He spit the gum he'd been chewing into the trashcan by his desk, giving the room the faint scent of spearmint and nicotine.
Mrs. Beaumont hugged me, telling me to keep in touch as she drove off in her car. As I walked to mine, holding my jacket over my head to keep the rain from soaking me, I spotted Ash's private investigator and changed direction toward his car, ready to give him a piece of my mind, even if it was drugged-up and crazy.
"Shouldn't you be looking for Bridgette?" I asked.
He sucked in his cigarette and exhaled. "Ash likes to keep an eye on you."
"I'm fine. Tell him I'm fine."
"It won't matter." He flicked ash out of his window, and I had to step back to keep from getting it on my shoe.
"Why not?"
"Love is as love does," he said, echoing his words from before.
I dropped my jacket and let the rain soak my head. "The day Bridgette disappeared, were you following me?"
He nodded.
"Did you see Jon around her house?"
He shook his head. "I had other errands to run that day."
A dead end. "Have you looked into Lucky's contacts?"
"He had a few cell mates back in prison."
"Great. Have you tracked them down yet?" Lighting stuck in the distance, and I wondered how long until the thunder. Somewhere in the back of my mind I started counting, remembering an old scary movie I'd seen as a kid. Poltergeist. Even the memory made me shiver.
"Yeah. They're still in prison."
So they couldn't have done it.
Jim continued. "I talked to them. They said Lucky was really messed up. Some serious trauma shit. He…"
"He what?"
"He ran his own kid over in his driveway. Was too drunk to notice."
"Shit. Does he have a wife?"
"She died young. Poor bastard had it hard."
I remembered the night he kidnapped me. The way he held the knife to my face. "He wasn't a poor anything."
"Catelyn, don't feel sorry for the man who hurt you. Feel sorry for the kid he ran over, the wife he lost. Feel sorry for the man he was before he turned hard." He breathed out smoke. "A hard life makes a hard man. Who's to say which one's to blame?"
I sighed, frustrated and lacking any sympathy or empathy for criminals at the moment. "So do you have any leads?"
"Whoever kidnapped Bridgette was close to Lucky. Someone who would have visited him, maybe even at his kiosk. Likely, they were both behind the Midnight Murders. You know anyone like that?"
"I never saw him with friends."
"Anyone kind of older? Got coffee from him often?"
"No one comes to mind."
"Keep thinking about it." He leaned back in his seat.
I turned to leave. "You can go now."
"Hey, I'm following you."
***
I ignored Mr. P.I. and drove to the address Ash told me to meet him at for our first gun and fight club lesson. He kissed me when I arrived and escorted me into a shooting range where we spent the next two hours. Ash trained me in how to hold a gun, how to shoot without stumbling back from the recoil, how to load the gun, and how to turn the safety on and off. By the end of our time, I could successfully hit a target 60% of the time, which I thought wasn't bad at all, all things considered.
He just smiled and kissed my head. "We'll keep working on it, sweetheart."
When he showed me how it was done, I knew I had a long way to go. As he pulled the target toward us, I only saw one hole, straight through the heart, but he'd shot five times. And then I realized all his shots had gone through that one hole. I whistled. "You're like that dude in Lethal Weapon."
Afterwards, he took me to the gym and we sparred. And by sparred I mean he knocked me on my ass a lot. I got a lot of bruises and in the end I learned, A: how to disarm someone who came at me really slowly from one very specific angle, and B: how to fall into my attacker to throw him off balance in order to get away. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to duplicate either of those lessons in real life, but Ash assured me it was a start and we would keep at it until I was one “badass motherfucker." That was my goal.
Ash was holding a punching bag and making me beat on it as he corrected my form, over and over, when his phone rang. I sighed with relief when he frowned. "Time to meet Maxwell. Game on."
Chapter Twenty Eight
Setting Up A Killer
MAXWELL MET US at our house—I still had to remind myself it was our house and not just his house—and we settled in the living room with coffee.
"Good news and bad news on the investigation into Bridgette's disappearance," Maxwell said.
"Good news first," I said.
"It's actually the same news. The good and the bad is that the police are now investigating Jon as a suspect in her case." Maxwell sipped his coffee and waited for one of us to speak.
Ash clenched his teeth. "How is this good news?"
"It means they're finally considering suspects other than your girlfriend," he said. "And we need that, otherwise, they'll put everything they have into pointing the evidence at her and that won't bode well for any of us."
Ash stood and paced. "So it's better my brother is set up for this? He didn't do it."