It wasn’t something you sent to the ex-lover you were still definitely in love with.
No wonder he wasn’t interested in dating me. I wouldn’t be interested in dating me, either, if that was how I behaved.
Henry’s cream did help, though. It made it so that my knee and my wrist were painful but functional, even after a whole day of firefighter training, which as far as I was concerned wasa goddamn miracle, and I owed Henry a really nice dinner. Not that I could afford one.
Money was less tight than it had been when I’d first moved into my apartment, but things like fancy dinners still weren’t part of the budget. I needed the money for expensive fire-resistant boots and the inevitable car repair that the funny humming noise my car was making told me was coming sooner rather than later.
“Mays, excellent.”
I looked up, surprised. I hadn’t been expecting Detective Smith. “Hello, detective,” I greeted him. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping you can bring the tire and ATV tracks from the Crane place and see if we have a potential match with a person of interest.” The polite way to say ‘suspect’ before you had evidence to actually implicate them.
“Sure,” I told him. Legally speaking, I was only allowed to make a comparison if the vehicle in question was parked in a public place or with the explicit permission of its owner. I had the feeling that whoever owned it was unlikely to be interested in letting me anywhere near its tires. But I wasn’t going to ask.
Plausible deniability was sometimes critically important.
“I’ll drive,” Smith said, and I nodded, following him out of the office after sending Lacy a text to let her know what I was doing.
Smith turnedinto a parking lot behind a bowling alley, pulling into a spot near a beaten-up pickup truck with ATV-sized tire tracks in the bed. I expected him to get out, but he didn’t, instead staying in his seat, the car still running. “Here’smy working theory,” he said, breaking the silence that he’d maintained throughout the drive. “What they did to Elliot Crane is retaliation.”
I frowned. “For what?” I asked. As far as I knew, Elliot hadn’t made any enemies in the community.
Smith’s expression was grim. “Not dying.”
“Jesus,” I blurted.
“I don’t know that Jesus has much to do with it,” Smith replied wryly. “I know the people in this town well enough to know that there are some of them who would take it as a personal insult that their friends were incarcerated over the death of a shifter.”
Thinking about that did not improve things. “You’re serious.” It wasn’t a question.
“Unfortunately,” came the answer. “This truck,” he nodded his head toward my window. “Belongs to a man named Nils Erikson. He was one of Wess Dopfer’s buddies. In fact,” he said, nodding over at the bowling alley building. “They used to play league together at this very bowling alley.”
“Whose buddies?” I asked him.
He shot me a sidelong glance. “Wess Dopfer. One of Gregory Crane’s killers.”
Oh. I swallowed. “And you want me to check the treads of his tires,” I said, feeling both terrified and strangely hollow. This man had been friends with one of the men who’d killed Elliot’s dad. Who had tried to kill Elliot.
“If you’d be so kind.”
I got out of the car, then bent as though tying my shoe in order to examine the treads of the truck’s tires. It took me about three seconds to determine that they absolutely werenotthe tire tracks from Elliot’s driveway. I leaned against the open door as though waiting for someone, relaxing, or possibly taking a smoke break, although I had no cigarette.
“Not the tires,” I told Smith through the open door.
“Really?” He sounded surprised. “How certain are you?”
“Positive,” I replied. “These treads are extremely worn. Far too worn to have made the impressions from the driveway.”
“Darn,” he said, sounding morose.
I wasn’t quite done yet, though. “Give me a minute,” I told him, then casually ambled away from the car, passing the back of the pickup and taking a good look at the muddy tracks in its bed on my way over to ‘throw away’ an imaginary piece of trash into the dumpster on the far end of the parking lot. I took another look on the way back.
I climbed back in the car. “It wasn’t the truck,” I told him. “But it might have been used to drop off or pick up the ATV.”
“You can tell that from the muddy tire tracks in the truck bed?”
“Not really, no,” I replied honestly. “But I can tell you that itcouldbe.”
