The house felt like it shifted underneath me, like I was standing on a dock in a storm rather than on solid land. And I wasn’t sure I was steady enough to keep my footing.
There was a dead man on Mark’s couch.
My brain kept coming back to it and rejecting it as impossible. It wanted to tell me I was dreaming. Or watching a movie. That this was not real. This couldn’t be real.
From my angle, I couldn’t see the man’s face. His build looked familiar. Intellectually I knew it couldn’t be Mark. Mark texted me less than fifteen minutes ago, and based on how dark the blood on the dead man’s shirt was, he’d been dead well over an hour. Besides, this man was more muscular than Mark.
But my heart wasn’t listening to my brain. Instead, it felt like I’d been running on a treadmill for the past half hour.
I had to see who the man was for myself.
Because if it wasn’t Mark, it still had to be someone we knew. As unreal as it seemed that Mark had a dead man on his couch, it seemed completely unbelievable that Mark would have a dead stranger on his couch.
I inched forward. I knew I was holding my breath from the way my chest burned, but my lungs didn’t seem to want any air.
I averted my gaze from the man’s wound. There was too much blood. If I looked at it, I wasn’t going to make it close enough to see who it was.
One more step and I stopped and forced my gaze onto the man’s face.
Troy Summoner.
Bile burned up my throat. Troy helped me find a key piece of evidence in my last case. We hadn’t been friends, but we’d been learning to work together. Seeing him like this and knowing how he’d died—
“Nicole,” Mark said from behind me.
I spun around. He stood near the doorway to the kitchen with two men in Fair Haven police uniforms. My brain struggled to connect names with their faces, even though both should have come easily to me.
Quincey Dornbush came into focus first. Thank God for Quincey. Mark and I were going to need a friend.
“She shouldn’t be here,” the other one said.
His callous tone snapped his name into place as well—Grady Scherwin.
I wanted to answer him, but my stomach refused to settle. I sprinted for Mark’s bathroom.
By the time I finished losing the breakfast I’d had with Mark’s mom a couple of hours ago, Mark joined me in the bathroom. He handed me a damp washcloth and sat next to me on the bathroom floor.
I wiped my mouth. It would be a long time before I could also wipe away the image of Troy with his neck slit from my mind. If I ever could. Some things stayed with you forever. “What’s Troy doing in your house?”
It wasn’t exactly the right question, but it was as close as I could get to asking why Troy was dead in his house. Mark and Troy weren’t friends, either. They didn’t socialize. Troy shouldn’t have been here even alive. Especially not so early in the morning.
“I don’t know.” Mark’s voice carried a strange, strangled note, like he knew how that sounded.
My last client gave me a similar answer when I’d asked him what happened. He’d told me he didn’t know whether or not he’d killed his employee, and he blamed his medical condition. “You don’t have sporadic fatal insomnia, do you?”
My own voice had a riding-a-rollercoaster-for-the-first-time panic to it.
Mark shook his head and opened his arms. I leaned into his hug.
“I’m glad you’re finally here,” he said.
He’d called me because he needed me. I had to pull myself together. He already had a dead man on his couch. He didn’t need a passed-out woman on his bathroom floor. “Am I here as your fiancée or your lawyer?”
“A little of both.”
I could be his fiancée later. Right now, it seemed he might need a lawyer more. And I could handle this situation better in lawyer mode anyway. “Do you have an alibi for Troy’s time of death?”
“I don’t know when he died. We’re still waiting on the medical examiner from the next county.”
Right. That was a stupid question on multiple fronts. Obviously, he wouldn’t know the time of death. If he knew the time of death, that would mean he was here when Troy died, and he likely would have known why Troy was here.
He wouldn’t be allowed to examine Troy’s body as the medical examiner since he’d be a person of interest in Troy’s murder. There was no way given the manner of death that this could be an accident, which was probably why so many officers had responded.
The bathroom floor was cold, but I wasn’t ready to go back out to where Troy was—partly because seeing him there made my chest ache for him and his family and partly because I was a selfish person. Seeing him there reminded me what I had at stake here. Troy wasn’t just dead. He was dead in Mark’s house. Mark, who I loved and was supposed to marry in less than a month.
A less selfish person wouldn’t look at Troy’s body and see the potential consequences for their own wedding and future.
I wasn’t a less selfish person, though, and I’d wanted to be a normal bride who could focus on her wedding and her groom rather than on dead bodies and murder. Just once, I wanted to be normal.
I shifted position to get more comfortable, my back against the sink. There was barely room for both of us to sit side by side. At least the floor was clean. I’d never been more grateful to Mark’s cleaning lady.
I linked my hand with Mark’s so he’d see I was with him even though I wasn’t looking him in the eyes anymore. “How about you tell me what happened?”
Mark let out a long huff of air as if he’d forgotten to breathe until that moment. “I got a call early this morning to head out to an accident right at the county boundary. When I got there, no one else was there. No accident. No people. I called in, but I was at the right place. Dispatch didn’t know what had happened, so I headed back. When I got home, I found Troy. My door was still locked and there wasn’t any sign of forced entry.”
Someone had set him up. They’d drawn him away on a fake call, so they could bring Troy to his house and murder him, effectively framing Mark. Dispatch would be able to confirm that they’d called Mark, but if I were the prosecution, I’d argue Mark set up the fake call himself to provide an alibi.
“Did you stop anywhere along the way? Did anyone see you?”
