Page 140 of Long Way Down

Prince sat back, hint of a smirk playing in the flex of a cheek. “Kids, you know? They fuck up sometimes.”

Pongo glanced toward Kat, who looked pained.

“We have someone who’s going to check on the footage,” Mav said. “My question is, how did you figure out who dumped the body that fast?”

~*~

Tobias looked exactly like a man who’d spent the night in a precinct holding cell. The product he wore to keep his hair in shiny waves had gone to grease overnight, strands hanging limp and dull on either side of a face lined and pale with sleeplessness and stress. In his crumpled clothes, eyes bloodshot, hands unsteady on the steaming paper cup of coffee Contreras set before him on the bolted-down table of the interrogation room, Melissa had a hard time understanding why she’d felt that initial tug of attraction for him.

“How’s it going, Tobias?” Contreras asked, making a show of dragging out his chair and unbuttoning his jacket. He settled with a lot of paper rustling and pen shifting.

Melissa folded down neat, and silent, and still.

Tobias dampened his lips, gaze pinging between the two of them, and said, “If you’ll let me explain, I promise I didn’t hurt anyone. Not Lana, not Lynn, not anyone. Please.”

“What about when you were just plain old Toby Renfroe?” Melissa asked. “Did you hurt anyone then?”

“I–” He gulped.

“Yeah, see, that’s the part we’re confused about,” Contreras said, pad open to a clean page, pen ready. He frowned at Tobias as if confused. “You said all along that you wanted to be open with us and cooperate. And then you went and gave us a fake name.” He played disappointed, and Melissa was glad it wasn’t a look she was on the receiving end of.

“When were you going to clear things up?” Melissa asked. “When the system finally pinged your DNA and we found out you’re not really Tobias Santini?”

“I am him, though,” he said, defensive. “I had my name legally changed. That’s my real name, now.”

“Yeah,” Contreras said, smiling humorlessly, “but you left out the whole stint in Rikers for assault thing, man.”

“I didn’t – I wasn’t…” He blew out a deep breath that flapped his lips and all the mystique was gone. He was as handsome as her captain, now, which was to saynot at all. He raked a hand back through his now-stringy hair and said, “I didn’t think that was relevant. It was a long time ago. I served my time, got out, turned my life around and haven’t done anything like that since. I don’t see why it–”

“Who did you assault?” she asked, tone sharp; it cut through his sentence, and left him dangling a moment. “A friend? Family member? A girl you were dating?”

He frowned, and a spark of meanness flared in his gaze, there and gone again when he scrubbed at his stubbled jaw. “Don’t you have the file?”

“Yeah, but I’d rather hear it straight from you. You learn a lot about someone hearing about their crimes in their own words.”

He stared at her a moment, and she could tell he was seeing her in a wholly different light, now. There’d been softness, before, and a certain smugness, like he knew that she thought he was good looking. Now, there was only surprise, skepticism. Wariness.

It was nothing like the way Pongo looked at her. Or even Maverick, in the wee hours, with that paternalattagirlsmirk. Tobias – Toby, whoever he was – looked at her as if she wasother. A beast from a foreign pack which he had no hope of understanding.

She liked that.Pack.

Contreras dug the file out from the small stack he’d brought and flipped it open. “It says here–”

“It was a friend,” Tobias said, tightly. His Adam’s apple jumped as he swallowed. “A former friend.” He glanced down at his cup, fiddling with its edge. “I thought we were friends. I was…my home life wasn’t great, growing up. Dad skipped out and Mom was a drunk. I spent a lot of time hanging out after school. Basketball court, under the bleachers. Wherever. My friend, Ryan, always had beer. Or a bottle of Jack. His mom’s pills. Then, somehow, he started getting his hands on somebody’s coke stash. I think his mom’s boyfriend was a dealer or something.”

He shook his head. “Anyway. He said we – our other friends and me – could earn some extra money if we started making deliveries.”

“So you all became dealers,” Contreras said.

Tobias winced, and shrugged. “I mean…I guess. Technically.”

“We care about ‘technically’ around here,” she deadpanned, and made aget on it with itgesture.

“Yeah, okay, so.” Another deep exhale. “We started making deliveries. Sometimes we made them…sometimes we opened them and took a cut for ourselves.”

“I’m sure that went well.”

He fidgeted. “Sometimes it was coke. Sometimes it was other stuff. Pills…I don’t know what it was. It fucked us up. I had blackouts, lost whole weekends. I woke up one morning with two black eyes, covered in all these scrapes and cuts, blood all over the sheets, and I realized it had to stop.