She was the one who had removed herself from his life, who had made herself unavailable despite his repeated attempts to maintain their relationship.
A sob tore from her throat and she slumped forward, her forehead resting on the leather steering wheel.
And she sobbed, a deep heart-wrenching sob that made her ribs ache, as she grappled with that reality.
Noah wasn’t responsible for his death.
She was.
21
Saturday, March 24th
8:00am
It was Saturday morning, and three fresh inches of snow covered the ground. Lucas should’ve been sleeping in, or enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee and a plate full of scrambled eggs.
So why the hell was he parked outside of the Dans family home? Why had he gotten up at 7:00 a.m. to shovel out the driveway and navigate the unplowed side streets to make his way there?
It was simple, really.
He felt like an ass.
He’d gone home the day before, after Alaina had stormed out of his office, and spent the night feeling like absolute shit. Two Surlys—his favorite type from the Twin Cities brewery was Furious, a hoppy IPA—over the course of the night and an emphatic Minnesota Wild win hadn’t improved his mood.
She’d accused him of giving up. On the case and, in effect, on her.
He felt horrible. It didn’t change the facts of the case—essentially, that he didn’t think there was one—but he wished he’d handled it better. Handled her better.
He shook his head, his hands still gripping the steering wheel. Alaina wasn’t something to be handled. He wasn’t a police officer anymore, didn’t need to think about people as witnesses in that detached way he’d become so adept at. She’d hired him to help, and he should’ve used a little more finesse in discussing why the case was ending. Hell, he’d handled Mariah more delicately than Alaina, and this was a woman he actually cared about.
His breath caught in his throat as the admission came through like a bullhorn inside a sports arena.
Of course he cared about her, he thought dismissively, once again trying to reason his way out of the emotions coursing through him. She’d gone through hell over the last few weeks. A lot of it was self-inflicted, but still. A person would have to be heartless not to care. That was the reason why he was sitting outside of her parents’ house instead of wrapped in his flannel sheets, toasty warm.
The only reason.
But a small, insistent voice was whispering in his head, telling him there was more.
More reasons.
Her fierce determination. Her courage. Her vulnerability.
Her lush hair and soft lips and supple skin.
The way she melted in his arms. The way her lips felt pressed against his. The way she moaned softly when he touched her.
He had to tune it out. He didn’t want to hear it. Not now.
Pocketing his keys, he stepped out of the car. His boots crunched on the fresh snow as he made his way up the sidewalk. It hadn’t been shoveled yet.
Barbara answered the door. She was already dressed, and Lucas breathed a quick sigh of relief. At least he hadn’t woken her.
“Mr. McGowan.” Her fingers immediately flew to her neck. She was wearing a gold chain with a teardrop opal. She held the stone between her fingers. “What can I do for you?”
“Actually, I was hoping I could take one more peek downstairs.” He avoided mentioning Noah’s name.
She glanced behind her and then back at him, her eyes filled with uncertainty. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she said.
“I need five minutes, tops.” He smiled. “I’ll be gone before you know it.”
“Barbara.”
Barbara Dans flinched.
A man appeared behind her, a giant looming in the doorway. He eyed Lucas with suspicion, frown lines etched deep into his forehead.
“What does this man want?” he demanded.
Barbara’s shoulders hunched, and Lucas watched as she literally seemed to shrink in front of him.
“Lucas McGowan,” he said with an easy smile.
The man scowled. He was a distinguished-looking man, with blond hair that had gone silver and blue eyes that matched both his wife’s and Alaina’s. But that was the only resemblance he saw between this man and his daughter.
“You’re the detective who’s been snooping around.”
Lucas arched a brow. “I’m the detective your daughter hired.”
“I don’t have a daughter,” he barked.
“Alan,” Barbara said with alarm.
He silenced her with a look, then turned his attention back to Lucas, who made a conscious effort to stand even taller despite the menacing look on the man’s face.
“Leave,” Alan seethed.
“Look, I—” Lucas began.
“If you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police. You understand me?”
Lucas stared at him, trying to see if this was bluster or if he really would follow through.
Alan pulled out his phone and Lucas knew.
“Fine,” he said shortly. He spun on his heel and trotted back to his car.
Alan watched from the door, his phone still clutched in his hands. Lucas started the car and drove away from the curb. He watched in his rearview mirror and saw the front door close.
He took a right at the stop sign and circled the block slowly, thinking.
Barbara had clearly told her husband about Lucas’s previous visit. And it had obviously not sat well with him.
Lucas sighed. He could see why Alaina had left home when she did, and believed her now when she said she had no relationship with her father. He had probably been the one to sever ties, not Alaina.
He turned right again, and then again, slowing to a crawl as the county snowplow cleared the road in front of him. He took one more right and was back on the Danses’ street. Instead of pulling up in front of the house, though, he parked at the beginning of the block, directly behind an HVAC van. He grimaced, wondering if the house it was parked in front of was without heat.
Not a fun morning to be dealing with that, he thought.
He sat in his car, the engine idling, and waited. Because something occurred to him. It was relatively early on a Saturday morning and both Barbara and Alan Dans were completely dressed. Barbara had her jewelry and makeup on, and Alan was clad in an argyle sweater and navy dress pants, hardly what one might wear for a casual morning at home.
To Lucas, this meant one of two things. Either they were expecting company, or they were heading out.
He had his answer five minutes later when the Danses’ garage door opened and a silver Lexus backed out of the driveway. Lucas was a little surprised that they hadn’t bothered to shovel before leaving, but that just told him they were in a hurry to get wherever they were going.
He watched as the car trundled down the street and then took a left at the stop sign, the direction toward downtown. They might be sticking around Aspen Falls or they might be taking the main road to the highway, which led straight south to the cities. Whatever the case, Lucas shifted the car into Drive and headed toward the house. He didn’t know how much time he would have, but he wasn’t going to waste a single second of it.
He parked a few houses down, just in case, and then walked back up the sidewalk he’d been on only moments earlier. He went through the motions of ringing the doorbell and waiting for an answer. And then, when the door remained closed, he looked around the neighborhood, making sure no one was out shoveling or snowblowing. The street was quiet, and the homes within viewing distance all had blinds and curtains closed. He made his move.
He hurried across the front lawn, trying to line up his steps with the indentations he and Alaina had made the other day. It wasn’t hard to do, even with the couple of inches of fresh snow; he just hoped no one would look too closely, see they were relatively new.
He got to Noah’s window and crouched down. Nothing had been disturbed, at least not as far as he
could see. He yanked off one of his gloves and fished around in his coat pocket for the slim leather case tucked inside.
He ripped off his other glove and got to work, dusting both the lock and the surrounding frame for prints. He didn’t expect to find much, especially because of the outside elements he was dealing with, but he wanted to be thorough.
Lucas hadn’t changed his mind about what happened to Noah. He still believed it was a suicide. But Alaina’s words cut into him, her accusation that he had given up. And he knew there was one thing he could do, one thing that might help prove once and for all that the official story of Noah’s death was in fact the accurate one. It would suck having to tell her, but the proof would be irrefutable. And maybe, armed with that, she could move forward in her grieving process. She could put to bed the what-ifs in relation to the cause of his death and begin to deal with the other emotions warring inside of her.
It felt like the least he could do.
Lucas finished with the exterior and sat back on his haunches for a minute. His fingers were numb with cold, and his ears were sore from the arctic wind. He’d somehow forgotten his hat.
He leaned close to the house again and pushed gently on the window. Unsurprisingly, it slid easily to the right. He carefully removed the window screen, propping it against the side of the house. He took out his kit again and dusted as much as he could of the window ledge, then reached into his pocket for a plastic baggie and used it to hold the pebbles and sand he scooped up.
Satisfied, he stuffed the plastic baggie and the kit back into his pocket. He was just about to replace the window screen when the bedroom door burst open. He fell back on his ass, but not before he saw who was standing in the middle of Noah’s room.
22
Saturday, March 24th
8:40am
Alaina stared at the man outside her brother’s window, her mouth and eyes wide with shock.
“Lucas?”
He leaned forward, peering into the room. “What are you doing here?”
She ignored his question and raced to her brother’s dresser. She rummaged through his drawers, throwing shirts and socks to the floor.
“What are you doing?” Lucas asked.
When she didn’t answer, he asked again, more urgently this time. “Alaina. What’s going on? What are you looking for?”
Her hand closed around a slim metal object and she held it up triumphantly.
“Noah’s phone?”
She nodded, just barely. Adrenaline surged through her body. Her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest, and the roaring in her ears sounded like a train barreling through town.
She concentrated on the phone, even though it shook violently in her trembling hands.
“Alaina.” Lucas’s voice was sharp. “What the hell is going on?”
“He…he texted me.”
Lucas frowned. “Who texted you?”
She swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry, her throat tight. “Noah.”
Before she knew it, Lucas had somehow shimmied through the window. Suddenly he was standing next to her, his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.
“Tell me what’s going on.” His voice was no longer harsh. It was calm, soothing, and Alaina felt herself relax a fraction.
She looked at him. “I got a text this morning.” Slowly, she pulled her own phone out of her jeans pocket. Wordlessly, she handed it to Lucas.
A text bubble displayed on the lock screen as soon as he hit the Home button. The sender was Noah.
Stop looking…or you’ll regret it.
Her eyes were on Lucas. She watched his eyes widen and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
He looked at her. “When did you get this?”
“This morning.” She felt the hysteria building. “My brother texted me. From the dead!”
“Hold on,” Lucas said, holding up a hand.
“It’s him,” she shrieked. She snatched the phone back from him and held it up so he could see. “That’s his name. Right there!” She looked at the phone in her other hand. “I need to see when he sent it.”
“He didn’t send it, Alaina,” Lucas said quietly.
She glared at him. “Yes he did! This is his name. Right here.” She stabbed a finger at the screen. “Are you blind?”
He just watched her, an unreadable expression on his face.
She turned her attention back to her brother’s phone. It was password-protected. She tried his birthday, but it remained locked. She tried her birthday. Nothing.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she let out a strangled scream of frustration.
“Try your face,” Lucas said.
She glared at him. “What?”
“Facial recognition,” he said. “Try it. That’s the newest iPhone. It should have it enabled.
“That won’t work.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. But if you keep punching in random codes, you’re gonna get locked out of that phone, and then you’ll truly have no way to get in it.”
She hesitated, then held the phone out and pressed the Home button.
And just like that, the lock screen disappeared.
“It worked!” Impulsively, and almost without thinking, she kissed him. Just on the cheek, a simple quick kiss, but he jerked back, startled.
She barely noticed. She tapped the text button icon, her nerves eating her alive.
And then she froze.
“What?” Lucas asked.
“There’s nothing there.” She couldn’t understand it. And not only was there no text to her, but there were no texts, period. “But…but I got a text. From him. From this number.”
“What you got was spoofed,” Lucas told her.
She frowned. She didn’t know what that meant. “Spoofed?”
He nodded. “Most people use it to hack personal info. They masquerade as someone the caller knows and then try to get sensitive info.”
“Is it hard to do?”
“Nope.” Lucas’s voice held a hint of disgust. “There’s literally an app that lets you do it.”
Alaina staggered to the bed and sat down. Her heart was still thumping, but the roaring in her ears had lessened. “I don’t understand.”
“Someone purposely sent that text,” Lucas said. “Someone who wanted you to think it was from Noah.”
She closed her eyes. She felt almost numb. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas admitted. “To mess with you. To scare you. I have no idea.”
She swallowed hard. When the text had come in that morning, she thought she was imagining things. But then she stared at the name and the corresponding message in the text bubble, too frozen to actually swipe her phone open, and panic had set in. She wasn’t one to believe in spirits or ghosts, but she couldn’t come up with a single explanation as to why she was getting a message from her brother.
Her dead brother.
She’d sprinted out of her house wearing nothing more than her pajamas and raced to her parents’. The front door was locked, which momentarily deterred her, but then she remembered the garage code and she’d let herself in that way.
She took a couple of deep breaths. Now that the hysteria had passed, she still felt a sense of unease. Because even though the message hadn’t been sent from the dead, there was still something to grapple with.
The fact that someone had purposely sent it to her.
The question was who?
And, more importantly, why?
23
Sunday, March 25th
7:10am
“You look like hell.”
Blaine rolled his eyes at his friend. “You’d look like hell after a twelve-hour overnight shift, too.”
Lucas dropped into the chair across from Blaine. He was sitting at his friend’s desk, back in the one place he’d once sworn he’d never step foot in again.
The Aspen Falls police department.
The sights, the sounds—hell, even the smell—were achingl
y familiar. The low hum of conversation, of phones ringing, of fingers tapping on keyboards. The smell of stale coffee and sweat permeated the air like a low-lying layer of smog. Everything was bathed in a sickly yellow, the result of fluorescent lighting that was a holdover from when the building had been erected back in the eighties.
Lucas loved every inch of it. Still.
Blaine yawned and rubbed his eyes. Stubble lined his cheeks, and he looked in desperate need of a shower. And sleep.
“What brings you here?” Blaine asked.
Lucas hesitated. He’d meant for his next interaction with his friend to be less direct. He’d wanted a chance to chat, to make sure everything was cool with his friend, especially after the somewhat testy exchange they’d had at Lulu’s.
But that wasn’t why he was there.
“I need a favor,” Lucas said.
Blaine eyed him warily. “What kind of favor?”
Lucas reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the samples. He tossed them onto the desk. “I need you to send these to forensics.”
“Fingerprints?”
Lucas nodded.
Blaine reached for the bottle of water on his desk and took a long sip, still eyeing Lucas. He recapped the bottle. “Why?”
“It’s for a case.”
“No, really?” Blaine asked, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. “What case?”
Lucas hesitated. “Noah Dans.”
Blaine leaned back in his chair, his expression hardening. “It was a suicide.”
“I know,” Lucas acknowledged.
“So why the hell are you dusting for prints?” Blaine frowned.
“It’s a long story.”
Blaine glanced at the clock mounted on the wall. “It’s a good thing I’ve got time.”
Lucas sighed. He didn’t want to go into the specifics of the case, especially after Blaine’s somewhat hostile reaction when he’d mentioned it to him earlier in the week, but he also knew he didn’t have much choice. Lucas was still friendly with several of the officers on the force, but there was only one he asked for favors.
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