Page 111 of Long Gone

“But—”

“Stop,” he grunted. “You need sleep. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

He walked out, shutting the door but leaving it cracked. I closed my eyes, feeling the tears well behind my eyelids but refusing to shed them.

I was a mess. Did I have any business letting people trust my investigative skills? But Malcolm was right. I’d found Hugo’s body. That had to count for something.

I finished off the wine in three gulps, then followed it with a long drink of water before I turned off the lamp. As I lay in the dark, I realized he’d never answered my question—did he ever get tired of it all. But I could still see the pain in his eyes, the way the muscles of his face had sagged just a little.

And I knew we were more alike than either of us would ever admit. He was tired of it too.

Chapter 25

My head was pounding when I woke up, but for once it wasn’t because of a hangover. As I roused, the smell of coffee filled my nose, making a promise I planned to accept.

The area over my collar bone throbbed, but I didn’t feel any sharp pain. I sat up and let my head adjust to the wave of dizziness that washed through me. Once it settled, I reached for what was left of my water. I’d drank nearly the entire glass, plus the water bottle at Delaney’s, and I didn’t feel an overwhelming urge to pee. I’d obviously been dehydrated.

It felt like every muscle in my body ached, proving I was out of shape. Then again, how did one train to dig graves?

I didn’t have any clothes in my old closet, so I left my room and walked over to my parents’ room, deciding it didn’t matter if Malcolm saw me. I was wearing more than some women wore to public swimming pools.

I found another track suit of my mother’s—deep purple velour. I tugged on the pants as best I could with one hand after realizing the hard way that I shouldn’t be making any abrupt movements with my right hand. Then I slid on the jacket and zipped it shut, the movement tugging at my stitches. I was sure I looked like shit, but I headed toward the kitchen to face Malcolm and the bloody aftermath of last night.

Except it didn’t look like I’d imagined at all. When I walked in, it was clean and Malcolm was sitting at the kitchen table in front of an open laptop and a coffee cup, the picture of domestication. His legs were extended under the table, his ankles crossed, and his hair was slightly rumpled like he hadn’t bothered to straighten it after he woke up. It looked a hell of a lot sexier than my bedhead probably did.

No. James Malcolm is not sexy.

But I’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that a lot of women probably did find him sexy. I just wasn’t one of them.

He looked up when I walked and gave me his trademark assessment, only it didn’t seem as harsh as usual. “You’ll live.”

“If you call hurting over every square inch of my body living,” I muttered. “But I guess it’s what I should expect after getting stabbed by part of my front door and digging up a body. Full day, yesterday.” I shuffled to the coffee maker, then reached for the cabinet above it with my left arm to grab a mug. “I see you found my mother’s coffee maker.”

“It’s hard to miss on top of the kitchen counter.”

“What happened to the mess?”

“I cleaned it up.”

I turned to glance at him, lifting my brow. “You? You don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d clean up messes that aren’t your own. And I suspect you have people to clean up your messes for you.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you want me to send you a bill or is there a point to this?”

I poured my coffee into the mug and then set the pot back on the heating element. “Sorry. Just making an observation. What are you doing?”

“Nothing to do with this case,” he said, turning back to his laptop and tapping some keys. “Tavern-related bookkeeping.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I wasn’t going to call him on it. I was still thrown that he’d cleaned up my blood. Why had he done it?

“I’ve been thinking about the men who broke in last night,” he asked as he picked up the coffee cup next to him. “We’re presuming they were after your father’s contracts, but could they have been after something else? This seems like a lot of trouble just for contracts.”

“I’ve seen people do worse things for a lot less than a stack of contracts,” I said as I grabbed creamer from the fridge and poured it into my mug. I was really missing my espresso machine right about now and considered wading through the debris of my apartment door to use it. “Besides, what else could it be? I keep case notes on my laptop and it’s password protected. But it was on the kitchen table in my apartment.”

“Your purse was still on the kitchen table, and I checked your wallet after you went to bed. There’s cash in it, so simple robbery wasn’t the motivation. I take it you haven’t gotten in contact with your father?”

I felt guilty that I hadn’t even tried again since my attempt the previous night. It made sense that they would have targeted his new place next. “No. I should check my phone to see if he texted or called back.” But the phone was in my jeans pocket, and I really didn’t feel like walking back to my old bedroom yet. At least not until I drank the rest of this coffee.

“We need to plan our next steps,” Malcolm said.

---