Page 79 of Smith

“Cool of you to check in on me. But I’m fine. Smith’s got everything under control.”

Smith nodded like I’d said the right thing.

“You should dump this place, Aria,” he suggested.

Sweet mother of all things holy, if one more person told me to dump the house my head was going to pop off and spin around in circles.

“I am,” I lied.

“Good. You don’t need this kind of headache and nothing’s worth your safety.”

Weirdly that sounded genuine. And the weird part was, as previously noted, we were not friends.

“You’re correct about that.”

“I had the day off. I was coming by to check in on you and see if you were making progress or if you needed any help.”

That was a nice thing for him to do. Strange, but nice.

“Sorry you wasted a trip to the house. As you can see with the police tape, it’ll be a few days until I can get back in.”

“The cameras get anything?”

According to Kira, they hadn’t. Even with her fancy facial recognition software she’d created, she couldn’t get a hit because the person had been wearing a full mask, sunglasses, and gloves.

I didn’t tell Phillip that.

“I’m waiting on the security company to review the recording. Might be a few days.”

“Hope like fuck they find something so the police can nail this bastard.”

The police might not but Smith would…in less than a few days.

“Me, too.”

“Right. I’ll let you go. Call me if you need anything.”

“I will. Have a good day.”

“You, too.”

I disconnected the call and asked, “What was that about?”

Smith didn’t answer my question. Instead, he asked his own. “Phillip ever call you before? Stop by one of your projects unannounced when he wasn’t making a delivery?”

“No.”

Smith’s gaze flicked to Jonas.

“You don’t think he has something to do with this?” I asked.

“What I think is, until we take down whoever is breaking into your house and following you, everyone is a suspect. And with that call, Phillip just scratched his name into the short list.”

“But why would he break in?” I asked. “He’d never been to that house before.”

“You know that how?”

“He told me.”

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