Chapter Fifteen #3
In case this room was bugged, too. At least Elle could settle his mind on that score.
“I checked,” she said. “I used the device detectors Sara left with me to check the rooms—this one and the one we were in. There’s a bug in the old room, under the lamp.
I think they put it there when they planted the laptop, the brooch, and the textbook in our room.
This room’s clean. I’m running a signal jammer to be certain we aren’t overheard. ”
“Then what’s wrong?” he asked.
Alexis stepped aside so that he could enter. “She found another homicide overnight.”
Eight total.
“Yes, I know. I found it, too, in Bakersfield.”
What? No. That wasn’t the homicide she’d found. She’d found the one in Portland.
There were more?
Elle suddenly couldn’t breathe, the air sucked from her lungs. No. She bent over, gasping. “No, no, no,” she chanted.
“What’s happening?” Ronan asked, alarmed.
Alexis gently pulled Elle into a hug, rubbing big circles over her back as Elle held on, shaking down to her bones. “She found another one. A different one. Where, honey?”
“Portland,” Elle rasped out.
“Fuck,” Ronan muttered.
That meant there were nine. Nine people who were dead who should still be breathing.
Elle broke away from Alexis’s embrace and grabbed the backpack that had fallen to the floor. Get out, get out, get out.
“Elle,” Ronan said quietly. His hands closed over hers and she desperately wanted him to put his arms around her. But he only stood there, holding her hands. And waiting.
“I’m leaving. I’ll go somewhere isolated. Where there aren’t people who can die.”
He pried the backpack from her hands and dropped it to the floor. “I need you to listen to me, Elle. It’s important.”
She shook her head. “Please let me go.”
“Giselle,” he said sharply, and the tone, along with the use of her given name, had her wrenching her gaze up to meet his.
He looked worried and sad. Tired and gaunt. His eyes were filled with a combination of wariness, weariness, and banked rage.
And then she knew.
There were even more. “Who?” she whispered.
He held her hands tighter. “Judith. Her body was found this morning. She was killed sometime during the night.”
Elle’s vision began to fill with black spots and her knees buckled. She dropped to the floor, her ass taking the brunt of the fall.
Ronan followed her down, crouching beside her. “I needed you to hear it from me and not the gossip mill. It’ll be all over town before lunch.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again.
“Judith?” Alexis asked. “The innkeeper here?”
Ronan spared Alexis a quick nod before returning his attention to Elle, his gray eyes somehow both tumultuous and calm all at once. He was still holding her hands.
Still giving her strength.
“How?” she asked.
“I haven’t been to the scene yet.”
But surely he knew the cause of death. “How, Ronan?”
He sighed. “She was beaten and shot.”
New horror rushed over her and for a moment she could only stare, open-mouthed. “No.”
Ronan sat on the floor beside her and, after hesitating for several beats of her racing heart, he pulled her to his side, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.
She turned her face into his chest. Ten people. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was all she could think to say. “Judith was so kind. I’m so sorry.”
He stroked her hair, not saying a word in reply. Maybe he didn’t know what to say, either.
That was okay. He was holding her and…not angry.
It would be enough. It had to be.
“I’m going to need to get your whereabouts for last night,” he finally said. “It’s standard procedure,” he added, cutting off Alexis’s protests. “I want to get that out of the way. Then maybe some food? When did you last eat?”
“Last night,” Elle murmured. “But I’m not hungry. I couldn’t eat.”
“We stopped at Taco Bell after we left your place,” Alexis said. “But she ate only a bite or two.”
His arm tightened around her. “You need to eat, Elle. You aren’t helping anyone by making yourself sick.”
“He’s right,” Alexis said. “I’ll call down for some oatmeal and a cup of tea. No coffee right now. I think you’re wired enough. And we were both here, Detective. In this room. Elle worked all night and I sat with her.”
Elle tensed at the lie. Alexis had slept like…
Like the dead.
“I see,” Ronan said. “You’ll sign an affidavit?”
“In my own blood if that’s what you require,” Alexis said.
Her friend was lying. Why? To protect me, obviously.
“A pen will be sufficient,” Ronan said dryly. “If you’d write your statement on that legal pad you carry around, that will be enough for now. Elle, talk to me. I need to know you’re okay before I go.”
He was going. Of course he was. He had murders to solve. Ten of them.
“Ten,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he confirmed, stroking his big hand over her hair. “And we’ll find whoever killed them. We will get justice for all those people, Elle.”
She sagged into him, wanting so much to believe him. “I should leave.”
“No, I need you to stay. I’m going to need your help. And, well, leaving so soon after Judith’s murder might make you look…”
“Guilty,” she said flatly.
“To some people, yes. Not to me.”
It was the best thing he could have said because, somewhere along the way, Ronan Clarke’s opinion of her had come to mean everything.
“Then I’ll stay.”