Page 91 of Never Fall Again

“Thank you.” She had an almost unquenchable desire to fallagainst him. To let him hold her. To snuggle close and know that his arm would fall over her shoulders.

Gray poked his head out of the door. “There you are. Everything okay?”

Cal reached him first. “Just a heads-up. As we’re talking about this case, Eliza’s father needs to stay out of any conversation Eliza might overhear. Oranylittle ears might overhear. He’s a topic that needs to be off-limits.”

“Got it. Come on in.”

Landry stared at the space that had been her sanctuary. She couldn’t make her mind make sense of it. She tried to see it the way it had been. Was it just yesterday?

Gray led them to a back corner. “We figured out how he got in.” He pointed to the corner behind the kilns.

“Am I supposed to be amazed right now?” Landry pinched her lips together. Her mouth was going to get the best of her. She rambled when she was anxious. She got super sarcastic when she was scared or tired. And she was all three. Which meant if she wasn’t careful, she was going to ramble sarcastically.

Wouldn’t that be a treat for everyone? And now she was being sarcastic to herself. “Sorry, Gray. That was rude. What am I missing?”

Twenty-Five

Cal pointed around the building. “Your studio has one way in and out. The windows on the front of the building aren’t functional. And they’re visible to the guests and security staff. The keypad is monitored. The code is changed frequently, and the keypad worked last night. There’s no evidence of tampering. The glass on the windows is intact. That means there are only two possible scenarios. Either our bad guy knew the code and waltzed in through the front door, or he got in a different way.”

“But there is no other way.” Landry’s eyes narrowed. “So you guys decided to see how he got in through a solid wall?”

“Exactly. I am curious. Why is the studio built this way? It isn’t like anything else at The Haven. You have trees almost touching the back and sides. And no windows back here.”

“We wanted it to blend in as much as possible but not be accessible to guests. I didn’t want guests showing up while I’m working. That’s also why the windows on the front are set high on the walls and don’t function. I wanted natural light, but I didn’t want people to gawk at me while I worked. I get enough of that during classes. And I didn’t want an exit into the woods. Mainly because I didn’t want there to be an entrance from the woods. I spend hours in the studio. I needed a place where I felt safe. This building is exactlywhat I wanted.” Landry’s words were calm and reasonable, but her skin was turning an adorable shade of “you’re ticking me off” red.

He wanted to kiss her. He needed to kiss her. Soon.

But not now.

“That makes sense. Thank you for explaining it to me. Now, back to our bad guy. Once he realized that the windows in front weren’t functional, he had to go around back at some point. We have to assume that once he got back there, he saw that while there was no way in, there was a lot of privacy.”

“I’m still not following you.” Landry looked from Gray to Cal and back to Gray.

Gray whistled and got the attention of one of his officers. “Open her up.”

The young man spoke into a walkie-talkie type thing on his shoulder and walked over to the corner Gray had indicated earlier. A moment later, a two-foot square of wall moved.

Landry jolted, then stared. It moved again. And again. And then the officer inside the building grabbed it, pulled, and the whole thing came out. A young man peered at them from outside. “Want us to put it back?”

“In a minute.” Gray turned to Landry. “I hate to say it, but it was elegantly done. He managed to choose a location that didn’t have any electrical wires running through it. You had shelves back here before, so it would have been highly unlikely that you would have noticed the damage. And even if you had, he’d camouflaged it.”

“He what?” Landry leaned closer.

“We don’t know for sure”—Gray pointed to the cube now sitting on the floor—“but we suspect that he created this ingress before now. It’s been here for a while. He cut out the square, crawled inside, then wrapped it.” Gray put a gloved hand on the cube, then tilted it onto one side. “He put straps on it that he could use to pull it back into place from the outside.” He nodded to his officer. “Show her.”

As she watched, the officer outside reached through, grabbed straps on the top and bottom, hefted it up, and slid it back into place. Within a few seconds, if she hadn’t known what she was looking for, she never would have seen it.

“Like I said. Elegantly done. This wasn’t a heat-of-the-moment opportunity. This was meticulously planned.”

“The biggest problem is the size of the opening.” Gray rubbed his jaw. “I tried. Even going at an angle, putting my hands through first, shifting around—nothing I did allowed me to fit through there. But a few of the guys were able to shimmy through. So we’re looking for a man with a narrower build than mine and the tenacity to plan something like this.”

Landry dropped her head and groaned. “You need to look at Ignacio.”

“Who?” Gray pulled a pen and notebook from his pocket.

Landry explained who Ignacio was, what he did for a living, and why he’d made it onto her short list of possible suspects.

Gray wrote furiously. “Any idea where he is now?”