Chapter 7
SEVEN
brAN
Twiggy says, “I’ll be monster hunting,” like she’s telling me she’s going to order a pizza.
She’s on the couch, cross-legged, laptop already balanced on her knees, bare toes tucked under herself to make herself as small as possible.
I’ve been in this apartment less than fifteen minutes, and it feels like I’ve stepped into the middle of a storm that’s just barely getting started.
“Monsters later,” I say. “First, I need to see your building.”
She blinks. “You want to…tour the hallway.”
“The hallway,” I say. “The stairwell. The back exit. Roof access, if there is one. Laundry room. Basement. Parking. Anywhere he could come from or vanish to.”
“I think that’s overkill, Bran. You know there’s a word for that, right?” She squints up at me. “Paranoia.”
“Where I’m from,” I say, grabbing my jacket off the chair, “we call that job security.”
She sighs like I’ve personally offended her. “Fine. Let me get real pants.”
I look down at her leggings, oversized t-shirt, and fuzzy socks with tiny pixelated cats on them. “Those count.”
“These are ‘sit in my house and feel vaguely squishy’ pants,” she says, levering herself to her feet. “Not ‘trail a giant mob wall down the stairwell’ pants.”
“I’m not the mob,” I say automatically.
She waves a hand. “Organized crime lite, then. Whatever you boys call yourselves. Point is, the girls in the upstairs apartment are already nosy. If they see you and me out there together, they’ll assume things.”
“What kind of things?” I ask.
The tips of her ears go faintly pink. “Nothing we’re discussing before I’ve had a full cup of coffee.”
Fair.
She disappears into the bedroom. I use the thirty seconds of quiet to breathe and take in the apartment again.
Small. Clean-ish. Organized chaos: cords coiled in neat loops, notebooks in tottering stacks, a tangle of blankets on the couch. There’s a mug with a punny coding joke on the coffee table—Talk Data To Me—and another next to the sink that just says Nope.
The tree in the corner is objectively tragic, but the hummingbird isn’t. That thing looks like money and memory. It’s hung low, like she wants to see it, not just display it.
I file that away.
She comes back out in jeans, boots, and the same oversized hoodie, hair scraped into a messy knot. Real pants apparently means denim.
“You good?” I ask.
She narrows her eyes. “Don’t ask me that every five minutes.”
“Noted.”
I open the door, check the hall—empty—and let her go first. She locks the door with the kind of ritual familiarity that says she’s done it a thousand times, even before last night.
“Don’t hover,” she mutters as we move down the narrow corridor.
I’m not hovering. I’m just tall, and the hallway is small. There’s nowhere else for me to be.
We start at the top and work our way down.
The third floor is composed of four units, one of which is Tallulah’s.
Windows look out over the street and the alley.
One of the doors has four separate locks and a sticker that says THIS HOME PROTECTED BY JESUS AND A GUN.
Another has plastic plants outside it and the faint smell of weed seeping under the crack.
“Mrs. Lewis,” Twiggy murmurs, nodding at the Jesus door. “Nosy but harmless. If a leaf rustles wrong on this floor, she’ll post about it in the building Facebook group.”
“Good,” I say.
“Good for surveillance, bad for my blood pressure,” she replies. “She thinks I’m a hacker for the deep state.”
“Are you?”
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” she says.
The stairwell is narrow concrete, paint peeling in strips. The light at the landing flickers ominously.
“Thurston came up this way?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She gestures down. “Old fire escape in the back connects to the second-floor landing window. Jack thinks he came up that way, checked my door, then looped around to the front to do his creeper thing at the window.”
“He could’ve gone higher,” I say. “Roof access?”
“There’s a door.” She makes a face. “But it sticks. Landlord says it’s sealed for code.”
“Code doesn’t stop a crowbar.”
“Welcome to the thesis of this entire town,” she mutters.
I check the second floor. More doors. More smells. One of the tenants has a yappy dog that loses its mind when it hears us. Good for early alert. Bad for noise discipline.
We reach the ground floor, boasting the front entrance, tenant mailboxes, and a cramped alcove that used to be a storage closet and now has a sad vending machine and a laundry unit shoved in like an afterthought.
I test the front lock, the glass, the hinges.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Twiggy says, leaning against the wall with her arms folded, “how screwed am I?”
“Door’s cheap,” I say. “Frame’s worse. The lock’s decent, but the deadbolt could be bumped if someone knows what they’re doing. Windows are your best feature, and they’re not great.”
“Is that your way of saying I’m screwed?”
“It’s my way of saying he got in once. We don’t give him a second try.”
Her jaw works. She looks small against the chipped white wall, hands pushing deep into the pocket of her hoodie. I can tell she’s trying not to let the “he got in once” phrase land. It does anyway.
“Is there a back exit?” I ask, breaking the silence.
She jerks her chin toward the end of the hall. “Through the laundry.”
The door from the laundry room to the alley is metal, dented, and hanging slightly crooked in its frame. Great if you’re trying to shove a washer through. Less great if you’re trying to keep a determined man out.
I run my fingers along the edge, feeling where the latch meets the plate. “No security bar?”
She snorts. “My landlord won’t replace the dryer belt until it physically snaps in half. You think he paid extra for a security bar?”
“Who installed your cameras?” I ask.
“Me,” she says.
“Inside,” I clarify. “You’ve got good angles in your apartment. None in the common areas.”
She hesitates. “I wanted to. Brodie vetoed it. Said it was a liability nightmare if the feed ever got hacked, and we had other tenants’ faces on it.”
“And he wasn’t wrong,” I say. “But now you’ve got a man willing to commit felonies in the stairwell. Liability’s happening whether there’s footage or not.”
She makes a face. “You’re very reasonable for someone who looks like he eats nails for breakfast.”
“I mix it up,” I say. “Sometimes it’s screws.”
Her mouth twitches like she doesn’t want to smile but is considering it against her will. “Bran Kelly. Did you just make a lil’ jokey joke?”
Hiding a smile, I step out into the alley, scan the space. Dumpsters. A fence that’s more suggestion than barrier. A corner where shadows pool even in daylight. Beyond, the river and a gray, hazy line of trees.
“That the fire escape?” I nod to the old metal stairs zigzagging up the back.
“Yep.”
“It’s a ladder to your floor,” I say. “We’re putting a camera on it.”
Her boots crunch on the thin crust of frost as she turns back toward the building. I take the opportunity to walk the perimeter, mapping sight lines and choke points. It’s not a fortress; it’s a two-and-a-half story box attached to three other boxes.
But Thurston doesn’t need complicated. He needs one opening and enough privacy to exploit it.
He had that last night.
He won’t again.
By the time we’re back upstairs, the deputy outside has been relieved by another one—a kid with a buzz cut and wide eyes who tries not to stare when Tallulah and I walk up together.
“You good, Ms. Gentry?” he asks.
“Living the dream,” she says. “You?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, like he’s not sure what else to say to the tiny gremlin with the death glare and the hoodie.
I open the door for her, watch her slip inside, then close it behind us.
She locks everything without being prompted—not once, but three times while I watch. She brushes by me with a defensive huff. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
Her computer wakes up the second she touches it, screens flickering from dormant to alert like they’re happy to see her.
“Okay,” she says, fingers flying over the keys. “Here’s where we are on the online front.”
I take the chair opposite the couch, angled so I can see both her and the door. Habit.
“Hit me,” I say, mildly surprised that she wants to talk through whatever it is she’s discovered.
She launches into it.
It’s not an info dump so much as a controlled flood.
She walks me through the chat thread from last night, the handle that popped in with the “source is good” detail, the way the rumor spread once she said Henry Thurston’s name.
She shows me scraped content from three true-crime blogs, two local Facebook groups, and a subreddit that makes my teeth itch.
She’s made a color-coded spreadsheet, because of course she has.
“You did all this between Henry’s visit and sunrise?” I ask.
She shrugs, eyes on the screen. “What else was I going to do? Watch infomercials?”
“How about sleep?”
“Sleep is for pussies,” she replies.
Her cursor moves fast, highlighting, copying, sorting. Every so often, she mutters something under her breath—“liar, liar,” or “that’s not how levitity works, you idiot, it’s lividity”—then corrects herself without missing a beat.
I let the rhythm of it sink in. The way her brain moves. The way her body doesn’t, much.
Patterns. That’s what she’s really good at. Beyond the code, beyond the forums. She reads people through their text the way I read them through their weight and tell.
“Bottom line?” I ask when she finally takes a breath.
She leans back, rubbing at the back of her neck.
“Bottom line is, nobody knows anything concrete yet. The guy who claimed ‘source is good’ bailed before giving details. The local gossip machine is divided between ‘drunk hiker’ and ‘Thurston’s back, lock up your daughters.’ The true-crime weirdos are excited in a way that makes me want to salt the earth. ”
“And you?” I ask. “Where are you landing?”
Her jaw tightens. “It’s definitely him.”
“You’re basing that on…?”