Nate laughed, his tone scornful. “You can’t make her do anything. People who look like us? You wouldn’t last a minute in front of the judge, and she can get you put away for whatever she wants.”
Spike leapt to his feet with a shout, but in the same moment Nate was also standing, one broad hand planted firmly on Spike’s chest to hold him in place. For a long second, they faced off against one another, Spike brimming with anger and pushing back against that hand, ready to spring on Laura. But Nate carried on looking at him with dead calm, almost boredom, and finally Spike stopped trying to fight him.
“Take a seat, Mr. Greendale,” Laura said, her voice completely different to how it had been a moment ago: no more needling, no more false arrogance, back to her professional and blank voice that she usually used for suspects. "We heard that you have anger problems, and you’ve just confirmed that for us.”
Spike stared at her, then dropped down into his seat. He seemed to be shrinking now that he realized what he had done. “That doesn’t mean anything,” he protested. “A lot of people get angry. I haven’t done anything!”
“Is there any way you can prove what you’ve told us? That you were at home, working, alone for the past three evenings?”
“No,” Spike said, spreading his hands to either side, turned up as if to measure his innocence. “I was on my own. What am I supposed to do to prove that?”
“That’s what we’re asking you,” Nate said, remaining calm and steady. “If you can’t prove it, then I’m afraid we’re going to have to take these allegations seriously – because right now, we can link you to at least two out of three murders that have taken place in the last few days.”
Spike’s jaw fell open. He stared between the two of them, as if to check that Nate was being serious. “Linked how?” he managed, at last.
“We have strong reason to believe that you knew both Lucile Maddison and Suzanna Brice,” Laura said.
“Yes, I know them both,” Spike said. “But they’re not… dead…?”
“I’m afraid they are,” Nate said.
They all went silent, allowing this news to sink in. Spike’s eyes drifted to the floor, his hand covering his mouth. A flash of anger lit up his eyes as he glanced around, as if seeking the person responsible for this turn of events. Then it died out again, and Laura only saw sadness.
As real as it seemed, it only lasted a short time. Then, he shifted, sniffing and rubbing his face quickly before gesturing to a laptop on the coffee table. “Can I show you something?” he asked.
Laura nodded and gestured for him to go ahead. Her body tensed. Was he about to show them something innocent? Or something that would explain why he had killed them?
But when he opened the laptop, tapped a few keys, and then spun it around to show him the screen, it was only a website builder that was open – open to a log of recent changes.
“Look,” he said. “The work log. It has all the times I’ve made changes to any page on the website. Even small changes like adding a word or moving a block. It’s all there.”
Nate shifted closer on his seat, peering at the screen. “These timestamps cover a large range of last evening, and the evening before.”
“Exactly,” Spike said. “Even if it doesn’t prove I was here, it proves I was working on this. I couldn’t kill someone and then go back and change something on my website a moment later. I’ve been adding all kinds of things. And filming videos, too – they’ll have timestamps on, and they’ll show I was right here. There’s no way I would have time to do anything else in-between. I’ve barely had time to eat.”
Nate leaned back, glancing at Laura with a nod. “It does appear to back up what he’s saying.” He glanced back at Spike. “If I was you, I would take screenshots of all of that data in case it disappears from the site. That’s your alibi right now.”
Spike nodded, reaching for the keys. Laura felt a headache growing in her temples, and not the kind that signaled a vision.
It was the kind that told her she’d been doing this for too long and wasn’t getting anywhere. That there was a killer on the loose and yet again, their one lead had panned out to nothing.
“Thank you for your time,” Laura said, standing up. “It looks like we can clear you from our investigation. We may need to talk to you again, but for now at least, that’s all we needed to know.”
She left Nate giving him more of a proper debrief and walked out of the building. She needed some fresh air, but it was stiflingly hot outside with the sun at its peak. When were they going to catch the break that would allow them to solve this case – and get a killer off the streets at last?
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Laura slumped inside the car and hit the A/C, covering her head with her hands for a moment until it kicked in. With the refreshing cool blasting over her face, she finally relaxed as much as she could. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to check her messages, anxious not to miss the chance to talk to Amy.
There were no messages from Chief Rondelle, or calls from unknown numbers, or anything else that might be a sign she was being given the go-ahead to check up on her. It was frustrating, having to just wait to be given permission. She wanted nothing more than to call every foster home in the state until she found Amy and could hear that she was alright. That would have been stupid, though, and she knew it.
She couldn’t even risk chasing Chief Rondelle again. He would end up branding her a troublemaker. She couldn’t talk to Marcus and beg him to let her talk to Lacey, because there was no way he would let her again so soon. And if she did start bothering him, he would think that allowing her to talk to her daughter in the first place had been a mistake.
Getting any kind of custody or visitation agreement in place was so far off that Laura could barely even imagine it. But hearing her daughter’s voice had almost wrenched Laura loose from the world, knocked her out of her carefully held-together calm and back into the chaos that had forced her to drink in the first place. She couldn’t go back to that, now. Not when Marcus had finally given her one tiny sliver of trust.
And with the case going badly as well, Laura couldn’t help but feel the walls closing in on her again. She felt like she was running as fast as she could but getting nowhere, like in those awful dreams you sometimes had. She couldn’t even talk to Nate, and he was getting more distant by the day.
The man who’d claimed to be a psychic, Nolan Perry, had left her another message asking her to meet him. She ignored it. Even if she wanted to, she had no way of knowing when she’d be able to get back into town. Or how long it would be before she had to leave again. She wasn’t going to try to schedule something, not now.