Page 114 of Reading Between the Lines
“What do you suggest?”
He considered and took the iPad from my hand. “Shuffle over.”
I moved to lean against the headboard. Diem joined me, grunting as he got comfortable.
“Do you need more meds?”
“I can’t yet.” He eyed the remains of the whiskey but didn’t reach for it. Instead, he opened the eBook and read.
Out loud.
I didn’t question or tease him. I curled against his side, let him wrap an arm around me, and listened. Diem was the furthest thing from an enthusiastic storyteller. He mumbled his sentences and gave no inflection to dialogue, but it was one of the most intimate, nonsexual moments we’d shared, and I soaked it up. I had an aversion to reading but could get used to this.
I closed my eyes and pretended I was watching an episode ofCriminal Minds. When the two main detectives were called to the churchyard because a body had been discovered by a woman out for a walk, I paid close attention to the details that were described. In a murder mystery, every little thing was important. The author’s job was to cleverly bury clues in the text so the reader would hopefully miss them. I wanted to be the smart detective who saw the truth.
A third of the way through chapter four—what might have amounted to page fifty-six if we were reading the paperback version—I bolted upright. The nagging thought at the back of my mind sprung forward, assaulting me with such force I gasped. “Oh my god.”
“What?”
“I know who our killer is.”
29
Diem
Tallus tended to be overzealous when working on a case. He pointed fingers before gathering evidence and raced into battle on hunches, unarmed and with no game plan. So when he jolted upright, proclaiming he’d figured out who our killer was, I barely reacted.
He shuffled around on the bed to face me, slapping my knee—about the only part of my body that didn’t hurt. “Holy fuck. Oh my god. It’s right there in front of us. Black-and-white. On the page.” He clutched his chest. “I think I’m having a heart attack from shock. It makes so much sense. Sort of. Oh, wow. D, I can’t breathe.”
“What makes sense?” Calming him down enough to have him concisely explain took almost more effort than I possessed.
When he reviewed the details of his discovery, my soupy brain still struggled to keep up, but then, slowly, the image cleared, the pieces clicked, and I saw it too. I stared at the book I’d beenreading and replayed the few facts we’d learned in a handful of chapters.
If Tallus was right, we could prove it. The details were right in front of us, in a book. Ambrose Whitaker wrote from multiple points of view. On occasion, he delivered the story from the killer’s perspective—ambiguously, of course. But if Ambrose Whitaker was our killer and the stories were real, we had a huge advantage. In the cocky way of a sociopath who was convinced he could never be caught, Ambrose Whitaker had found a means of bragging about his kills. Through text. In detail.
And if that was the case, this story in particular was personal.
Detectives Angler and Raven couldn’t solve it because they hadn’t pieced together their suspect’s backstory—they didn’tknowthe suspect—but we’d met the killer in real life, and we’d learned intimate details about their past. Ambrose might have altered geographical locations or tweaked details, but in the end, it was the substance that counted.
“Am I right?”
Tallus’s eager expression begged for me to agree. Not for the first time, I saw the man who had desperately wanted to be a detective and was rejected because of his vision.
Their loss. My gain.
I touched his face, cradled his cheek, and stroked my thumb under his bottom lip. “I think you’re dead-on, and you make an excellent partner.”
Tallus glowed and leaned in, connecting our mouths. I indulged him for a while before breaking the kiss.
“Is this the part in the story where you nag me about finishing the PI course?” he asked.
I smiled against his mouth. “I should.”
“But you won’t because I’m brilliant.”
“You’re cheeky.”
“I think you love that about me.”
