by Carina Adams
“Teasing me?”
“Nah, brat. Kissing these perfect lips.”
She grinned knowingly and gave my shoulder a playful push. “Go get the door. The quicker you let them in, the quicker they leave.” She dragged her teeth over her bottom lip, and all I wanted to do was kiss her again.
I groaned as I hurried to the door, telling myself that I couldn’t send my friends away, and yanked it open.
The police officers on the other side were a shock. They were in plain clothes, one in jeans and a hoody, the other in khakis and a long sleeve tee shirt, but they reeked of cop.
Forcing down an unease that only came from interactions with the boys in blue, I stepped into the hall and closed the door as much as I could behind me to keep them from seeing Cris. “Can I help you?”
“Robert Doyle?” the younger of the two asked.
I nodded.
“I’m Detective Evans.” He flashed a badge. “This is Detective O’Shea.” He pointed to the middle-aged man on his left. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Fuck. Detectives. That happened a lot faster than I’d expected it to.
“Yeah, of course.” I reached for the doorknob behind me and pushed the door open a crack. “Come on in.”
Detective O’Shea shook his head. “We’d like you to come down to the station. It shouldn’t take long.”
“Uh…” I hesitated, trying to figure out what to do. “Can I ask what this is about, Detective?”
“Cody Hansen was found dead last night.” In the apartment behind me, Cris gasped. “He was murdered.”
26
Cris
I couldn’t stop shaking.
I’d started right after I’d heard the detective say Cody’s name. No. That wasn’t true. My hands involuntarily started shaking after I’d heard him say that Cody had been murdered.
Without as much as a glance over his shoulder, Rob had shut the door behind him and gone with the policemen. And hadn’t come back.
Tank and Matt had shown up not five minutes after Rob had been escorted out of the building, and once I’d been able to explain why I was so upset, they’d called in the cavalry. All around me, men talked and debated, trying to find a solution, to come up with a plan. I sat quietly, listening to them, and attempted to wrap my head around the situation.
Cody Hansen was dead. Rob had killed him. While I had sat in the car outside and waited.
Not that I was sad he was dead. I hoped that he’d suffered, felt excruciating pain. If there was any justice in the world, Rob had stolen Cody’s sight and hearing, and beaten him so badly he’d drowned in his own blood. The way Hannah had.
I was in shock that the man I had come to care so much about in the last few hours had done it.
Jeremy slid a cup of coffee in front of me and then cleared his throat. “No news is good news, Cris.”
I thanked him for the coffee and tried to smile. “You think?”
He nodded. “My dad will call as soon as he knows something.”
Jeremy had come as soon as Matt had called, and had spent the last couple hours hounding his father, uncles, cousins, and brothers for any and all information they could get. So far, we knew that Rob had been detained for questioning, that he’d told them he wasn’t talking to them without a lawyer. We also knew that the evidence was circumstantial at best.
Motive was shaky. Rob had been very outspoken about justice for Hannah. He’d been interviewed many times over the years, accusing Cody every time. It was a bitter he said-she said battle, though, and the detectives handling Hannah’s case had never been able to break Cody or Ali, could never get enough evidence one way or another. Because of that, Cody had never formally been charged with her murder. The detectives claimed that fact would make any father homicidal.
An old four-door Bronco had been seen parked on Cody’s street. No one had managed to write down the license plate number, or at least no one had come forward if they had. There weren’t that many of the old Fords registered in the city, and out of those, a Centurion was one of the only ones that matched the description. Add the coincidence that one of those trucks belonged to Rob to the fact that he had a history with the victim, as well as his record of violent behavior, and it was too much for the investigators to ignore.
However, they had no murder weapon and no real physical evidence to tie Rob to the scene. Yeah, Rob’s knuckles were beat to shit, but there were plenty of witnesses to say he’d been in a brawl with members of the Bean Nighe Motorcycle Club over his new girlfriend. The consensus was that without one or the other, BPD would never be able to charge him formally.
Not one person in my apartment had even attempted to lie and tell me that Rob hadn’t pulled the trigger. I didn’t know if they thought he’d told me, or if they just assumed that I knew him well enough to know the truth. Instead of pretending he was innocent, they busied themselves making contingency plans for if he got charged. The mood throughout the room was hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.
And they were certainly prepared.
Each one, even my brother, seemed to be an expert on a particular piece. All of them talked like they knew from firsthand experience. As I looked around the room, the truth sucker punched me. They’d all been arrested before.
The one thing they were having trouble figuring out was the little boy. So far, no one had connected the lost child with the dead woman in the apartment. When they did, Rob’s need to get the boy help would come back and bite him in the ass.
Once they connected me to Rob, everything would fall apart. I was the link that couldn’t be denied. There was no way any jury would be convinced that I just happened to stumble on the little boy while out for a walk the exact same night that his mom and her boyfriend had been murdered in their apartment. By my boyfriend.
In fact, it made Rob look even more like a sadistic prick. Like he’d hurt the child and left him for dead. And me, being a woman, had felt bad and gone against his wishes.
Another thing we struggled with was timing. Almost 700,000 people lived in the city, yet they narrowed it down to just one suspect in a matter of hours. It seemed like too much of a coincidence.
“Hey.” Matty raised his voice as he looked at his watch. “It’s been two and a half hours since they took him.”
A hush fell over the room.
“Jesus Christ!” Tank threw the file he’d been looking through against the wall; papers scattered everywhere.
“I don’t understand.” My heart beat frantically as Rob’s friends started to gather the things they’d had spread across my table. “Why does that matter?”
“He’s been with them for two hours, babe,” Tiny told me, as if that would explain it all.
Matty cleared his throat. “He’s not talking to ‘em, Cris. He’s not saying a goddamn word. Which means they have no reason to hold him unless they think they have enough cause for a warrant.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means,” Tank spoke up, “that on a late spring Sunday afternoon, when all the judges are at the golf course working on their handicap, we only have about an hour before the staties break down that door.” He pointed toward the entryway. “And we only have twenty minutes to sweep it clean before they do.” His Boston accent was so thick, which I’d noticed happened when he was stressed, that I almost didn’t understand what he was saying. He clapped his hands. “Let’s do this!”
They all went in different directions and started riffling through the drawers and closets. Even Jeremy.
“What are you going to do if you find something?” I asked, panicked.
Matty, the last to join them, pressed a kiss to my temple. “We get rid of it.”
I grabbed his wrist before he could move away. “That’s obstruction,” I hissed angrily. “A felony!”
I knew that law all too well. I’d had more than one detective and numerous attorneys talk to me about what would happen if I lied once I was on the stand. I
t hadn’t stopped me then.
It wouldn’t stop these guys now.
Jeremy, the only one close enough to hear our conversation, scowled at me. “Do you know how hard obstruction is to prove?”
I shook my head.
“Extremely,” he answered. “And if there’s a chance I could spend a couple years in state pen to keep my friend from spending a lifetime behind bars, I’m takin’ it.”
He had a great point. I didn’t even know why I had questioned it. I would do whatever it took to keep Rob out of prison, so of course, they would, too.
I hurried to the kitchen, the one place where no one else was, and yanked open a cupboard door. “What am I looking for?”
“Weapons.” Preach held up a gun that he’d pulled from under coffee table. Dear Lord in heaven. I wondered how many guns Rob owned and how many he still had hidden around the apartment.
“Anything that connects him to Hansen,” Tiny called out from his spot in the closet.
“You should check your place, too!” Wiz called to my brother. “They just moved in. God knows what he has at your place.”
“Rob doesn’t keep shit,” Tank supplied. “I’m more concerned about his clothes, his shoes, anything from last night that might have blood on it. And his Glock.”
“Fuck!” Matty ran his fingers through his hair. “He’s wearing the same goddamn boots!”
There was nothing in the kitchen. Our shelves were still practically bare, making my job easy, but I was worried I was missing something. I slammed the last door shut and hurried to the drawers. I yanked the top one open and almost shut it on instinct before I realized that it wasn’t filled with utensils.
There, with a handful of change, was the gun I’d seen him hold against Shooter’s head.
“Matty,” I called, my voice eerily calm. “I think this is it.”
My brother and Tank both rushed to me, Tank with a towel in his hand.
“Don’t touch it,” Matty warned.
“That’s it.” Tank picked it up with the cloth, rubbed it all over to clean away the fingerprints, then wrapped it tightly in the towel. “Get everything out of that drawer, put it in a baggy,” he told me, “and then wipe the entire thing with bleach.” He paused, turning back to me. “Good job, baby girl.”
I did what I was told as the rest of the guys went through every inch of my apartment. When they were done, it looked just as clean as it had before they’d begun.
“What about the truck? He sat in it, covered in Cody’s blood.”
“Preach is already on it,” Tiny assured me with a long look. “You need to pack.”
“Pack? I’m not leaving.”
They ignored me. Tiny snatched my backpack from the table and shoved it into Tank’s arms. Tank didn’t even look at me before he hurried to my drawers and started grabbing.
The shrill ringing of Jeremy’s cell phone startled us all, and for a split second, we all stared at him as he answered. His face fell, but he thanked whomever was on the other end.
“They’re on their way,” he told us as soon as he hung up. “Got the warrant. Maybe twenty minutes out.”
Tiny pointed at me. “Someone needs to get her to my house. Now.” He yanked the bag out of Tank’s hands and held it out to me. “Put it on. Don’t take it off until you get there. Candy’ll know what to do.”
“Where are you goin’?” Tank demanded as the giant strolled toward the door.
“I’m going to call in favors, kid. So should you.”
“Shouldn’t I stay here?” I asked after the door slammed. “Shouldn’t someone be here when they get here?”
“No,” my brother told me as he took one last look around. “It’s better if it’s empty.”
Jeremy nodded. “We need to keep them from connecting the two of you for as long as possible.”
“I’ll take her,” Mutt announced.
We’d been introduced earlier, but I hadn’t said more than two words to him. He was older, maybe in his early forties, and while he was shorter and thinner than the rest of them, he gave off an odd vibe. Like he was unstable. I got the impression he was even more dangerous than they were if you messed with him.
“Tabby’s still there,” he continued, “so I have every reason to be goin’ that way. Just in case they’re watchin’.”
“Go,” Matty instructed. “We’ll be in touch soon.”
Mutt’s bike wasn’t as large or as comfortable as Rob’s, but Mutt was about half Rob’s size, so it made sense. I clung to the sissy bar as he sped through the city, sometimes circling back on himself to make sure no one was following us. Two hours had passed by the time we arrived at Tiny’s.
Candy was waiting on the steps, expecting my arrival. She wrapped her arms around me in a motherly gesture and ushered me into the house. She stopped as soon as we shut the door and handed me a Nokia cell phone.
“What’s this?”
“A way to talk to everyone. Landlines aren’t safe.”
Without another word, she pulled me into the kitchen and down into the same chair that I’d sat in with Rob just twelve hours earlier. Candy dropped into the one next to me and gripped my hand. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say.
“Tiny called.”
The air rushed from my lungs.
“They’ve officially pressed charges.”
I shook my head in denial. No. They couldn’t have.
“How?” My voice broke. “What did they find?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do we do now?”
“We wait.” She patted my hand. “You’re safe here. So, we wait for the guys to figure out the next move.”
“I need to call his uncle Liam.” I swallowed, thinking of all the things I had to do, all the people I needed to contact. “See if he can get me money for a lawyer.”
“It’s been taken care of.”
I fought to keep my face blank. “By who?”
“No need to worry about it.” She stood up. “You go call who you need to and take a shower. You’re sleeping in the same room you had last night. Wiz is planning to come talk to you in a bit, so I’ll put on some coffee. Have you had supper yet?”
“No. I can’t eat.”
“Go rest.” She smiled kindly. “I’ve got ya.”
I exhaled slowly and pushed myself to my feet. “Thank you.”
“Oh, honey. You’re family. Here, we do whatever it takes to protect our own.”
I had just thrown the bag down on the bed that Rob and I had shared the night before when the cellphone in my hand rang.
I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it anyway.
“Hey, kid.” The sound of my brother's voice calmed my nerves a bit. “I need you to save this number. It’s how you’ll reach me from now on.”
I clutched the phone tightly. “Did they really charge him?”
“Yeah.” His voice was bitter. “His fuckin’ boots.” He paused, and I bit my lip to keep myself from asking a thousand more questions.
After a few seconds, I couldn’t handle it anymore. “What can I do?”
“No one knows what’s goin’ on. They don’t have a murder weapon. And they don’t have you to connect the rest of the dots. So, for right now, I need you to stay there. I know it sucks. I’ll come when I can.”
“I don’t care about me!” I snapped. “What can I do to help Rob?”
“For right now, stay outta sight.” I could do that. “Give the gun to Candy.”
I balked. I’d forgotten it was in my bag. Surprisingly, the idea that I’d been carrying it around didn’t horrify me. As long as I had it, the police didn’t. Yet, I wasn’t comfortable handing over something so valuable.
“Can we trust her?”
Matt hesitated, just for a moment, but he did. That was the only answer I needed. I had to figure out a way around giving it to her.
As soon as I hung up, I emptied the bag onto my bed. Tank had shoved a bunch of random clothes in, but als
o two of Rob’s shirts. I lifted one and hugged it; the smell of his laundry detergent lingered in the air.
I missed him. Holy hell. I missed Rob.
There was an electricity between us, a pull that I couldn’t deny. When he kissed me, nothing else mattered. When he held me, I forgot everything. More than anything, I just wanted to be around him.
Under the clothes, I found the towel. Slowly, I unwrapped the gun and looked at it. The little black thing was light, and if I hadn’t known it was real, I would’ve assumed it was fake.
I wrapped it back up and put it on the nightstand until I could figure out a way around giving it to Candy. I didn’t want her to have the one thing that could turn circumstantial evidence into concrete proof. I grabbed my bag and upended it onto the bed, hoping I had a spare toothbrush. The sight of a second gun stopped me cold.
Memories from the day before, when Rob had come home in a frantic rush, hit me. He’d grabbed more than one weapon. I vaguely remembered seeing him shove one in the bag but hadn’t given it another thought since, not with the hell that had broken loose.
I reached out and lifted it carefully. I didn’t have much experience with firearms. I knew you had to point and shoot, that was it. The second one looked almost identical to the first, but it was heavier. I carried the second to the stand and unwrapped the first, comparing the two.
A plan began to form. A risky, scary plan. Without thinking about it too much more, I snatched the first weapon off its towel, shoved it under the mattress, and replaced it with the second. I wiped down the second gun the same way I’d seen it done earlier, and then I wrapped it back up in the terrycloth.
Before I could lose my nerve, I carried it out to Candy. And hoped no one looked too closely. No one needed to know that I’d kept the key piece of evidence.
27
Rocker
The district attorneys were worried about their case. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t drag me out of my cell, force my lawyer to drive to the jail, and sit across from me playing good cop/bad cop every few days. I got so used to it that when a day went by with no visit from the cops or DAs, it felt like something was wrong. I never said anything, never answered any of their questions. Instead, I sat and watched them with a blank stare I’d learned to perfect in juvie. And waited until they’d let me go back to the peace and quiet of my memories.