Chapter 7
Kelsi
Neither of them moved for a long moment. Instead they stood frozen, facing each other, and drank in the details of the other’s appearance, both of them daring the other to break first.
Kelsi cleared her throat and took a step toward her office.
Dylan had always waited for her to take the lead, and it looked like at least some things hadn’t changed.
With his focus on her, she felt clumsy and uncoordinated and wasn’t sure where to even begin.
But work was safe. They could talk about work, and she could totally ignore everything else.
Kelsi spoke up. “So I guess we should probably go over the file now.”
Dylan smiled at her, his real smile. “Sure, Red.”
The use of that old nickname jarred her, and she blinked stupidly at him, trying to puzzle out his behavior. Was he happy to see her? Did he think about her at all these past few years?
“Come on, we can do this in my office. It’s a little more lived in than I imagine yours is.
” He started off down the hallway without waiting for an answer.
He was limping slightly. Not dramatically, but enough that she could tell something about his left leg must be bothering him, because his movements were stiff.
She bit down on her tongue, hard, to suppress the urge to demand he tell her what was bothering him. He doesn’t owe you anything. You’re not friends anymore. You’re not anything anymore. She mentally slapped herself for worrying about him for even a second.
He opened the door to his office, the other one without a nameplate, and she walked in after him as he held it for her.
Dylan stepped close as he let the door swing closed behind her, shutting them in together.
She could feel the heat radiating from him.
This was the first time they’d been truly alone with each other in four years, and that thought hit her like a freight train barreling into a concrete barrier.
Kelsi gulped audibly and stepped sideways to get away from him before she made a fool of herself.
She looked around at his office. It was identical to hers, except his diplomas were already hung on the wall over the filing cabinet and he had framed photos propped up on his desk.
She stepped closer to see them. The first one was a picture of him and his mom, both smiling brightly at the camera, Dylan only thirteen with lime-green braces.
The next picture was of his dad in his Army dress uniform.
A pang went through her chest, remembering the day they got the news that he had been killed in combat.
Dylan had been inconsolable, crying in her arms for hours. They’d only been nine at the time. Learning how to handle loss had been new and difficult for them both. The following year her dad left, and their moms both became single parents, lessening each other’s burdens where they could.
She shook her head to knock the memory away and looked at the next frame, which was a group picture of Dylan and some other men in tan camouflage Army gear. They were in the desert with an American flag held in front of them, smiling with their arms thrown around each other’s shoulders.
Kelsi turned to the last frame, but before she could get a good look at it, Dylan picked it up and shoved it inside the top drawer on his desk. She thought she saw him in the frame with his arm around someone . . . a girl maybe?
Too late, she realized she had been blatantly snooping and took a large step away from the desk.
He cleared his throat, the sound a little strangled, and grabbed a chair, dragging it around so it was next to his own.
He sat in his chair, sticking his left leg out straight and massaging his thigh an inch above his knee for a few seconds.
She frowned at his leg and mentally cursed herself again for caring.
“Sit, please.” He jerked his chin at the empty chair.
Kelsi sat slowly. He’d put the chair so close to his that their thighs brushed. She tried to subtly shift away but couldn’t get far enough to escape him.
“How long have you been working here? It has to have been at least a while to have everything set up already.”
He glanced over at her sharp tone and arched a brow. “I’ve been working here for a few weeks now.”
Weeks? He’d been working here for weeks and nobody told her? Not her mom, who had to have known, not Banksy, who damn well knew, and certainly not Dylan.
“I didn’t even know you were back in town.” She flinched at how icy her voice sounded, even to her own ears.
“You wouldn’t have come home if you did.” He said it so softly that she half thought she imagined his melancholic words. He looked away at the law school diploma hanging on his wall. “If you need help hanging anything in your office, I’d be happy to.”
“Um, sure, thanks. I’ll let you know if I need help.” It was the cold, disinterested way in which he offered, as though she were no more than a new colleague, that made her realize exactly how much distance had grown between them.
With that abrupt change in subject, Dylan laid the file folder from Banksy on the desk in front of them and opened it to the first page.
Banksy was nothing if not organized, and the separate tabs and the table of contents for the file’s documents were a little much.
Kelsi snorted at the layout, and Dylan cracked a small grin in response.
She flushed and recovered her cool expression, looking back down at the file.
Together they ran through the contents of the case file, Dylan reading them aloud in his unfamiliar deep, husky voice.
The first document was the initial police report from the witness who found the body.
It was John Blackwell, a man they knew to be eccentric but kind anytime they had seen him around town.
The witness’s recounting of the events stated that he went out in the morning in his jon boat to collect his crab pots.
He’d pulled up four pots and thrown them in the boat before turning around to head back to his property.
He glanced up at the riprap—a rocky material placed around the shoreline to protect against erosion—on the southern portion of his property, off the point, and saw the victim.
His body had washed up onto the riprap sometime overnight and his clothing had snagged on the rocks, anchoring his body to them when the tide went out.
Kelsi looked up from the document to Dylan when he finished reading. “Mr. Blackwell’s property is only a creek down from the McGuinness place, right?”
Dylan nodded slowly. “Yeah, I think so. Blackwell lives at the mouth of both though, so it’s not as though it would be unreasonable for a body to wash from the McGuinness creek down to his property, depending on the currents and the tide at the time the body hit the water.
We could try to look at maps to figure out where the body was dumped and all that. ”
“Yeah, that’s something to keep in mind for trial. It also couldn’t hurt to get an expert to take a look at those and testify if we need. If it helps prove in any way that McGuinness is the one who killed him, we’ll want that testimony for the jury.”
Dylan pulled out a legal pad, writing down expert witness: check maps of currents on night of death and what times were low and high tide on night of death? in masculine block letters.
The professionalism was easy to slip into, but it jarred her how cool their behaviors were.
This didn’t feel like they had been friends since birth.
This felt like the obligatory respect you gave a lab partner when you needed to get a group project done.
Kelsi flipped to the next document in the file, the coroner’s report.
“According to this, the time of death is estimated to be between ten and eleven thirty on the night of July third. The cause of death was drowning, and it’s labeled as ‘suspicious’ in the report, but there’s no finding of homicide or accident listed by the coroner.”
“Probably back at the vacation home for the weekend of the Fourth and got a little carried away drinking. Maybe he fell into the water off the docks and nobody noticed?” Dylan furrowed his brow in thought as he looked down at the report in front of them.
“But why charge McGuinness with first-degree murder and not involuntary manslaughter or something? Are there any other injuries listed in that report?”
Kelsi scanned the document. “Yes, it says there was blunt force trauma to the posterior of the skull, resulting in a skull fracture and a visible laceration.” She sat back in her chair, steepling her fingers underneath her chin.
“So, either Tripp fell and hit his head before winding up unconscious in the water, or he was hit by somebody.”
“If he was attacked it would explain the first-degree charges, but nothing we’ve read yet can conclusively prove that.” He shuffled through the papers.
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m trying to see if there’s a report here about any evidence found, like record of a possible murder weapon or any forensic analysis for a potential murder site.”
Kelsi observed him as he scanned the pages, a sense of déjà vu overcoming her.
They used to sit like this in law school, scanning their casebooks and hoping they were understanding the homework enough to survive the inevitable cold calls, where the professors chose one student at random to question in front of the whole class.
God forbid you missed one day of reading, because you were guaranteed to be the unlucky soul subjected to academic torture.
She knew the moment Dylan found something, because his brow furrowed even more.
“What is it?” she questioned. “Did you find anything helpful?”
“Not helpful, just more confusing. This evidence log says the police noticed a large scratch on the side of the McGuinnesses’ boat when they went to the property the next day, as though it ran into something.
But they didn’t impound it for evidence, and the very next day it was in the shop for repair work. ”