Mark shook his head.
With no witnesses and no one at the location he’d gone to, he had no way of proving he’d actually gone.
Thankfully for us, whoever worked Dispatch last night would be able to tell us who called in the accident. The person trying to frame Mark wouldn’t have been stupid enough to use their own name or officer number when they called it in. Hopefully, though, they wouldn’t have thought to disguise their voice. If the dispatcher could identify them by their voice, we’d have a solid lead for who was behind this.
Until then, I had to do everything possible to protect Mark from whoever set him up. “Were you questioned?”
Mark nodded.
“What did you tell them?”
The look he gave me said isn’t it obvious? “The truth. What I told you.”
To him it would seem obvious. He was innocent, so he answered whatever they asked. When the police considered someone a potential suspect in a murder, though, it was never that simple. Unless we could prove he hadn’t been involved, the police would dig into his life with the intent of finding guilt.
Mark probably wouldn’t believe that if I told him, though. He was used to being allied with the police.
Quincey would believe Mark and wouldn’t try to trick him, but their friendship meant Quincey would quickly be replaced. Even Chief McTavish might not be allowed to conduct this investigation. At least I was here now to monitor the rest of the questions.
I climbed to my feet, dropped the washcloth into his sink, and moved for the door. “Then what we need to do is figure out why someone would want to frame you for Troy’s murder.”
Mark clambered to his feet too fast to be graceful and shifted to the side so he was in front of the bathroom door. He placed a hand over the knob.
At first I thought he planned to open it for me. But his hand stayed in place and the door stayed closed, preventing me from leaving. His Adam’s apple struggled up and down in his throat.
Like he had something to hide. Like there was something he wasn’t telling me.
3
My throat felt blocked, as if I’d tried to swallow something much too big. For a second, it was like I wasn’t standing in front of Mark anymore. I was standing in front of my dad, who controlled when a conversation started and when it ended. Who controlled how much I knew about any situation we were involved with—including hiding from me that he’d known all along my boyfriend was guilty of murdering his wife.
Or like I was standing in front of Peter, listening to him lie to me, telling me he hadn’t killed his wife. And I’d believed him—not because he was the world’s greatest liar, but because I wanted to believe him.
Mark hadn’t been in a situation like this before, but I had. If he turned out to be guilty too, it would destroy something in me that I was sure could never be fixed. Not everything broken could be repaired, and not everything was stronger after you repaired it. My faith in humanity and my own judgment certainly weren’t stronger after Peter broke them.
I rubbed a hand around my throat. “What’s going on?”
He cupped my face in his hand and ran his thumb across my cheek bone. “I know I called you here, but you can’t investigate this.”
That sounded awfully guilty. What reason could he possibly have for not wanting me to search for the truth unless he knew the truth and didn’t want it coming out?
“Don’t you think we should do everything we can to prove you didn’t do this?”
“Chief McTavish will be here any minute. He’ll believe me, and he’ll find the real killer. But you can’t be involved.”
McTavish and I hadn’t always agreed on who the guilty party was in a murder investigation, but he had proven that he cared about finding the truth, and he was a good police officer. He wouldn’t charge someone with a crime simply to have an elevated closure rate or to satisfy the press.
That said, my parents had taught me not to leave something important to anyone else. You delegated the tasks where mistakes could be fixed or wouldn’t matter in the long run. You delegated tasks when you could hire someone with a higher degree of skill. You didn’t delegate the things that really mattered when you were the one who could best complete the task.
I couldn’t navigate unless I had a GPS telling me where to go, and my cooking wouldn’t be winning any competitions, but as Liam Neeson’s character said in the movie Taken, I did have a very particular set of skills. When it came to proving Mark’s innocence, I trusted my skill set over Chief McTavish’s. I knew my strengths.
But Mark knew my strengths, too. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t come right out and ask him why he was arguing with me on this. The only two reasons I could come up with were that he didn’t believe in me as much as he said he did, or I couldn’t believe in him when he said he didn’t do this.
Had he actually said he hadn’t done this? Crap. I couldn’t remember, and I couldn’t ask if he’d already told me without letting him know I had doubts. But hadn’t he only said he’d found Troy? He hadn’t said he’d found Troy dead. That could be implied or intentionally left out.
Focus, Nic. Don’t give ground. The truth is too important. “I’d feel better if I was investigating this as well.”
Mark’s hands slid down to my shoulders, and he squeezed almost too tightly. The panic sensors in my brain flashed on.
He loosened his grip. He glanced back over his shoulder even though the door was closed, and last I knew, he didn’t have x-ray vision to see through the wall to what was going on beyond it.
He turned back and held my gaze more tightly than he’d held my shoulders a moment before. “Troy’s dead in my living room.”
The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes had deepened into something else—fear lines.
Sometimes my desire to investigate a puzzling case overcame my common sense. This wasn’t about Mark wanting to hide anything from me. It was about Mark wanting to protect me from a dangerous situation I’d been trying to run straight into. I should have seen that sooner. I might have if history hadn’t come back in to crush me under its massive weight.
Troy, a man we both knew and worked with, was dead in his home. Unlike most people in Fair Haven, Mark locked his door, a remnant of his time living in New York City. To get in, they’d have either had to pick his lock or have stolen his key and made a copy of it without his noticing.
A shiver ran over my body like I’d jammed both hands into a bucket of snow.
Whoever had done this was skilled. He was deadly. And he was targeting Mark.
If I went after the killer, it’d put a bigger target on me than I’d ever had before.
I was willing to take that risk for Mark.
“Promise me you’ll stay out of this,” Mark said. “Please, Nicole.”
