Page 41 of Cold Case Murder Mystery

“Brooke, I put this lab together, helped you get that skull, because I thought the stalking might be connected to the case, but now I wonder...”

Probably the same thing she did. “If they’re wholly unrelated?”

Zeke nodded. “Royal and I talked, and he agrees. He didn’t know anything about what you were doing here. When I explained you had a real human skull in your backpack, I think his opinion of you changed entirely. He was very perplexed.”

She wanted to laugh. She really did. But on the other side of her temper was always that awful guilt. And she knew what it stemmed from. You didn’t grow up in a gang and then get bounced around to foster homes without developing a certain amount of trauma responses. She didn’t want to be a bother, didn’t want to hurt anyone in case they might ditch her.

But he already had ditched her, so to speak. And still, she couldn’t resist the apology. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Royal’s theory about our father trying to... do something.”

“I thought you wouldn’t be made to feel guilty about not including me in something that was none of my business?”

This time she did laugh in spite of herself. He recited her words with such dry disdain it was justfunny. “I tried. But I’m really good at feeling guilty. And the truth is, if you were anyone else, I probably would have told you. I’d probably be more comfortable involving you and asking you for help. But it’s... you.”

“What about me?” he returned, eyebrows furrowed. Clearly confused, even if she thought he shouldn’t be. “I’ve helped you lots.”

“Yes. You have. In a North Star capacity. But not after. Zeke, I was so desperately in love with you then. I didn’t hide that. Surely you know that.”

She wouldn’t say he lookeduncomfortablewith her saying those things, but he certainly wasn’t going to interact with the idea oflove, even after he’d said all that stuff last night. For whatever reasons, and maybe they weregoodreasons, he didn’t want to deal with the idea of love. Then or now.

Still, maybe it was her turn to try to explain herself. Because he wasn’t doing it to be cruel. He’d never really been cruel to her. She knew what that was like.

“Those are not just feelings that go away, and it took me a long time to... resituate myself once we broke up, once North Star ended. I don’t want to ever have to go through that kind of... upheaval again. I have been bounced around at other people’s whims myentire life. Finally, I have some... some agency. Some power. I can’t just hand it over because maybe something dangerous is going on. I can’t lose myself again. I have to stand on my own two feet.”

He was silent a moment and then nodded. “Okay.”

She blinked once. His easy agreement was the last thing she’d expected. She’d braced for a lecture about protection not being the opposite of agency and so on and so forth. She’d heard something of the like in North Star her entire time there. She narrowed her eyes at him. She did not trust Zeke Daniels’s calm acquiescence. “What do you mean ‘okay’?”

“I mean okay. That sounds fair and right, and the last thing I want to do is hurt you again. But I also want you to consider that I don’t swoop in because... I’m trying to inflict my whims on you. I’m trying to keep you safe, not keep you from standing up for yourself too. In fact, I’d like all four of us to work together to make that happen.”

Help was not the enemy. Brooke knew that from an investigative standpoint, but she was still trying to accept it on a personal, adult level. She’d always done everything on her own there. But she couldn’t handle whatever this was on her own, and she knew it. So why couldn’t she accept help from someone she trusted, even if he’d broken her heart?

Even if, worse, she still had feelings for him and was afraid it would lead her down the same heartbroken path?

Regardless, she had to set those feelings aside and be reasonable. “I’d like that too.” She frowned. “But who’s the fourth person?”

“Hart. He came by looking for you so you could excavate. I haven’t told him everything, and God knows Royal hasn’t told us much, but between the four of us... Maybe we can get to the bottom of everything.”

Everything. She wasn’t sure it was possible, but she supposed now was the time to try.

Chapter Thirteen

They convened in the living room. The afternoon had been... tense at best, but Zeke was hopeful they’d all come to a kind of understanding about the most important thing. Figuring out what was going on so they could keep Brooke safe.

The men in the group made quite a trio. The cop, the con and whatever Zeke was. Some combination of the two, he supposed.

Then there was Brooke. She’d let go of her mad. She always did. Too quickly, in Zeke’s estimation, but he couldn’t be frustrated with her over it in the current situation. Not when herI was so desperately in love with youwould echo in his head for the rest of his life.

Both the way she’d said it, so serious and with all that emotion, that hurthe’dinflicted just there in her eyes. And then the past tense she’d used. Loved. Yeah, he found he didn’t care for that.

“We dusted your car for prints,” Thomas was saying to Brooke. “We’re running what we found through our system, but I can’t imagine we come back with anything. It was a small very-homemade bomb. Very hard to trace. There was some thought put behind that.”

“I think the bigger concern is that we don’t know what the hell the point of it was,” Zeke pointed out. He’d thrown some frozen pizzas in the oven and they were now eating them over the coffee table in the living room since his kitchen table couldn’t hold four people comfortably.

Viola moved from person to person, begging for scraps. It might have been homey. Four friends enjoying a meal.

Instead they were discussing car bombs and murder.

“It wouldn’t have really hurt anyone,” Royal said. “Not unless someone had the hood open when the bomb went off. Even then, not lethal. Maybe just some burns. So the point had to be to scare, not necessarily to accomplish any injury.”

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