It was him.
The dead guy.
The one she’d spent twenty minutes examining only a few hours earlier.
He’d been at that scene. And then, days later, she'd rounded a parking garage pillar and interrupted him mid-conversation with her supervisor, right before she’d been placed on forced leave.
Her brain processed the timeline, each instance a glaring marker.
Crime scene.
Parking garage conversation.
Forced leave.
Dead body less than two miles from where she was.
Not a coincidence. Not a random death. Not a medical event.
She sat there for a long time, Shadow's warm weight against her, and let that sink in.
Someone had sent him here.
Someone had sent him here because of her.
She closed the app. Put the phone face-down on the nightstand. Lay back down in the dark with her eyes open and the October night very quiet around her.
She didn't sleep again.
18
YOU NEED TO SEE THIS
PATRICK
Patrick woke laterthan he'd intended, the angle of the light through the curtains telling him it was well past eight. He and Riley had talked late into the night about the forum, the case, Morgan—all of it.
And the stuff he hadn’t said out loud? He didn’t have to, because Rileyknewhim. Sometimes better than he knew himself.
He lay there for a moment, looking at the ceiling.
Riley had been the one to put that growing awareness he’d been feeling into words: “What if she’s your croie?”
He'd deflected, because deflecting was easier at one in the morning than examining what it would mean if she was right. But the question lingered, supported by his own thoughts, increasingly impossible to deny.
Regardless, that wasn’t a question he could definitively answer yet. He had other things on his to-do list, and the first was, getting an ID on the guy in the morgue, and he knew exactly where to start.
He reached for his phone, remembering only when he came up empty that he’d left it charging in the kitchen.
He found it face down on the counter, exactly where he’d left it. The screen lit up the moment he grabbed it.
Eleven notifications, including seven texts from Riley, timestamped across the last two hours. The last one was brief and to the point.
Riley:OMW
He’d no sooner read the text than there was an impatient knock at the door. Riley was on the step with her laptop bag and the fierce expression of a woman who didn’t appreciate being ignored.
“What the hell, Patrick?” she said, pushing her way into the house. “Did you turn off your phone or something?”