Stay in Your Lane!

12. Kyle

CHAPTER 12

KYLE

S ome stubborn part of me still wanted to be mad at Everett. I’d never been one to put up with people storming off in a huff. I had a very low tolerance for dramatic fights and blowups; if we couldn’t sit down and talk things through like adults, what was the point of being in a relationship?

Which was probably why I was twenty-eight and hadn’t had a relationship last more than three months. Yeah, it was possible I was the problem.

But somehow, Everett had come back—and waited for me until at eleven at night, no less—with a peace offering. The pie was great, but admittedly, it was the cat grass that won me over. It was adorably thoughtful. It was just so… Everett, and I was startled by how endearing that was.

Holy fuck. I like this guy more than I thought I did.

And it wasn’t like he’d stormed out on me over a disagreement about leaving socks on the floor or something equally inconsequential. It was about this possible murder we were trying to solve. The stakes were pretty damn high, and so was the stress. Was it really that dramatic or theatrical for someone to get that angry when he thought an actual murder might go unsolved?

I chased a few pie crumbs through the remaining melted ice cream on my plate. In the middle of the living room, Jeff and Patches inspected the cat grass. Patches had discovered she liked chewing on it and rubbing her face on it. Jeff was still trying to figure out how to sniff it, and he was deeply offended that each attempt ended with a blade of grass going up his nose.

“I always thought that was a myth,” Everett mused. “The whole thing about orange cats being stupid? But Jeff…”

I snorted as I put my plate on the end table. “Yeah. They say orange cats share a single brain cell. Jeff… doesn’t get a turn very often.”

Everett looked at me. “Does he ever get a turn?”

“About as often as certain comets pass by the earth.”

He laughed, and okay, yeah, I definitely wasn’t mad at him anymore. He was just so damn cute. And he loved animals. In particular, my animals. He’d even said hi to the fish on the way into the living room, and he was starting to figure out how to identify them on sight. Gladys and Bill were easy thanks to their physical anomalies, and of course Steve always gave himself away. But Everett could also tell Julie and Tim apart, which even I struggled to do sometimes because literally the only difference was that Julie, being a female, had a very slightly darker red belly. He was one of the few people who’d ever caught sight of Paul, who typically lurked in the shadows and showed himself so rarely, I’d worried a few times that the others had eaten him.

When I’d pointed out Octavius, he’d cocked his head. “That’s a different name from all the others. Did he come with it? Like Patches?”

“No. He was my most recent, and he was number eight, so I thought I’d be clever and call him that.”

“Number eight? But you only have—” Everett had straightened, a look of horror on his face. “One of them died? ”

“No, no! The others were kind of picking on him and he wasn’t eating, so I sold him. Apparently he’s much happier in a tank by himself.”

The relief in Everett’s sigh had been endearing, too. Like he was seriously invested in the well-being of a fish who’d been gone six months before we’d ever crossed paths.

Sitting here beside him on the couch, watching him laugh at my cats playing with the grass… no, I couldn’t be mad at him. I didn’t even want to be.

I was also relieved to have him back on my side while we figured out what happened to Ricky. I wanted to see this through, and I’d been worried ever since he’d left that I was on my own.

I cleared my throat. “So, um… What do you think our next move should be? With Ricky?”

Everett turned a surprised look on me. “Our next—oh. Uh…” He blinked as if I’d caught him by surprise—maybe I had—but then he shifted gears. “I mean, we need to wait and see what your brother finds out from the M.E. While we’re waiting, I guess we could…” He chewed his lip.

“If you’ve got any thoughts, I’m all ears.” I sighed. “Because I have no idea what to do at this point.”

He was quiet for a moment, then flicked his eyes to me. “I keep going back to the Air Force 1s. A few nights ago, I was looking around online for info, and like, they’re not super common, but they’re not ‘only one dude in the whole town probably has them’ rare. And even the really, really limited editions like the Tiffany ones have the same tread pattern on the bottom. So I just…” He shook his head. “I don’t know how far we’ll get pulling that thread.”

“Oh.” My shoulders sank. “Well, damn.”

“I know, right? But then I went down a rabbit hole about shoe impressions. Turns out if you have a shoe and an impression with the same size and style, and you can match like one or two little imperfections—like wear and tear damage, or a spot where a rock took a chunk out of the tread—it’s almost guaranteed to be the same shoe. The odds of two shoes having the exact same damage and wear—especially two shoes of the same style and size—is like one in some number I’d never even heard before. A quadrillion or something.”

“No shit?” I sat back, chewing on the information. “I mean, I’ve heard some of that, but I never realized… So, if we can find a pair of Air Force 1s that’s the same size as the bruise on the body?—”

“And the print in the dirt outside!”

“And the print outside,” I acknowledged. “If we can find them, and we can find some sort of imperfection in both the prints and the shoe… Then whoever owns the shoes is probably the person who kicked or stomped on Ricky.”

“Especially if there’s still dirt or blood in the treads,” Everett said. “Did you know they can figure out you’ve been somewhere just by the dirt in your shoes or on your car’s floormats? I read about this one case where they found a body in some remote place by a river, and then they found trace amounts of a certain kind of dirt in the suspect’s shoes, floormats, and clothes that is only found in like this one tiny area. Which proved the guy had been there.”

I blinked. “How far down this rabbit hole did you go?”

The way he blushed had no right to be that cute. “I, um… I think I ended up with like twenty browser tabs open.” He gestured at his phone and sheepishly added, “I still have five of them open because I wanted to reread some of the articles. And keep them handy in case we need them.”

“Could you send me the links?” I took out my phone. “I think I want to read them too.”

He stared at me like he wasn’t sure if he’d heard me right. Then, tentatively, he said, “I can—yeah, I can send them.”

“Cool. Thanks.” I smiled, and so did he, and my God, I wasn’t just relieved to be back on the same page with him because of this case, was I?

No, I was not.

But I wasn’t going to think about that right now. I was going to think about shoe impressions, and shoe imperfections, and the odds of two shoes being identically damaged and worn, and how much I admired Everett’s dedication to this case, and…

Fuck me. This was neither the time nor the place for me to be getting butterflies over someone. We were trying to figure out a murder, damn it.

Then again, my brother met his wife at the scene of an accident, so what did I know?

I cleared my throat. “Okay, so we need to figure out the size of the shoes, and identify any imperfections that might?—”

“Already did!” Everett declared.

“You… You did?”

“Yep! From the picture you took with the ruler, I figured out the print on the ground was a men’s size twelve. Which means it’s definitely not Leon.”

I blinked. “Oh. Damn. Okay. It’s—how do you know about Leon’s?”

“I took a picture of it next to his beer bottle,” he said. “And when I compared the measurements—anyway, he’s a size fourteen.”

I stared at him for a second. “Wow. What about the one on the body? We can guess it’s the same one, but without measuring it—maybe when we get our hands on the autopsy report?”

“We don’t need to do that.” Everett turned the screen so I could see it. On it was the image of the print in the dirt. “You see right there on the big circle? How there’s like a chunk missing?”

I leaned in closer, and sure enough, on the large circle in the tread, at about the two o’clock position, there was a gouge. “Okay, I see it.”

“Right. So then…” He flipped a few more photos, found one of the print on the body, and zoomed in. “See it here too?”

Holy shit. Yep. There it was—the circle was broken in exactly the same place as in the one outside. On the impression in the ground, it showed as a raised area of dirt that hadn’t been tamped down like what was around it. On the body, it was a section of unbruised skin.

“There shoeprint outside the trailer matches the one on the body,” Everett said. “But Leon’s is the wrong size and doesn’t have the gouge in the tread. So I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him.”

I had to start giving Everett more credit—he was seriously fucking smart.

“Wow,” I breathed. “Okay, so we definitely—” I lost my train of thought when I turned to Everett and realized we’d both leaned in—like, way in—to look at the images.

Now is so not the time, but oh my God, you have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever ? —

My phone shrieked to life on the end table startling us apart.

“Dammit,” I muttered, and snatched off the table.

But then I saw the caller ID—Colin.

Oh, maybe he had an update?

“It’s my brother,” I told Everett, then took the call. “Hey, what’s?—”

“Are you at home?” Colin sounded edgy. Nervous, even.

“Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”

“Stay put. I’m on my way over.”

Then he ended the call.

I stared at my phone for a moment, trying to make sense of that brief call. This wasn’t like Colin. Not in the least. And not just the part where it was after midnight.

“Uh.” Everett cleared his throat. “What did he say?”

“Just that he’s on his way over.” I lifted my gaze to meet him. “I have a feeling he found something.”

I’d seen my brother after some harrowing calls during his early patrol days when we both still lived at home. I’d seen him get that thousand-mile stare—the same one our dad could get sometimes—when someone brought up some of the awful things he’d seen. I’d seen him rattled after testifying in a case where he’d not only had to relive his own trauma, he’d walked away from the courtroom thinking someone just might get away with murder. All of those came with the territory of being a cop.

What I’d never seen in my brother’s face was fear.

Actual, bone-deep, white-faced fear .

Sitting here in my living room, my brother wrung his unsteady hands, and oh, yeah, something had spooked him. Badly.

I exchanged uneasy glances with Everett, who was on the couch beside me. Finally, I asked Colin, “So, did you find something out?”

He sat back and drummed his fingers on the recliner’s armrest. “I did. And you guys… You’re right to investigate this as a murder. Because I’m convinced—it’s not a suicide. It’s blatantly not a suicide.”

“So it’s a cover-up,” Everett said.

“Yes,” Colin agreed without hesitation. “And the more I dig into it, the more I can see how much work is being put into covering it up.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “What does that mean?”

“Well… Okay, for starters, there’s the M.E.” His eyes lost focus for a moment. “I’m not sure what’s happening there, but I think he’s either being bribed or blackmailed. Or… something.”

“How do you figure?”

“He ruled the case a suicide and seemed really wound up about that. When I said a witness on-scene was concerned about some irregularities…” Colin’s brow furrowed and he gnawed his lip. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to him before, and he’s always really straightforward. Totally on the up-and-up. I’ve always thought he’s a little too blunt sometimes, honestly. And he’s the kind of guy who will look you right in the eyes the whole time, which is one of the reasons I hate talking to him. But this time? He was real nervous. Kept looking around instead of at me. He… wasn’t himself, you know?”

“So you think someone’s blackmailing him or something?” Everett asked.

“I think something is up,” Colin said. “He was defensive, but in that way people get when they’re legit scared. Not just scared you’re going to figure out what they’re hiding, but like scared scared.”

I exhaled. “Fuck. That’s not suspicious or anything.”

“I know, right?” Colin whispered. “But then after I left, I got a call from someone else who had access to the autopsy. They begged me not to make them give an official statement with their name attached. They were scared, too. Probably of losing their job, but… probably of more than that.”

“Like the M.E.?”

Colin considered it, but shook his head. “No. The M.E. made me think he’s hiding something. Like he’s got a guilty conscience, you know? This person—it was more like when an informant talks to us. They want to help, but they’re terrified of the backlash from the people they might implicate. It’s… it’s a different kind of fear, you know?”

Everett and I both nodded.

I squirmed in my seat. “So what did they tell you?”

Colin took a deep breath. “They didn’t get much of a look at the report, but they told me Rick Leighton had premortem fractured ribs. Plural.”

A chill ran through me. “ How premortem? Like, he’d broken them recently? Or they happened at the time he was killed?”

“There was no evidence that they’d started to heal, so they were very, very recent.” Colin swallowed. “And all three were directly underneath the bruise on his torso.”

“The bruise on—” Everett sat straighter. “You mean the shoeprint?”

My brother nodded grimly.

Everett whistled. “Holy shit. How hard do you have to kick someone to break ribs?”

“Hard enough to leave a distinct shoe impression on someone’s skin,” I said.

Colin exhaled. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“So then, what do we do?” Everett asked. “Can’t you make the witness talk?”

“In theory, yes. I can threaten them with obstruction, I can offer them witness protection—but the problem with cases like this is that we need a witness to convince the jury. If the witness starts backtracking and hemming and hawing on the stand, that can make them seem unreliable to the jury.” He shook his head. “There are plenty of things I can do to compel a witness to testify, but there are plenty of things they can do to make the jury second guess them. And my gut tells me that whoever is ultimately behind this—we’re going to need the most airtight case anyone has ever put in front of a jury.”

Everett’s eyes widened.

I tilted my head. “What exactly does that mean? Who do you think is behind it?”

Colin glanced around as if he thought someone was going to come busting into my living room. Then he looked right in my eyes and lowered his voice. “I think there’s cops involved.”

“Well, no shit.” Everett started ticking points off on his fingers. “They ignored obvious evidence at the scene. They immediately dismissed it as a suicide without giving it even a cursory investigation just in case things were hinky. And the guy’s baby mama is literally the Chief of Police’s daughter, and the chief apparently hates him.”

Colin blinked as if he were surprised by Everett’s insight. “Wait, she’s—the guy was with Chief Daniels’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” Everett said. “We talked to her. They’d split up for a while but then got back together, and her dad was pissed about it.”

Colin stared at him for a moment. Then he hissed a few curses as he let his face fall into his hands.

Everett and I exchanged wide-eyed glances.

“What?” I asked my brother.

He groaned, then looked up again. “This is going to be even harder to unfuck than I thought.”

“What? Why?”

Colin swept his tongue across his lips. “Because one of Leighton’s buddies was found dead last night.” He swallowed. “And it sounds like a suicide.”

“Which buddy?” Everett asked, almost whispering.

Colin pursed his lips, then took a notepad out of his pocket and started thumbing through it. “Um…”

“Was it Leon?” Everett asked.

My stomach clenched. Oh no…

It clenched even harder when Colin paused, then nodded. “No. The guy’s name was Craig Meyer. Who’s Leon?”

“A friend of Ricky’s,” I said numbly. “Leon Taylor.”

At the sound of Leon’s full name, Colin swallowed. “I know who he is. The dead guy—Meyer—he was closely tied to both of them.”

“Oh, shit,” I said on a long exhalation. “Fucking hell.”

“Why?” Colin peered at both of us. “What’s going on?”

I raked a shaky hand through my hair and sighed. “We talked to Leon. Asked him about what happened. Who might have it out for Ricky.”

Colin sat straighter, renewed fear working its way into his expression. “Did anyone see you with him?”

“Maybe?” I said. “We met him in public. At a night club.”

“Decadence,” Everett supplied.

Colin shifted a little. “Shit.”

“What?” Everett asked.

Colin drummed his fingers faster. “There’s a drug ring that has people who spend a lot of time there. Which means there’s a very, very good chance there was at least one undercover there when you met with Leon. Probably more.”

“That’s not good,” I murmured.

“No, it isn’t,” Colin said flatly. “At best, you might’ve clocked as a client or a potential client. At worst, an associate.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

Colin looked right at me. “Yeah. Fuck.”

“Whoa, wait a second.” Everett put up his hands. “I know there’s a lot of drug activity there, but was Leon involved in that? Shit, was Ricky?”

“Leon was,” Colin confirmed. “Ricky—he’s been out of the game for a while. Based on the timing, I’d say he got out when he found out he was going to be a dad.”

“But was he still a user?” I asked. “I mean, there was drug paraphernalia at the scene. I have no idea if it was planted or not, and it’s not admissible, but it was there.”

“I don’t know.” My brother folded his hands in his lap. “Toxicology will take a few weeks to get back to us about any narcotics in his system. But he was a dealer, at least at one point, and a lot of dealers don’t use. So he probably didn’t fall back on a habit he never had, you know?”

Everett cocked his head. “Dealers don’t use?”

“Not usually,” Colin said. “The ones who last are clean as a whistle—they might drink, they might smoke the odd joint, but they know damn well what’ll happen to them if they use the stuff they’re selling.”

“They’ll get in trouble with the cartels and suppliers?” Everett asked. “Or they’ll get too messed up to function?”

“Both.”

“Wow. Nice guys,” Everett said dryly. “They know how much it’ll fuck people up, so they don’t touch it, but they do everything they can to get people to buy it.”

“Sounds like capitalism to me,” I muttered.

Colin scowled.

Everett shrugged and said, “Not wrong.”

My brother rolled his eyes. “ Anyway . I have no idea of Rick Leighton was a drug user. It’s possible the paraphernalia in the house belonged to someone else. But it doesn’t matter because the scene has been released since there’s no active investigation into his death. There’s no chain of custody and by now, the place has probably been cleaned out by the family anyway.”

Everett perked up. “But it’s possible they haven’t, so if we snuck in and?—”

“That’s commonly referred to as breaking-and-entering,” Colin said through his teeth. “And even if you were to find a way to legally obtain whatever’s inside—which would require explicit permission from whoever now owns the place—it wouldn’t be admissible as evidence because the scene is no longer secure.”

Everett’s shoulders dropped. “Well, fuck. And the cops on the scene just… didn’t bother to collect any of it or document it.”

“Not when they were going to dismiss it as a suicide,” I said. “And… I mean what if it isn’t just the cops who are trying to cover up a murder?”

Both Everett and Colin eyed me.

I squirmed in the scrutiny. “We know Ricky was on the Chief’s shit list because he was with his daughter. Definitely some motive there. But if Ricky was a dealer who decided to get out of the game, what if the people he knows are trying to keep him quiet? Like they’re afraid he’s going straight enough that he’ll roll on all of them?”

Colin got even whiter. “That’s… That’s kind of what I’m afraid of here. Ricky had enemies in two very different factions. When both the Chief of Police and the narcotics rings cross you off their Christmas card lists, things can get… dangerous.” He looked pointedly at me. “And that also goes for people trying to investigate the death of someone who was taken off those Christmas card lists. I’m not telling you that I don’t want justice for Rick Leighton, okay?” He shifted nervously. “But I also really, really don’t want to get called out to a scene where my brother and his boyfriend were found in shallow graves.”

The prickle of fear that went down my spine almost made me skip over where he’d called Everett my boyfriend. I wanted to mention that, no, he wasn’t, but all things considered, it just didn’t seem like the most important part of that sentence.

“I’m not his boyfriend,” Everett said, since we were apparently on similar trains of thought. “I mean, not yet. We’re not—the point is that I’m here because we’re trying to figure out what happened to Ricky.”

I blinked, caught off guard by what he’d let slip.

My brother grabbed the reins before I could think too hard about it, though. “Look, I know you guys want to figure this out. I do too. No matter what he was involved in, Ricky deserves justice, same as anyone else. But I don’t want the two of you getting caught in whatever crossfire there is.”

“So are you going to investigate it?” I challenged. “Because if you start doing things officially, someone’s going to find out and shut you down.”

Colin chewed his lip. “Maybe that’s what I need to do, then.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe I need to start making some official inquiries—act like I got an anonymous tip, and I’m just doing my due diligence by following up. See who gets twitchy and tells me to drop it.”

“You don’t think that’ll put you in danger?” Everett asked.

“I doubt it.” Colin shrugged. “If I’m just being the super shiny good cop who’s innocently following up on a lead, and then I back down when I’m told, no one will come after me.”

“But you’ll back down when you’re told,” I said.

“Pfft. Of course not. I’ll just say that’s what I’m going to do.”

Relief swept over me. My brother was in. He was taking a huge risk and sticking his neck out, knowing there were quite possibly cops or cartels involved—both, knowing our luck.

We weren’t in this alone. We were going to find justice for Rick Leighton.

And maybe while Colin tugged at some threads, Everett and I could dive deeper down this shoe impression rabbit hole.