Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“You confronted that pedophile who had Elsie Fay,” Luna pointed out.
“I had no choice. He was walking to the room where he was holding her,” Raye retorted.
“She really did have no choice,” Jessie put in her vote.
“I probably would have confronted him too,” I said.
“I totally would have,” Shanti added.
“No one could walk away from that.” Willow brought up the rear.
Luna huffed.
“And that’s not gonna happen here,” Raye went on. “We’re just looking into things.”
“Can’t we do that with a couple of guys following us?” Willow asked.
Before Raye could say anything, Shanti said, “Listen, I hear you. It’s invasive, and it comes off as them thinking we don’t know what we’re doing. But take Cap for example. He’s been training with these guys since he was a teenager. This is Willow and my first rodeo. And none of us has any formal training. Maybe our first few cases, we have backup just in case?”
“I’ve read the Rock Chick books,” I announced.
Everyone looked at me.
“And, just saying, we want backup,” I concluded.
“It isn’t the backup,” Raye said. “It’s Cap telling me we were going to have backup, rather than asking me if we wanted backup. The answer to which would have been yes.”
“Ahhhhhh,” we all said in unison.
“Yeah, that wasn’t the way to go,” Jessie mumbled.
“And yeah, that’s why we’re collectively mad at the guys, because between that and Mace et al coming in and confiscating Kev, this isn’t cool,” Luna explained.
I had to agree with that.
“Well, we have no choice. They’re going to trail us. So did you guys find anything at Kev’s place yesterday?” I asked.
Luna shook her head. “Negatory. But then we went to Trev’s place.”
Oh boy, I thought.
“Oh boy,” Willow said.
“What’d you find there?” Shanti asked.
“Well, first, seeing as he was murdered there, we found crime scene tape and a big sticker sealing the door, so even if someone could tear down the crime scene tape, they couldn’t get in without the cops knowing,” Raye shared.
“So you didn’t get in?” Willow asked.
“No, we got in, because Tex is a wild-ass motherfucker,” Luna stated. “He just opened his army knife, slit that bitch, then popped the lock and we went in.”
Although I feared this might be all kinds of illegal, I couldn’t help but giggle.
Tex was such a stitch.
“The place was a wreck,” Raye told us.
“Trev was never all that much of a homemaker,” Willow put in.
“No, Willow,” Raye said. “Tex was right about how easy they took it on Harlow’s digs. His place was torn apart.”
That gave me a little shiver and put me in the confusing position of feeling gratitude to whoever broke into my home that they didn’t do more damage.
“Did you see…?” Willow let that trail but communicated by stretching out her lips.
“Yeah,” Luna said quietly. “A body bleeds a lot when an artery is cut.”
“Like…a lot,’ Raye added.
We all sat with that, and the vibe was not sunshiny goodness.
Jessie snapped us out of it. “Did you find anything else?”
“If there was something to find, whoever was looking for it didn’t find it,” Luna said. “Our guess is, they tried there first, then went to Harlow’s. But even if they didn’t find it, the cops would have. There was fingerprint powder everywhere. They went through it pretty thoroughly.”
“Obviously, this boils down to someone looking for something,” I noted. “We just don’t know what.”
“Well, while on house arrest yesterday, I did some calling around,” Willow told us. “A few of Trev’s exes. A couple of Kev and Trev’s buds.”
“Anything?” Shanti asked.
She shook her head but said, “It won’t shock you to learn, with the exes, Trev was a burn-his-bridges type of guy. None of them had heard from him since they scraped him off, and they weren’t sad about it.”
We all nodded at this intel, completely unshocked.
Willow kept going.
“With the friends, all of them were cagey, probably mostly because I was calling, and they know I’m out of the loop. Only one of them would say Trev was into something hinky, but he didn’t know what it was. Though he did say he wasn’t surprised it came to that. He’d cut ties with both Trev and Kev because, his words, ‘assholes made an art of calling us all to the bar and conveniently forgetting their wallets.’ Something else I’m sure you’re not shocked to learn.”
No, again, we weren’t shocked at all.
“You know, men should journal more, so when they do stupid stuff and get their throats slit, we could just find their journal and it’d tell us all we need to know,” I groused.
“That would be optimal, but Trev wasn’t a journal guy,” Raye said. “I’m not even sure how his body remained functioning with what was strewn all over his kitchen. We can just say, the dude was not about sticking to lean proteins. We didn’t make more mess than was already there, but Tex is good at a search, and we were all over that place. Nada.”