“They’re basically kids. Maybe over eighteen, but not twenty-one yet. You really want to go there?”
“Ladies. It’s been fun, but I think this is where I leave you.” He smiled at them and pulled away from the bar. I found us atable on the other side of the room. It was closer to the stage where the karaoke was being set up, but at least there were no potentially underage girls around us.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I snapped, kicking his chair just as he was going to sit. He managed to catch it and plop his ass down without falling to the floor.
“They were at a bar. They had drinks in front of them,” he said, throwing his hands up. “I figured they had to be at least twenty-one. Ronnie wouldn’t serve them if they were underage, even if they tried to pull a fake ID.”
“Nonalcoholic mocktails. They’re probably here for the karaoke. Seriously, man. You need to watch out.”
“I wasn’t planning on taking them home.” He shrugged.
“You’re always planning on taking someone home.”
A shadow covered the table, Wes’s enormous body blocking the light from the chandeliers overhead. The tall black chair scraped against the floor as he pulled it out.
“Wes.” I nodded a greeting.
“Luke. Seb,” he said, folding his large frame onto the small seat.
Wes and Seb talked, or Seb talked while Wes sat by silently. I thought I needed to get out of my house, but now that I was here, I couldn’t seem to get out of my head. Images I really didn’t want to see flashed through my mind. My wife… and my partner. Juliet’s round belly. A nursery with the two of them peeking over a sleeping babe in a crib… instead of the two of us. A life that should have been mine.
I tried to shake myself out of it, but I couldn’t quite get myself to focus.
“What’s up with you?” Wes asked. I forced my gaze to his, blinking a few times to clear my head.
“Huh? Nothing. You make any progress on Redmond’s case?”
“You going to do anything about it if I do?” he countered.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” It sounded an awful lot like he was implying something he better not.
“Redmond is innocent.” His hard stare bored into me. “And someone on your team knows that already.” His long hair was tied back, his dense beard taking up the lower half of his face. He was tall, broad, and stony. He could easily intimidate a lesser man, but that wasn’t me.
“Not according to the evidence we have on him.” I leveled a hard look right back at him. “Listen, I looked into it when you said you were taking the case on. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. No trace that evidence had been covered up.”
“Then you didn’t look hard enough. You know he and Alana were together?”
“Yes. He’s saying it was consensual. None of her friends confirmed that. We don’t have proof that it was or wasn’t.”
“They met up at the beach. Fooled around. But she was alive when he left.”
“Of course that’s what he’s going to say,” I huffed. We had been down this road already. I’d had these same conversations with Redmond myself. None of this was news. The kid’s story didn’t match up with the facts.
“Think it through, Wilder. Ryan and Alana were together. Had been together since last year when she volunteered to be his student tutor for some honor society credits. He’s a troubled kid, from a troubled home. An easy target for the police. They have a connection, and that’s all it took for you all to run with the theory.”
It clicked. Why Wes was so adamant that Ryan was innocent. He probably saw himself in Ryan. A version of what his life could have looked like if he hadn’t made friends with Wyatt in the third grade. If he hadn’t found a place, a home, that he could go to where he was safe and loved.
Wes continued. “I trust you, Luke. You’re a good cop. I know that. But your partner? Him, I don’t trust.”
“Ha.” I let out a humorless laugh. “You’re smarter than me.”
“I won’t say he’s dirty, not without evidence, but he’s shifty. Like a snake.”
“Yeah, well, he’s also been fucking my wife,” I said.
Wes’s face gave nothing away. On the other side of the table, where Seb had been engrossed in chatting with the server, his head snapped to me.
“What?” he growled. “Is that who Juliet’s baby daddy is?”
