"Hand him your phone," her brother said. “And ask him for his so you can watch what he just did.”
She crossed the kitchen. “Jag wants to speak with you, and can I see what’s on your phone?” she asked as softly and kindly as she could manage, but her voice shook. So did her hand.
Noah didn’t say anything. He just swapped phones and quickly turned his back, pressing her phone to his ear.
She focused on the small screen and the video. She slid her finger along the progress bar, rewinding the footage, and tapped play.
Monica Payne stood outside a police precinct with a reporter beside her, another person next to her, two cops behind her, along with a half a dozen other people. A microphone was attached to the podium she gripped as if it were the only thing holding her up. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, that showed off the bruising and cuts on her face. The swelling had gone down, and her eyes were less puffy. She was certainly recognizable, but the effects of her injuries were jarring.
However, it was the words coming out of her mouth that made Ziggy fall back into one of the stools.
“Noah Chase. My ex-boyfriend. He did this to me.”Monica held up her phone, screen to the camera, showing her call log with Noah's name at the top—multiple calls. Timestamps fromthe night Ziggy had gotten the image. From yesterday. From this morning.
“…And he just tried to call me moments ago. He wants to silence me, and he thinks he can threaten me to…”
Ziggy held the phone with one hand, while she gripped the side of the counter with the other.“…Noah told me that if I went public, he’d come for me, and that I’d pay.”
As a reporter, Noah was many things, and he knew how to pressure people. But this, this wasn’t him. And especially as a man, he would never. Ziggy knew that.
But she understood what this looked like and how it could and would be spun. Facts often didn’t matter in the age of social media.
Ziggy sat in Noah's kitchen and watched the clip a second time, and her brain did what it usually did in a control room when something was going wrong on air—it tracked everything simultaneously.
The anonymous text on Sunday night. The photograph. The calls Monica had recently received. Noah had admitted he’d left message after message. And the slew of odd deliveries.
On the surface, it didn’t trace back to Matias, not even for those who knew Noah was indeed Angel.
Rapid-fire questions filled her brain, but she landed on one. Who was Matias using on the outside, and how were they going to find them? Because that was the key to all of this.
"I'll be ready,” Noah said, and that brought her back to the present.
"Ready for what?" She turned.
Noah set down the phone. Pressing both hands onto the counter, he dropped his head forward. "Your brother's five minutes out. He's bringing Baxter Allen."
“My dad’s golf buddy?”
“That’s the one.”
Baxter Allen had been coming to Bowie Christmas dinners since she was twelve-years-old. He'd also been a criminal defense attorney for thirty years. Those two facts had lived in completely separate parts of her brain until this exact moment in this kitchen with a shattered mug in the sink and Monica Payne's voice still coming from the phone in her hand.
"Why is he with Jag? Why are either one of them…” she let the words trail off as it all snapped into place nice and neat like it had been tied in a big pink bow.
Noah lifted his gaze. “Because Jag says I need to voluntarily offer myself up for questioning. Get ahead of it and redirect the narrative." The corner of his mouth pulled in a way that had nothing to do with smiling. "Which sounds exactly like something I'd say on air about someone else's crisis."
This couldn’t be happening. This kind of thing happened to other people. To the people they brought on Noah’s show. Only, Ziggy should know better, because this shit had been happening around her family in different ways for years.
"What it actually means," Noah said, "is that I need to turn myself in."
11
Noah had sat across from enough people in enough rooms to recognize when a space was designed to make you feel small and like you’d already lost.
The interrogation room at the Seattle Police Department was doing exactly that. He shifted in the hard metal chair that was built to keep him aware that his spine was more than the thing that connected his ass to his neck.
And occasionally it needed support.
The cold metal table was actually bolted to the floor, as if someone might pick it up, race out of the room, and run off with the ugly thing. He wondered if there was gum stuck underneath. He shivered at the thought and kept his hands in his lap.