Page 60 of Midnight Waters

I laughed over the counter. What a burn.

“Anyway, I’m leaving,” he said.

“Wait.” I circled around the desk to go into the back room. “Stay here.”

Even if he had only come here to check if he still had an amateur investigation partner, Ben’s arrival had saved me tracking him down all over Dusk.

I dashed through the break room and into the back office and took the watch out of the safe.

“Come in here,” I called to him once I’d returned to the break room. “You’ve got to see this.”

“Is this some kind of trick?” Ben called from the office.

If I rolled my eyes as hard as I wanted to, my eyeballs would have done a one-eighty. “Just get in here.”

Ben inched through the doorway, peering around the door as if expecting a horde of heavily armed ogres on the other side.

“Mind the booby trap by the coffeepot,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him.

He actually flinched. Dumbass.

“Does this look familiar?” I held up the watch.

The moment he caught sight of it, Ben hurried over and snatched the bag from me.

He held the bag closer to his face, recognition sparking in his eyes. “This is George’s or Morty’s.”

I balked. “You’re sure?”

Why would George or his brother have wanted Tyler dead? The life insurance policy might have been incentive enough to a gambling addict, but Ben had also mentioned Tyler had learned an intimate secret.

Had this secret belonged to one of the brothers and the money was just a convenient silver lining?

“Where did you find this?” Ben asked.

“It was on the sea floor close to where Tyler’s body was,” I said. “I didn’t think it was a coincidence.”

“You think Tyler might have torn the watch off as he went over?”

“I’m guessing. You can’t tell whether this is George’s or Morty’s?”

Ben put the bag down on the table and returned his hands to his pockets. “They have identical watches. No inscriptions or anything.”

“So whichever one of them killed Tyler is missing a watch,” I muttered.

Ben paced back and forth, interlinking his hands on top of his head. For someone who had just learned the possible identity of his friend’s killer, Ben was remarkably calm.

“You don’t seem shocked,” I said, folding my arms.

“The only thing that shocked me is that someone wanted to kill Tyler.” Ben swivelled on the ball of his foot and paced back the way he came. “The who, after that, isn’t surprising. Do you think this will be enough evidence for the police?”

I slid the bag over to me. “I doubt it. We need to dig deeper if we’re going to prove anything.”

Ben stopped in the middle of the room and whirled around. “We need to get into the house.”

Okay, why did he make this sound like it had to be some sort of heist movie?

“Michaela has visitors all the time. How is that hard?” I asked.

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