Chapter 15
Blade popped a piece of gum in his mouth, eyes catching the evidence warehouse shrinking in the rearview mirror. Tori sat rigid beside him, shoulders tight as a wire. That file—the psychiatric evaluations, the court orders, the entire timeline—it didn’t add up.
“That file bothers me.”
Her head swiveled toward him. “What do you mean?”
He drummed his fingers against the wheel. “I’ve reviewed thousands of case files over my career. This one ticks every box. Looks perfect on paper. But Damien says he was the responding officer that night, and his name doesn’t show up anywhere.”
“Someone is lying.”
“My money’s on Damien.” He chewed the gum harder and merged onto I-95.
“To fabricate that much information, you’d need serious resources.”
“Exactly. Why would Barclay, or anyone really, go to such lengths just to frame Nikos? What’s his motive to frame a child?” He let the question hang, but his glance at her told him she didn’t want to consider her brother had committed such a horrible act.
“Then why did Damien want to stir all this up again?”
“Maybe boredom. Maybe prison gossip. He heard you’re a regular at Union and decided to stir the pot.”
Tori stared ahead, processing. “You think he made it all up?”
“I think he’s playing head games. Using your trauma to get attention or hoping for some kind of deal or transfer.” He clenched the gum between his molars, the anger behind the idea slicing thin. “He’s a manipulative piece of garbage. Destroyed his own family. Why not try yours too?”
Her gaze fixed on the road ahead, empty of expression but full of calculation.
Blade recognized the effort it took for her to separate the personal from the professional.
A twin she didn’t remember. A brother responsible for murdering their parents.
And a prisoner who talked in circles and probably had them chasing their own tails.
Every twitch, every pause, told him she was cataloging it all, testing her own theories.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “He was convincing. If he hadn’t sent us after the file, I’d still be in the dark about Nikos.”
Before they pulled him away, Damien had sounded . . . desperate.
“What did he shout as they dragged him out?”
Tori’s eyes closed. “He said it started with them. My mother knew about the fractals.”
“Right. Then he mentioned it was the start of a pattern.”
“And he said Barclay lied. The official report’s a cover-up.” She opened her eyes. “He said Barclay created a second murder book.”
Blade’s fingers froze on the wheel. Second murder book.
“You think there’s something to it?” she asked.
That doubt stuck like a splinter. Damien’s desperation hadn’t felt staged. Warning? Or the manipulation of a con artist working an angle? “I hate to admit it, but yes. Sounded like he was trying to warn you about something bigger.”
“We need to talk to Damien again.”
She’d read his mind. “Yeah, and if there’s a second murder book, we find it. No more surprises.”
“Speaking of surprises, where are we going? You missed my exit.”
Blade glanced at the highway signs flashing past. “No way you’re going home tonight.”
Tori’s head snapped toward him. “Excuse me?”
“Excuse me? Excuse you. Your house is a crime scene mess after someone tried to kill you. I’m not leaving you alone.” He kept his eyes on the road. “You can crash at my place.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Good thing I’m not applying for the job. The pay’s terrible and the hours are worse.”
She crossed her arms. “I can just stay with Harlee.”
“Right. Wake up Harlee at this time of night and see how that goes for you. She’s a bear when her sleep gets interrupted. She’ll rip your face off before you finish explaining why you’re standing on her doorstep.”
“Yeah, well, your girlfriend isn’t going to love the idea of another woman sleeping over.”
He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. You’ve crashed there plenty of times. Remember our Lord of the Rings marathon? You made it through exactly half of Fellowship before you were snoring on my sectional.”
“I was not snoring.” Her indignation was exactly what he’d hoped for.
“You sounded like a freight train with a deviated septum.”
“That’s impossible. I have excellent nasal passages.” She shifted in her seat. “I was resting my eyes.”
“For four hours.”
“It was a very long movie,” she said. “And the books were better anyway.”
“The books were better? Tori, we’re talking about Peter Jackson’s masterpiece. The battle sequences alone—”
“Were overly dramatized. Tolkien’s prose captured the mythology in ways the movies never could. The films turned Faramir into a weak-willed—”
“They’re classics, Crew. Cultural touchstones.”
“They’re three hours of walking and talking about jewelry.”
His phone buzzed against the center console. Kiara’s name lit up the screen.
He didn’t want to answer. For the first time all day his shoulders had dropped below his ears. This easy banter with Tori felt like breathing after holding his breath all day.
Why was everything so easy with her? So natural.
He glanced over, caught himself smiling, and snapped his eyes back to the road.
“You going to answer that?”
“She’ll leave a message.”
The buzzing stopped.
“You feel bad,” Tori observed.
“I feel practical. She’s probably calling to see how you’re doing. I’ll call her back once we’re settled and I’m not driving.”
“Settled at your place. Where I’m apparently staying whether I like it or not.”
“You could always sleep in your car. I hear the back seat of a Honda Civic is surprisingly comfortable.”
“I drive a Range Rover.”
“Even better. More room to stretch out.”
She laughed. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m thorough. Brother or not, your stalker knows where you live, knows your schedule, knows how to bypass your security system. He’s escalated from watching to breaking and entering to attempted murder.” Blade’s voice hardened. “I’m not giving him a third shot at you.”
The laughter faded from her face. “When you put it like that . . .”
“Plus, my couch misses you. It’s been asking about you.”
“Your couch talks?”
“Only to special people. It’s very selective about its conversations.”
“What does it say about Kiara?”
The question caught him off guard. He’d never thought about it before, but Kiara rarely came over. She preferred her own space, her own routine. Their relationship existed in careful compartments. Dinner dates, weekend day trips, planned activities that fit neatly into schedules.
“Kiara isn’t on speaking terms with my couch,” he said.
Tori didn’t respond.
Probably the best place to leave it.
They drove in comfortable silence for several miles. Blade took the exit off A1A toward his condo on the narrow strip of island tucked between the Intracoastal and the Atlantic. His phone buzzed with a text. He ignored it.
“You know,” Tori said as they pulled into his parking garage, “I held my own tonight.”
“I know you did. But handling something alone and having backup aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.”
She unbuckled her seat belt. “Fair point.”
“Besides, someone needs to make sure you don’t wake the neighbors with your snoring.”
“I told you I don’t snore.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Blade unlocked his front door and stepped aside, letting Tori enter first. Her easy agreement to stay over felt less like surrender and more like absolute trust.
She kicked off her shoes and rubbed her temples. “I’m wrecked. I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“You know where the guest room is.” He grabbed two water bottles from the kitchen and tossed her one.
“Thanks.” She headed down the hallway, her shoulders sagging with exhaustion.
He retreated to his bedroom and tried to shut down for the night, going through the motions.
Gun on the dresser, badge beside it. But the case notes pressed against the back of his mind.
Before he knew it, 3:33 a.m. blinked at him from the nightstand.
He gave up and reached for his phone. Corbin wouldn’t appreciate the hour, but he always answered logic with logic, and he needed that now.
“King.”
“It’s Blade. You awake?”
“Now I am. What’s going on?”
“I need to run something by you, but first—you cannot breathe a word of this to anyone. I accessed a sealed file through unofficial channels.”
A pause. “Go ahead.”
Blade gave him the rundown: the psychiatric evaluations, the court orders, the transfer to Seattle, the diagnosis of early-onset paranoid schizophrenia. Every detail from Nikos Crew Jr.’s file.
“Hold on,” Corbin said when he finished. “You’re telling me they had a complete psychiatric workup on a four-year-old within six days? Multiple evaluations, a formal diagnosis, and a sealed court order for transfer to a specialized facility?”
“That’s what the file shows.”
“Blade, I’ve worked juvenile cases. Getting a psych eval on a traumatized child takes weeks, not days.
And early-onset paranoid schizophrenia in a four-year-old?
That’s extraordinarily rare. Most psychiatrists won’t even diagnose personality disorders in children that young.
Plus,” Corbin continued, “my father may have been a calculated piece of work, but I’m praying that he’s walking a new path these days. Maybe this is about redemption.”
“So you think—”
“My gut says the file may’ve been manufactured. The question is who did it, and why.”
“Okay, so I’m not crazy. I just had to talk it out.”
“That’s what I’m here for, brother.”
Blade thanked Corbin and hung up.
He pulled back the covers, but his feet stayed planted on the cold hardwood. If someone had fabricated the file, then the real killer walked free and a four-year-old boy had been framed for murder.
Blade padded into the kitchen only a few hours later, following the rich aroma of coffee that had pulled him from sleep.
Tori sat at the kitchen island with her laptop open and hunched over a well-used legal pad, scribbling notes.
She had her lips pinched in concentration.
Her hair was twisted into some messy updo, and she wore one of his gray undershirts over leggings.