by Darby Kane
She slid her arm across the counter, unable to do much else. She’d expended so much energy, her body now felt heavy and lifeless. An extra push and she touched the end of the remote. She brought it closer, ready to turn it off just as the next caller broke in.
“I know Aaron, and he’s not the man everyone thinks he is.”
A quick shot without any detail. Probably easy for most people to ignore. Not Lila.
The comment breathed life back into her exhausted body.
She recognized that voice.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
EXACTLY TWO HOURS AND A QUICK CLEANUP JOB LATER, LILA tracked Ryan down at his office. He’d ignored her repeated attempts to reach out, even the one through the college’s main number.
By the time she got to his office door, she’d worked herself into a full-throttle rage. Anger poured through her. His notes and all those side comments he’d written ran through her mind like a movie.
She opened the door and walked in without knocking. The move caught Ryan off guard. He dropped the book in his hand as he spun away from the window to face her.
Nothing in his expression said welcome. She picked up a bit of how dare you? mixed with oh shit and decided he was half-right.
After a few seconds, he nodded his head in what she took was a gesture to shut the door. Keep all the secrets in and don’t let the public see the mess. She’d grown up that way, and being with him threw her back into that mindset. The secrets and the scheming. But she closed it anyway.
He was the first to speak, and the harsh whisper of his tone matched his stiffness. “What the hell are you thinking by coming here?”
“You didn’t answer my call.” She didn’t bother to lower her voice or rein it in. He’d lost the right to have her care about his reputation when he dug into her past with abandon.
He bent down and retrieved the book, returning it with care to its assigned space on the shelves. “The police searched my damn house yesterday, Lila.”
“CID.”
“Does the precise name of the office really matter?”
His voice rose along with her indignation. Every cell inside her screamed to open his window and shout about his betrayal to the quad. Let him regain his favorite professor tag after that. “You don’t get to be pissed off.”
“Excuse me?”
He’d flipped the whole situation around and blamed her, put her in the role of begging forgiveness. As if she didn’t have enough garbage to worry about right now.
Screw that shit. This offensive strike was meant to throw her off balance. Little did he know that’s where she lived now. On the fringes, ready to fall into the abyss.
“The drama, the fake outrage—whatever this is—tone it down. Your students aren’t here to watch and applaud.”
A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Your marriage bullshit has turned my life upside down.”
Maybe true. She needed to own a part of that, but she’d do it in silence unless and until he explained the reams of papers he had collected about her without warning. “Oh, really?”
“I have a job and a life, Lila.” He pointed toward the closed window behind his desk. “Right now I have a meeting with the department chair and—”
“You used me.”
He froze. A second later his arm fell to his side. “What are you talking about?”
But he knew. The sudden blank expression and slight uptick of his voice gave him away.
She’d thought he was so different, but he wasn’t. “The research. My life. My father. My mother’s suicide.”
His hand closed over the back of his chair. “I can explain.”
Sure, now he wanted to explain. How convenient. “That you’re a piece of shit? No need. I get that.”
His fingers tightened. “Be careful.”
“Of what?” When he didn’t speak, she tried to spell it out. To make sure they were on the same plane. “Threats? Really, Ryan?”
He blew out a long breath and visibly regained control. Gone was the tight frown line on his forehead. His hand no longer held the leather in a suffocating clench. “Okay, let’s calm down for a second.”
Déjà vu slapped her across the face. The calming voice. The gaslighting. Aaron had used those tactics. He’d excelled at them. She hated the nonsense even more coming from Ryan because she’d expected better of him. “Now you want to placate me?”
He reached over and closed the blinds, blocking out the sun and plunging the room into shadow. “We shouldn’t do this here.”
He chose this battleground when he refused to respond to her. “Are you afraid I’m going to yell? Embarrass you?”
“The research isn’t what you think it is. I’m sure you’ve blown this into something bigger, but—”
“Aaron said the same thing to me.”
Ryan’s head snapped back. “What? You’re comparing me to your asshole husband?”
She would not be sidetracked. Not until he admitted his plan and where he thought she fit into it. “They. Found. Your. Notes.”
“We started working together, and you had this background . . .” He winced. “There was no grand plan. It just happened.”
“Sure it did.” She felt hunted.
“It’s what I do, Lila. I hear about cases, get interested, and dive in.”
She didn’t waste one second waiting for the apology that would never come. “Is that the entire explanation? Like having a big brain excuses you from being a jackass?”
“I’m writing a book. You knew that.”
She grabbed on to the bookcase to keep from throwing things. “You left out the part where it’s about my family.”
“No.” He held up one finger, like he might do to a child. “It’s about the connection between upbringing and crime and—”
“I don’t care.” She didn’t need a lecture. All she wanted—craved, really—was a few minutes of honesty. “Admit the truth. Spell it out.”
She let the quiet stretch between them. After a lifetime of filling in the blanks and letting things slide because that was easier than feeling anything, she could not let this go.
Ryan shifted his weight from foot to foot right before he started talking again. “It’s background. This is not a big deal.”
Funny, because it meant everything to her. “You lie with such ease that I wonder what other bullshit you’ve dusted off, packaged, and sold to me in some other form.”
He shook his head. “Right back at ya, babe.”
The return of the flippant tone meant they’d skipped from subterfuge—finally—to something real. “I told you about my upbringing. I never thought you’d have the balls to use it for a book.”
“What about the rest? Like, the snooping we’ve never talked about?”
“What are you saying?”
“You wandering around my office.” His gaze shifted to his bookshelves. “You think I don’t remember? More than once you insisted on meeting me here. You studied my shelves, looked through my books. I thought you were paging through, burning time.”
Her heartbeat thumped in her ears. “I was.”
He pulled out one book. The book. The one with the case from years ago that had taught her how to rig carbon monoxide through the air-conditioning vent.
“What were you really doing? Maybe studying? Learning how to take care of Aaron once and for all?” Ryan asked when he clearly thought he knew the answer. “Learning about how to kill and hide the body?”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Is it that outrageous?” He shoved his chair to the side and stepped up to the desk, right across from her. “I used you? Fine. Guilty. Maybe I did. The opportunity was right there, and I grabbed it.”
“I’m an opportunity now?” Whatever pang of guilt she’d felt for tangentially implicating him by paging through a few books disappeared in a hailstorm of anger.
“But I’ve been wondering if you used me, too. The questions about my work. The interest in my field.” With his fists b
alanced on the desk, he leaned forward, getting his face closer to hers. “You stalked me.”
The ego . . . how had she missed it before?
“I answered the phone when you called about buying a house months ago. It’s what I do, genius. I suck up to people for a commission.” Months ago she didn’t know Aaron was a monster. She wasn’t looking for a way to stop him. That morphed over time.
What she’d had with Ryan had been real . . . for her. At least at the beginning. Then, when she needed a little expertise, the relationship turned out to be convenient. She’d thought it was happenstance, but now it seemed more like he’d been the one stalking her, going after her for the information he needed.
His eyes narrowed. “I looked at the books that grabbed your attention.”
“Say it.” Challenge rose in her voice. “Stop playing and make whatever accusation you’re dying to make.”
“I don’t think I have to.”
The knock came as he finished his sentence.
“Ignore it,” she said. Because they were not done.
The door opened, and Ginny stepped inside with two sheriff’s deputies Lila recognized from the same office where Ginny questioned her. They stood just behind her, on either side. As a team, they made a formidable one.
Ginny’s gaze fell on Lila, and she shook her head. “What a surprise to find you here.”
“Are you still following me?” It made sense. With Aaron missing and no new clues, they had to be desperate. But dragging her to the station again?
“Should I be?” Ginny shot back with her usual take-no-shit style.
“Lila is only here to ask about my notes. Thanks to you.” Ryan’s voice ratcheted down to a normal level as he spoke with Ginny, his affect calm and in control.
Ginny appeared less than impressed. “She admitted you’re having an affair.”
His gaze shot to Lila. “She did?”
Lila hadn’t gotten to that point yet. If he’d responded to her, this wouldn’t have been a shock. “You’re not the only one with surprises you forgot to share.”
“Nice of you to give me a heads-up.” He looked at both women as he delivered the comment.
Ginny snorted. “Do I work for you now?”
“My point about Lila being here was to say nothing else is going on.” He waved his hand in the air. “We were just talking.”
For a man who handled twentysomethings with ease, his defensiveness came off as conspiracy fodder. He had to know that. Lila couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “The panic in your voice suggests otherwise, so maybe tone it down.”
“She’s not wrong, but you can explain why everyone is where they are when we get back to my office.” Ginny gestured for her underlings to step aside and for Ryan to step out of the office.
Not her. That thought ran through Lila’s mind. She was here for Ryan, not her. Lila had no idea what that meant, but she appreciated the front-row seat to the action because it would save her from guessing what happened later. Nia and the podcast would know, but this time she’d know first.
Instead of moving forward, Ryan retreated closer to the window. “What are you talking about?”
“We have questions for you.” Ginny stood there, in a face-off, not giving one thing away with her body language.
When she reached for Ryan’s arm, he shrugged away from the hold. “No. You know what? I’m done. No more. I don’t even know the guy. Ask someone else about Aaron Payne.”
“We found his phone in your house.” Ginny’s gaze traveled from Ryan to Lila then back again. “Aaron’s phone. The one that went missing when he did.”
Ryan’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“What?” Lila asked at the same time.
“We found it in your house.” This time Ginny grabbed for Ryan’s arm and held on. “So, no, you’re not done with questions.”
Chapter Forty
LILA MET TOBIAS AT THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE. SHE WASN’T ALLOWED near the room where Ginny had Ryan in for questioning . . . again. Tobias left to get some intel on what was happening and confirm that the phone was the only surprise they had to survive tonight.
Her fight with Ryan had come at the worst time. She’d just tipped off his memory of her paging through the books in his office then aimed him directly at Ginny. He might right now be scrambling to protect his ass by offering up hers. The move would be typical, not surprising.
Ryan had operated from an agenda the entire time, and she’d missed it. Her instincts had misfired. The last thing she needed or wanted was to have her upbringing split open for everyone to pick at and dissect. Reliving those empty years was not an option.
But a much bigger mess loomed. One she could not explain. Aaron’s phone. Nothing about the location in which it was found made sense. Ryan never had it. Despite Ginny’s assumptions, the two men never met, or if they did it was so secret they hid it from her. She couldn’t figure out why that would ever happen.
A wayward thought. A little pinching at the back of her neck raised the possibility that the men had colluded without her knowing. They could have met. Might have fought. If Ryan was desperate enough to find fodder for his book, he could have reached out to Aaron for background. But the jump from there, which sounded tenuous at best, to the idea of Ryan helping Aaron disappear seemed too broad to bridge.
That last possibility, regardless of how remote it might be, made her stomach flip. Fighting one of them sucked. Going up against them both had her brain scrambling to come up with new options and plans.
But the Ryan-as-accomplice idea sounded so unlikely to her that she forced her mind not to focus on it. That left her back in the confusing mire. The cell should have been where she’d left it: in Aaron’s jacket pocket. She flipped through each step of the plan in her mind. She’d struggled but gotten through them all.
Invisible noxious fumes. She’d expected a haze, but everything looked normal when she peeked in the room. All but Aaron’s body, laid in a diagonal sprawl across the guest bed.
With a towel clamped tight against her mouth, she ran inside, deep into the stale, poisonous air, to the other side of the room. With every step, she held the cloth tighter against her closed mouth. The finicky window lock fought against her fingers. She tugged and pulled until her lungs burned with the need to inhale.
A few seconds more, and the metal hinge opened with a snap. She shoved the window up, and cool air poured in from the dark backyard. She gulped in the freshness, wishing she’d thought ahead and bought a mask. The carbon monoxide canister had required enough subterfuge and lying. Angling it just the right way in the air vent and taping around it to protect the rest of the house had proven daunting.
She looked around the bed, anywhere but at Aaron’s unmoving body. When she finally focused on his hair, she thought about the one time she’d joked that he’d soon need to color it to chase away the gray. His terse response still rang in her ears.
She looked at him now, quiet and still. The worries of gray hair far behind him. An arm stretched out to his side, with his shiny gold wedding band showing.
She waited for the inevitable shot of guilt, a dose she’d convinced herself she could tolerate for a lifetime if it meant freeing those girls. But no feelings of remorse or pain hit her. Seeing those videos, listening to the girls praise his body and touch themselves for his pleasure, had turned him from man to pure monster in her mind.
She’d slain that dragon. Stopped his grooming—all of it.
She hadn’t let him touch her since that night, and she’d done everything to keep her hands off him. Now she reached over and felt for a pulse. The telltale thump she half expected was gone.
That left the cleanup. Dressing his body, which now amounted to nothing more than deadweight. Getting him on the blanket and dragging him out to the garage. Loading him into the back seat and hiding him on the floor. Having the phone and the videos ready for discovery.
Her back was slick with sweat from the fight with foul air and a windo
w. Her muscles tightened and locked from the soreness, but she had to keep going. Daylight would break, and the car had to be in position long before then.
Time was running out.
Tobias walked toward her, all traces of his usual amusement gone from his face. “Ryan is insisting he’s never met Aaron and has no idea how the phone got in his house.”
That fit with what she knew, but to Lila what mattered was the information he wasn’t spilling, though she feared the answer might be “yet.” “What’s Ginny saying?”
Tobias shot her a what’s wrong with you? frown. “I’m not actually Ryan’s attorney, so she’s not telling me.”
Lila ignored the sarcasm and watched the staff of the sheriff’s office scurry around. For once they weren’t focused on her and whispering in the loud way men often did when they wanted you to know what they really thought about you. Today they answered phones and a few circled in a back corner near the biggest glassed-in office. No one paid any attention to her. It was almost as if they forced themselves not to.
She shook her head. “I don’t understand this. This thing with Aaron’s phone makes no sense.”
Tobias guided her around the corner from the main room to the quieter hallway leading to the front doors. “Lila, you need to focus. It’s looking like Ryan is involved in Aaron’s disappearance, or at least met up with him close to the time when he died, which is a problem, since he never disclosed that.”
“That can’t be right.”
Tobias leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “You’re that sure?”
“There’s no tie between them.” Every time she said or thought the words, she felt more confident in them being true. That original assumption of this being something other than “real” evidence of wrongdoing by Ryan sounded right to her.
Tobias shook his head. “Well, there’s you. You’re a pretty big link between them.”
“Neither one of them would fight to the death over me.” They’d proven that through their omissions and behaviors.