You don’t have to.
Seth Mays
I need to do laundry and get groceries.
Okay.
Despite Elliot asking me to,I hadn’t gone to his house the night before—I’d desperately needed a little time to think. Which meant that I hadn’t done the laundry I needed to do equally desperately, and I was now out of clean underwear.
What Elliot had said to me last night sounded good—but while I didn’t think I needed to forgive him for having established personal boundaries, I was still reeling a little bit from the fact that he had switched so suddenly from not speaking to me to telling me that he didn’t want to live without me.
And yes, I was fully aware of my own hypocrisy.
I just couldn’t help it.
The only person I felt like I could trust completely was Noah, and even Noah I hadn’t told everything to.
I wondered if maybe someday I would trust Elliot that much. What it would take for me to trust him that much.
I sighed, then tried to refocus my attention on the sets of sand and dirt particulates spread out on slides in front of me. It was hard to concentrate on the comparisons when I kept getting distracted by thinking about Elliot, or, more specifically, aboutus. What I wanted. What I thoughthewanted. Whether or not we had a chance of lasting.
My phone buzzed, and I jumped a little, cursing under my breath as I hit my eye socket on the microscope’s eyepiece. “Shit!”
I picked up my phone, ignoring the look Roger shot me from across our tiny lab. “Mays,” I answered it, having seen that it was Smith calling. I walked out into the hallway so I wouldn’t irritate Roger with the conversation.
“How much do you remember from the Crane murder last year?” Smith asked me, not bothering with a more formal greeting.
I felt my stomach drop like a rock. “Not all that much,” I told him. “Unless you’re going to ask me about dried spit.” I remembered there had been four killers, that Gregory Crane had been hanged with a belt, and that Elliot had been attacked, but that Hart and Taavi had saved him. But I hadn’t paid attention to much else, since I knew they’d caught the killers.
Smith let out a sound that might have been either a huff or a grunt. “One of the men responsible for Gregory Crane’s death is named Wess Dopfer,” he said. “And his sister recently became engaged to Charles Buettner.”
I felt my whole body go very still. “Charles Lee Buettner?” I repeated. “As in, the source of the DNA on the dead dog?”
“The same,” Smith replied, but he didn’t sound triumphant about it.
“So what does thatmean?” I asked him, fear for Elliot pulsing in my ears.
Smith let out a long breath. “It means,” he said, his voice serious, “that my theory about Elliot Crane being the target of a revenge plot just got more likely.”
“Revenge fornot dying?” I demanded.
Smith didn’t answer, and I swallowed.
“Shit,” is what I said out loud.
“We don’tknowthat’s the case,” he said, his tone cautious. “It could just be blowing off steam.”
“And committing animal cruelty?” I was getting angrier by the second.
We both knew that most killers started with animals before they progressed to people. “The dog belonged to Buettner’s neighbors, by the way,” he said.
“So?”
“He admitted that he hit it, panicked, and dumped it.”
“In Elliot’s driveway?” I knew I sounded incredulous.
“He claims to not know anything about how it ended up skinned,” Smith said.
