“I’m unsure.”
“Have Jesse examine his pockets when he goes over the body. There was enough blood on him that if someone retrieved his wallet or keys after his death, there could be signs of disruption of the flow of blood. I’m going back to the scene.”
“Alright. Be careful.”
Gabriel and I head out to the car, and I start driving after we both buckle in.
“She plans to hold this over you,” Gabriel says. “You two didn’t get along overly well?”
“It wasn’t about getting along for us. It was about surviving. It was the only thing that mattered. Nothing else did.”
“That had to have been hard.”
I hesitate, unsure how to respond to that. I guess it was hard, but I was so fixated on other shit at the time that I didn’t realize how hard it was. “Yeah… thanks.”
When we arrive at the crime scene, I exit the car, then stand outside of the house and stare at it. There are other houses quite close to it, so if a gun went off, someone else would have heard it.
“Who do you shoot at if the victim is already dead?”
“What if it was someone shooting at the killer?” Gabriel asks.
“Then why would they run?”
“Maybe it really was the killer shooting at Abby.”
“Then why wouldn’t they have gone into the other house after her?”
“Did the police arrive too quickly?”
“They would have had time. Maybe not much, but definitely enough to enter the house and find her. She clearly wasn’t hiding overly well. But if you knew her, you’d know that isn’t like her.”
“You mean you think it’s strange she made it so easy for us to find her? Like maybe she was afraid the killer would get her if we didn’t?”
“Or maybe she was distracting us from something,” I suggest.
“Well… if it was a person she was distracting us from, they’ve had plenty of time to get away at this point,” Gabriel says. “They’ve had time to remove the body and everything else, so there’s no way there’s still someone here… but Liam… how far do you go? What if you dig and dig and find something she doesn’t want you to find?”
I lean back against my car and continue staring at the house.
“What if she condemns you because you look too hard? I can’t lose you. But how the hell do we turn away if she won’t let us? I mean… if she’s involved, how far do we look the other way or mess with evidence to keep her happy?”
I don’t know what to say or do, so I just keep thinking. I hate it when my lovely Gabriel is forced to fret. It’s really such a disappointing thing for him to have to do. “If she was distracting us away from someone else… it’s the exact thing we need to prove she wasn’t the killer. If we find proof there was someone else here, they’ll let her go. There’ll be no reason to hold her. Let’s go inside.”
Once we’re geared up, we enter the house. The body is gone, sent to the medical examiner who will inspect it at length when he gets in. Maybe Jesse will find something I missed.
I hesitate as my eyes are drawn down to the blood splatter. “What is this?”
Gabriel steps up next to me to get a look at what has snagged my attention. “Looks like the blood was disrupted right here in three spots… a tripod?”
“Someone recorded the whole thing. Why didn’t I notice this the first time? What was here?”
An officer notices me staring at the spot, so he walks over. “The coffee table was there. We moved it when we removed the body.”
“Did they use it to cover the spots from the tripod?” Gabriel asks. “But if you’re going to go to that much work, why not smear the marks? It’s pretty apparent we would move the coffee table at some point.”
“So what if they moved it for a different reason?” I say. “If they moved it to get it out of their way to kill him, they wouldn’t have moved it back. Why waste the time unless they didn’t want us to know they moved it, which means they moved it for a reason.”
“So they stood on it.”
