Page 11 of Into the Veins
“We’re still waiting on toxicology tests to confirm, but we’re looking into all possibilities.” Blair stood, tugging a folded piece of paper from the inside of her thick green jacket as Evyn got to her feet. The sheriff served the warrant and untucked her cuffs from her lower back. “Your connection to the vipers in addition to finding the remains was enough for a judge to sign a warrant letting us search your residence, Ms. Garder. I think it’s time we continue this conversation at the station.”
“This is insane. I wasn’t anywhere near that trail two nights ago. I couldn’t have killed Rachel or disposed of her body.” Evyn’s voice hitched into a higher octave as she drove her hand into her pocket and pulled her phone from the depths. “I can prove it. Check my watch data. I’m training for the Seattle Marathon. I never take it off so I can track my calories and workouts. It’ll prove I didn’t get to that trail until yesterday morning for my hike. Besides, I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with Rachel.”
“What do you mean?” Blair accepted the suspect’s phone, and the screen brightened, revealing another photo of Evyn Garder and the same woman Colson recognized from the photos of the mantel as her sister. “There were more conference attendees who felt they’d been cheated?”
“I got an alert on my browser. Someone got video of an argument between Rachel and another influencer and posted it online. I couldn’t see her face, but I know it was outside of a restaurant a few nights ago. The police were called,” Evyn said. “The only thing I could hear was this woman promising to make Rachel pay for what she’d done.”
CHAPTER NINE
Their search of Evyn Garder’s home came up empty.
No sign of syringes or traces of the poison used to throw Rachel Faulkner into an agonizing and drawn-out death. There’d been an empty terrarium, but nothing else to suggest their suspect owned or housed a viper. They didn’t have enough for an arrest. The sound of the door locking behind her reached her ears as Blair descended the stairs. She pulled an evidence bag from her jacket pocket and dropped Evyn Garder’s fitness watch inside. “I’ll have CCS double check the GPS data to confirm her alibi, but her body language and confidence are starting to make me think she’s not our killer.”
“Easily faked, given enough practice and the right motivation,” Colson said.
“She wouldn’t have handed over her watch if she wasn’t sure her alibi would hold up.” Clouds rolled above, blotting out the midday sun. Thirty-six hours since Rachel Faulkner’s remains had been discovered, and they were right back where they’d started. Her phone pinged with an incoming email, and Blair tugged it from her coat. “CCS couldn’t find anything suspicious on the victim’s laptop. From the report they just sent over, it looks like she used it strictly for business. Financial statements, project drafts and speech notes, a draft of her next book, and payroll logs. Nothing out of the ordinary from a female entrepreneur who spent sixteen hours a day building an empire. They’ll go through her email next, but I’m betting they won’t find anything worth pursuing. I’ve left two messages with the victim’s assistant, and Agent Reese is still running down the staff that maintained the grounds and house. They might have a better idea about Rachel Faulkner’s movements and mood leading up to her disappearance, maybe even who she fought with.”
“If Evyn Garder is right about Rachel getting into a public fight a few nights ago, it’ll be easy to find the video and the police report.” Colson headed for the passenger side door of her patrol car. He’d asked some damn good questions in there, particularly about the vipers found with the victim’s remains. He was right. Evyn Garder had the means and the motive to want Rachel Faulkner dead, but everything they discovered in that house, including the single viper, was circumstantial. They needed physical proof. The smooth canvas of his forehead crinkled as he wrenched the door open and glanced back at her, flashing a gut-wrenching smile. “You didn’t want me to open your door for you, did you?”
An unsettling spike in adrenaline jolted through her, and she felt as though being the center of this man’s full attention was a very dangerous thing, addictive even. Her skin prickled where he’d swiped spilled milk from around her ankles last night, and Blair dug her fingernails into the evidence bag containing Evyn Garder’s watch. “No, I got it.”
She forced one foot in front of the other and rounded the hood of her vehicle. Despite the cocky sarcasm and witty wise-cracking performance Colson seemed to rely on, there’d been something almost amazing about the way he’d handled the soup mug he’d pulled from her bookshelf the night before. As though he’d never held such a thing of beauty, which was ridiculous. Of course, he’d held a mug before. Who hadn’t? But the way he’d slid his fingers over her creation and complimented her work had elicited something foreign and terrifying: desire.
He’d heeded her warning. He hadn’t come within ten feet of her bedroom, but Blair hadn’t been able to stop herself from imagining what would’ve happened if he had over and over. Imagined how it’d feel if he’d touched her somewhere else other than her ankle, what joke he’d tell, how he’d taste. She couldn’t deny the thin vein of attraction coiling through her. He was handsome, devilishly so, with thick, dark hair and an angled jaw that was sure to slice her palm if she reached out. The vintage softness of his T-shirt beneath his jacket had molded against lean muscle across his chest and down his abdominals, and she’d wanted nothing more than to memorize the valleys and rises of all he had to offer as she drifted off to sleep.
“Are you checking me out?” he asked.
“Do you want me to shoot you?” Traitorous embarrassment shot across her face. Shit. She’d been caught fantasizing about a man who embodied the worst of investigative professions. Blair climbed in behind the wheel and started the ignition, attention straight ahead through the windshield. Colson was right. If Evyn Garder had been telling the truth, they had another suspect to find. That was what she had to focus on right now. Not the manipulative differences between her understanding of private investigators and the man collapsing into the passenger seat of her patrol car. She started the ignition and pulled away from the curb. Their list of suspects had dwindled. Relatives, friends, coworkers—according to January, no one had a bad word to say about Rachel Faulkner. “Evyn Garder drives a light green Prius Hybrid. She’s not the one our vic met up with the night she disappeared.”
Her phone chimed with another incoming message, and she read through it quickly, one hand on the wheel. “It’s January. She’s gone through all of the surveillance we collected from the neighbors. There’s no clear view of the license plate from the SUV Rachel Faulkner climbed into the night she disappeared or the driver. See if you can pull the video Evyn Garder told us about. I want to know who she was arguing with.”
Silence descended between them, thick and solid. The vibration of the tires against asphalt as she signaled to get back on the 167 to head to the Maple Valley station lulled her into a sense of ease. It was true that in the two days since convincing her to invite him to consult on the case, Colson Rutherford had absolutely refused to mold to the box she’d built for him. Apart from one small similarity: he was only interested in the payout at the end of the investigation. She had to remember that. She had to remember that no matter how much he defied the stereotype she’d put on him or how much he challenged her perspective, he would do whatever it took to collect his fee to fund his next adventure. Just as he and others before him had time and time again. This wasn’t about the victims for him. This wasn’t permanent. He wasn’t permanent, and there was no point in wondering if there might be something between them.
Colson tapped and swiped one finger across the screen of his phone. “You never told me if they found the man who killed your parents.”
“You didn’t ask.” Blair pressed the car’s accelerator as they climbed up the freeway onramp. Her stomach growled despite her middle-of-the-night binge, but honestly, how filling were carrots, celery, onions and noodles anyway? Keeping her awareness solely on the vehicles around them, she pressed back into the seat. “The detectives who caught the investigation did their best. Even after I gave them a detailed description of the shooter to produce a sketch, they were being stonewalled by my mother’s employer from looking into her client files. Infringement of rights, according to the executives. Their clients expected a certain amount of privacy, and since they couldn’t prove a client was behind the deaths, they wouldn’t do anything to put that at risk without a warrant. A judge agreed. No warrant was issued.”
“When what they really meant was they were protecting their image and reputation.” Colson’s tone soured. “Assholes.”
A flood of warmth shot down her arms and into her fingers. Blair’s mouth tugged at one corner, but she suppressed the appreciation blooming through her. They were in the middle of a homicide investigation and talking about the savage death of her parents. They weren’t having a moment. “I didn’t know it at the time, but the district attorney was finding it hard to trust a ten-year-old as a witness. A few months into the investigation, after the Reeses had already taken me in, the detectives visited to tell me they’d exhausted all of their leads. They had the guy, but they didn’t have the physical evidence to back up my statement or the resources we have today to prove it.”
“That’s why you joined the sheriff’s department. You wanted access to the case files so you could finish what the detectives couldn’t.” There wasn’t a hint of judgement in his assumption, but she flinched all the same. “You were an officer for the Seattle Police Department at the beginning of your career, graduated from the academy at the top of your class. I imagine finding the man who took your family from you was a good motivator, but you couldn’t have gotten access to those files without raising suspicion unless you were transferred to the sheriff’s department. Once you achieved that, you would finally be able to find what you were looking for. Did it work?”
“You looked into me.” She shouldn’t be surprised. He was an investigator, and despite his motivation to be part of this investigation, Colson had turned into somewhat of an asset during Evyn Garder’s interrogation. He lived to solve puzzles. Not just crimes, but what made people tick. He lived to uncover their darkest secrets and expose them for the world to see if his demands weren’t met, but she wasn’t some puzzle needing to be solved. Blair maneuvered into the Maple Valley station parking lot as dark cloud cover blacked out the sky. A chill swept across her shoulders as the past rushed to meet the present, but she wouldn’t let it deter her now.
Colson’s mid-size SUV waited in the parking lot a few stalls down.
Her pulse swelled behind her ears, but she didn’t move to get out. Rain peppered the windshield in small bursts, as though sensing the storm churning inside. “Yes, it worked. I managed to get my hands on the file a few months after I’d transferred into the department. It was all there. My statement, photos of the crime scene, the sketch, interviews of my neighbors and the executives at my mother’s company, the forensic lab’s results. The crime scene unit had collected three different types of DNA from my parents’ bedroom. Two samples from their sheets matched my parents, but the lab didn’t have enough of a sample of the third they’d taken from under my mother’s fingernails at the time to test. They put it on ice until technology advanced enough they could run their tests without destroying the sample.”
“Your mom fought back,” Colson said. “She scratched her attacker.”
“According to the evidence, yes. The detectives believed she’d put herself between the shooter and the hallway, where my bedroom was. She was trying to protect me, but he hadn’t come for me. He just wanted her, and my father had been in the way.” She cleared her throat. Why was she telling him all this? What she’d done—transferring into the department to work a personal investigation—had been against the rules and would most certainly cost her her badge if made public. What part of her believed Colson wouldn’t use her secrets against her as easily as he used his clients’? “I wasn’t assigned to the case. I didn’t have the authorization to request they run the DNA, but my dad’s old CO did.” She glanced at him, not really seeing the man profiting from others’ pain as she had less than twenty-four hours ago, but someone closer to a partner. She nodded. “He wanted the son of a bitch who’d murdered one of his best deputies to pay for what he’d done. He signed the authorization. I had the sample tested, and within a few days, I had an ID.”
“You found the man who killed your parents.” A stroke of that same amazement she’d sensed in his voice the night before softened his words.
“Shrinks have tried to convince me memories change over the course of years, that every time we recall something, our brain changes it just enough that what we think we saw and what actually happened might not line up anymore. But I knew the moment he opened his door I had the right man. I remembered every second of that night, every wrinkle on his forehead, the way he held the pistol in his hand. He was older, but he hadn’t changed. I served him the warrant to compare his DNA to the sample recovered at the crime scene, and he stared at me, as if he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. He’d known the day was coming, but he was the one who got to live a full life. Not them. He got to see his kids grow up. He got to go on vacations and celebrate birthdays and holidays. He got to watch his family grow, and all I had was a piece of paper and a pair of cuffs, and I just…stood there.”
Tears blurred her vision, the same helplessness she’d experienced then spreading through her now, but she wouldn’t let them fall. She was stronger than this. She had more control than this.