Page 133 of Hard Evidence
“What can I do to make this better?”he murmured into her hair.
“Just stay with me.Don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.I love you, and I’m staying.”
She squeezed him tighter.“I love you too.More than anything.”
Midnight, and the horrifying details of the day’s events were emerging over a late dinner.Ari and Brax had stayed, and Dawson was there with Violet.Justin had been surprised when his old friend began dating a Hollywood actress, but now that he’d gotten to know Violet, he understood why.Underneath the glitz, she had a good heart, and she hadn’t let fame change her.In between movies, the two of them escaped the circus and lived like regular people.Or as regular as they could when one of them was embroiled in a decade-old murder mystery.
And Ari was convinced of the “mystery” status.Jerry too, apparently, although she’d disappeared into the shadows again.Whatever happened in that house with Ruby, it was becoming clear that “man killed woman, man went to prison” had been a vast oversimplification.An unidentified assailant had tried to kidnap Jessie as leverage, threatened to harm her unless Justin confessed to a murder he hadn’t committed.What if they’d done the same to Levi?
Justin had felt the walls closing in after two days in a cell.
Levi had been locked up for ten years.
Levi, the man they’d shared a home with, eaten meals with, built their lives with.
They thought he’d betrayed them, but what if it was the other way around?
How the fuck were they supposed to fix this?
The forest was still crawling with cops, two more people were dead, and Justin was sitting in his kitchen, eating pizza as nausea roiled in his stomach.Go home and move on, Special Agent Rimer had said.Sorry for the inconvenience.
Like hell she was.
“What do we do now?”he asked nobody in particular.“What on earth do we do?”
“We’re going to find the truth,” Ari told him.She understood exactly what he was asking.
“How?We’re already ten steps behind.”
“Maybe we are, but whoever’s responsible for this, they’re rattled.They’re making mistakes.We find every loose thread, and we tug on it, and we keep pulling until the whole damn cover-up unravels.”
“Carefully,” Dawson added.
That was the most important thing of all.It wasn’t lost on Justin how close he’d come to losing Jessie today, and he hadn’t even been there to protect her.He never wanted to let her out of his sight again.
“How do we know it’s a ‘they’?The man Jessie shot in the woods was alone.”
“Was he?We don’t know that for sure.The Wednesday Walkers would have scared off any accomplices, and don’t forget the stars.One pentagram, one Star of David.”
Right.How could Justin have forgotten that Jerry somehowstole a fucking body?No, she hadn’t owned up to it, but Brax said she had plenty of shady friends, and she’d as good as confessed by setting them all up with an alibi beforehand.
“We can’t poke the bear.I’m not risking Jessie being harmed again.”
It was Jessie herself who disagreed.“We have to.Burying our heads in the sand will never work; Ridge taught me that.I tried so freaking hard to please him, foryears, and he always wanted more, more, more.I should have left earlier.Okay, I should never have married him in the first place, but I didn’t know any better back then.”
“They hit us, so we need to punch back twice as hard,” Ari said.
Justin didn’t like it, but he understood where they were coming from.Did he want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder?Maybe they wouldn’t come for him again, but the idea of seeing Jessie with a star carved into her chest…
“Where do we start?What threads do we have?”
“We have the video from Blackstone House.There’s something we’re missing.Plus Serafina has more information, I’m sure of it.And there might be an autopsy report coming.”
“From the man in the forest?What will that tell us, other than he was shot?”
“From Amie.”
