropped the items back in the bag. “Should we light this shithole on fire on our way out?”
There wasn’t even an ounce of humor in his voice, and I knew if even one of us agreed, he’d be lighting the match before we could say “arson is a felony.”
Rafe might not like local drama, but he liked fire.