Chapter 18. Isabel, the Assistant #2
“Is this your interrogation voice?” I couldn’t help picking up where we’d left off after the breakup: trading barbs, performing our disdain. But that wasn’t how you warmed someone up for a favor, and I needed the mother of all favors.
“I called the FBI tip line,” I admitted.
“Told them I needed to talk to you about a possible domestic terrorism situation. They gave me your office line. Then I told your assistant I was a long-lost lover desperate to reconnect. She said you came here at dawn every morning before work. I guess some things don’t change, huh? ”
He dropped his board onto the sand. Looked up at me from under a dark, arched eyebrow. “You think it’s funny, lying to the FBI?”
“It actually was a little funny how excited your assistant was. She seems pretty invested in your love life. Please don’t fire her.”
“As if I’d fire Susan over you. Why are you here, Isabel?”
I took a breath and met his eyes. “I need your help.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Brooks tipped his head back and laughed.
“I’m serious.”
He kept chuckling, wiping his face to sluice off drops of seawater. “And to think, the last time we talked, you were emphatically opposed to my help. How the tables have turned.”
“I need your expertise as an FBI agent.”
He picked up his board and took off past me, in the direction of the parking lot. “And how exactly did you find out I’m an FBI agent? When we broke up—”
“When I dumped you.” Why, Isabel? I regretted it the instant it came out.
“Right. When you dumped me, I was still in law school.”
Okay, I was really screwing up. Unfortunately, there was just something about Brooks that got under my skin, disrupting the self-control I’d worked hard to cultivate in the years since we’d dated.
Maybe he was too tied to my girlhood, the unvarnished, dreamy person I’d been at nineteen, and he kept tugging her out of me.
I scrambled after him. “If you’re going to make me say it, then yes, I’ve kept tabs on you.
Happy? It’s not weird to check on an ex.
Don’t pretend you’ve never checked on me. ”
“No need,” Brooks said dryly. He kept one step ahead. “You and Scout do everything you can to land in the news.”
“Brooks, please. Talk to me.”
He kept walking.
“Brooks, I’m in big trouble.”
He stopped. Goose bumps broke out across his back. He turned, his eyes fixed on me. “What kind of trouble?”
“The police think Scout killed a woman named Elizabeth Drake. They haven’t charged her yet, but it’s coming.”
Thank god he looked stunned. “What do they have on her?”
“They found Scout’s hair in the woman’s bathroom pipe, and one of her lyrics written in blood on the bedroom wall.
” I winced. I’d worked hard to shove down memories of the bloody, oozing hole in Georgia’s head, to keep from seeing it whenever my thoughts turned idle.
But this case was dredging them back up.
Brooks squinted into the sun. “Hair is bad, but it’s not definitive—it proves she was there, not that she killed anyone. And they must think she’s pretty stupid, to leave her own lyrics at the scene.”
“Cocky is the word the detective used. Scout suffers ‘delusions of invincibility’ on account of being a semi-famous pop singer.”
He whistled. “Harsh. What was the lyric?”
“I eat traitors like you for breakfast. It’s a line from ‘Midnight Mass.’” I frowned. “The murdered woman, Elizabeth Drake, used to be Reese Griffin’s assistant—”
“Griffin?” Brooks shifted his board higher on his hip. “That guy’s a monster. Remember he was at the Christmas party?”
I nodded, tight-lipped. I hated remembering that party. “They’re arguing that Scout killed Elizabeth Drake as a punishment for aiding and abetting a serial rapist.”
Brooks cocked an eyebrow, giving me a glimpse of the old him. “Because Scout, who once cried when she chipped a nail, is a rogue vigilante?”
Tread carefully, I warned myself. The unsettling part wasn’t how far-fetched the accusations were, but how closely they circled the truth. Of course, Brooks didn’t know that, nor could he ever. “In her defense,” I said, “it was a really expensive manicure.”
He blew out a breath.
“Will you help us figure out who really killed this woman, and why they’re trying to frame Scout?”
For a moment, Brooks stood there, studying my face. Had he always wielded this level of intensity? I struggled against the urge to shield myself. Finally, he said, “You told me you were in trouble. But it sounds like it’s actually your employer.”
I took a deep breath, inhaling salt and sunscreen and the vegetal scent of kelp. “I can’t tell you everything. But I promise, if Scout goes down, so do I.”
Brooks shook his head. “Ten years go by, and you’re still the exact same girl. Too much and not enough at the same time.”
The words socked me in the stomach.
“I’m sorry, Iz. It’s the LAPD’s case. I have no jurisdiction.” He set off once again for his car.
“Brooks—”
“And that’s only one of a thousand reasons I shouldn’t get involved,” he continued, talking over his shoulder.
I watched helplessly as he unlocked his black SUV, threw his board in the back, and climbed in the driver’s seat.
The SUV was new. I wouldn’t have expected it from him—it was so FBI.
But that was stupid. It had been ten years. Of course he’d changed.
I ducked my head, wiping the unexpected wetness from my eyes. Foolish to think I could come to Brooks, appeal to our history, to the moral compass that had once been such a big part of him—
“Iz?”
I looked up. Brooks peered at me through his open window. “That lyric on the wall.”
I scrubbed any sign of tears from my face. Cleared my throat. “Yeah?”
“What if it wasn’t directed at the dead woman? If someone’s framing Scout, what if the message was meant for her?”