“Okay, here we go,” he says, his fingers flying.
“What do you have?” I ask, coming around the table to stand behind him.
“Damn, man. That’s some fucked-up shit,” he says under his breath.
“What?” Magnolia asks from across the room.
Trey glances over in her direction, but his fingers never stop moving. The guy can literally carry on full conversations and keep typing without ever missing a keystroke. As someone who still has to look at his fingers on occasion to remember where a few letters are, I can’t help but be amazed.
“Crime scene pictures. You don’t want to see them, mama,” I tell her, wishing I wasn’t witnessing them either.
“Take his word for it,” Trey says, shaking his head like he’s trying to get the vision of Laura Brandon out of his brain, and I don’t blame him. “You can’t un-see shit like this.”
He clicks out of the photos as fast as he clicked into them.
“Any suspects?” I ask, squatting down to read his screen.
He clicks around and shrugs. “No. Nothing so far. But they’re definitely digging. Your buddy Cavender is on the case.”
Magnolia clangs the lid onto the top of the stockpot. “Fuck. He’ll probably be trying to pin this bullshit on me too.”
“Not a chance that’ll stick. You have an alibi, and even if you didn’t, the good detective isn’t going to suspect a woman did this. This was ...” I trail off, thinking of how to describe the gruesome scene. “Different. And I’d stake my money on the fact it was a man, for sure. Women don’t generally do that kind of thing.”
“It was that bad?” she asks quietly.
I frown and scratch the back of my neck where the hairs are still on end. “Yeah. But nothing you need to see or think about.”
Trey keeps poking around in the case file on Brandon’s wife, but there’s nothing helpful we can find. Fingerprints were lifted from the scene, but after Brandon and his wife’s were eliminated, there were three other sets of prints that haven’t resulted in any matches yet. No sign of forced entry. No shoe or boot prints found in the yard.
Whoever did this isn’t an amateur.
“That’s a big fat zero for information,” Trey says, clicking out of the murder case. “Let’s see if they have anything on the break-in.” His fingers go speeding across the keys again, and he pulls up the file on Cavender’s investigation of the incident at Magnolia’s condo.
“Check the forensics first,” I tell him.
He’s already on it, though, and we both scan the report as it pops up on the screen.
Trey notices something first, and lifts his hand off the keys and fists it against his mouth. “Fuck. It really was human blood.” His head swivels in my direction, and I read the unease in his gaze.
“That’s what Mount said he heard.” Magnolia’s voice is low and quiet.
I leave Trey’s side and head to her at the stove. I pull her into me, wrapping my arms around her. “You’re never going back there, and whoever this sick fuck is—we’re taking him out. Don’t give him a second of your time by worrying. It’s not worth it.”
“But whose blood was it?” she whispers with a shiver.
“We’ll figure that out too, mama. Trust me.”
I’m telling her the truth. My brain has been trying to connect the dots on this fucking puzzle since it started unfolding. I go over the timeline of events I’ve been striving to make sense of.
“Ricardo Ortiz tried to kill you. You killed him. Now someone else is coming after you—who we gotta assume is connected to Ortiz. So it stands to reason someone hired the guy to kill you. Could that someone have been Brandon or his wife?”
Magnolia presses closer into my body. “I don’t know why either of them would. Desiree thinks Brandon ran off with one of her girls— Wait. Let’s play this one out. If Brandon ran off with Naya ... his wife would be pissed.” She jerks her chin up at me. “That makes sense. Doesn’t it?”
I follow her logic. “It could, but wouldn’t a wife go after the woman he ran off with ... or Desiree? Why you?”
“Because I own the house. Everyone knows I own the house. It’s easy to look up. But could the bitch have been crazy enough to pay someone to killmebecause her husband ran off with a girl who just happened to live in a house I owned?”
Jules freezes on the other side of the kitchen island. “Woman scorned. That’s all I’m saying. Your scenario makes sense when you add up the rest. Brandon’s wife could’ve found your name and hired Ortiz to kill you. It’s not too hard to figure out Ortiz went into your building and didn’t come out alive. Someone might care about that enough to go after the person who paid him for the job that got him killed. Maybe to find out who his target was in the building? Then Brandon’s wife gets tortured and killed for the information. It all fits.”