Page 56 of Stay Away from Him

“So you saw the picture of me and Thomas that Kelli posted? The one of us kissing at that restaurant?”

“I did.”

“And then you followed me that night. Didn’t you?”

Derek blinked. “Huh?”

“You found out where I lived. Followed me to my apartment. Broke in while I was there with Thomas. And left a note on my dining room table.”

Derek grew still and quiet. After a moment, he shook his head slowly, a look of wide-eyed confusion on his face. To Melissa, it looked less like he was denying her accusation than he was struggling to process it, marveling at the wildness of its disconnection from reality. If it was an act, it was a good one.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you have any idea how that sounds? Even aside from the part about breaking into your apartment—which I’dneverdo—how the hell would I know where you lived?”

“You found out where I lived eventually,” Melissa said. “You found me today. Snuck through my backyard. Followed me, pulled me over.”

“What did the note say?”

Melissa sighed, sat back, closed her eyes. She pictured it, the jagged writing, the threatening words.

“‘Stay away from him unless you want to die.’”

When Melissa opened her eyes again, Derek Gordon was staring at her with a horrified look on his face, and in that moment, she knew he didn’t write the note.

“Someone really wrote that to you?” he asked.

“They did.”

“It wasn’t me.”

Melissa sighed. “I believe you. But it’s what you want to tell me, isn’t it? That if I stay with Thomas Danver, he’ll kill me?”

Just then, the server arrived with the drinks, and both of them were quiet as she put them on the table. When she left, Derek leaned forward and started talking. “I don’t know if Thomas Danver is going to kill you. I couldn’t possibly predict that. But I do know he’s dangerous. And I know this for certain: He killed his wife. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Melissa figured he’d come to something like this eventually, the bald accusation—but still, it hurt, actuallyhurt, to hear him say it out loud. Melissa had come to trust Thomas, tolovehim; she’d shared moments with him that were as intimate, as vulnerable, as two people could have together. By contrast, she had no reason to trust Derek Gordon, and more than a few reasons to distrust him. Still, there was something about his cop’s authority, about his hard certainty, that cracked something in her, brought a sharp, burning pain to the pit of her throat.

“How do you know?” she asked, her voice gone meek.

“Because I investigated him,” Derek said. “I questioned him. I sat across a table from him and looked into his eyes. He’s a killer, Melissa.”

His voice was still hard, certain—but there was something not right about what he was saying. “Hold on a second,” Melissa said. “You’re a Saint Paul cop, aren’t you? But the case against Thomas was a county case. Which means the Saint Paul police weren’tinvolved in the investigation. The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office was. You couldn’t have investigated Thomas.”

Derek suddenly looked embarrassed, and for a moment, Melissa thought she had him, had caught him in a lie.

“I’m in the Saint Paul PD right now. But I used to be part of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. I was an investigator. But then I got…” He trailed off and couldn’t meet her eye.

“Got what?” Melissa prodded.

“I was fired,” he said.

She sat back, thinking. So the investigator in charge of Thomas’s case was fired, then had to get a job in another police department. Not only that, but he got busted back from investigator to beat cop. Must have been pretty bad, whatever got him fired. “What did you do?” Melissa asked.

“It was bullshit.”

“Just tell me.”

“I was the investigator who caught Rose’s stalker complaint before she went missing,” he said. “I looked into it but couldn’t find anything. Then, after Rose went missing and we brought charges against Thomas, Thomas’s lawyer did some digging and found out, made a big stink in the press about how I was incompetent, the case was tainted, all kinds of shit. Really smeared me.”

Melissa couldn’t hold back a surge of smug satisfaction at the thought, felt it curl in her lips. “Sounds like he may have had a point.”

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