Right there was part of his problem with her. He didn’t want Lathan to want her. Why? Gill didn’t look like the type to have a boy crush on Lathan. So that wasn’t it. She wasn’t exactly a pillar of Sundew society. But she wasn’t the lowest gutter roach either—to use Gill’s term. She worked. Supported herself. No longer relied on anyone for anything. That was respectable. Right?
Or did Gill somehow know about her past with Matt? No, he couldn’t. Everyone speculated, but no one knew for a fact, except her and Matt. And neither of them was likely to tell anyone.
“Trust me. I’d rather stay here than wait tables, but I need the money.”
“If Lathan’s pissed, I’m blaming it on you.”
“Fine. I just need to get my stuff.” She ran upstairs to get her clothes. Lathan had washed and dried them again. She wiggled into her shorts and the Ernie-approved shirt, but when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror—breasts spilling from her cleavage—she put Lathan’s T-shirt back on over everything.
She followed Gill out to his car. Neither of them spoke as he pulled out of the driveway and drove them through the isolated countryside toward town. The silence wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either.
“How much do you know about Lathan?” he asked when they reached the outskirts of Sundew.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you know his birthday, his favorite color, his favorite food, what kind of childhood he had…” He rattled off an extensive list, all of which she didn’t know. But somehow, none of it mattered.
She kept quiet.
“Listen, I don’t mean be a dick, but my top priority is protecting Lathan.”
Yeah, she knew how to read between the lines. “Protecting him from me?”
Gill gave one solid nod of confirmation. “Why are you messing with him?” he asked as he waited to make the left-hand turn into Sweet Buns parking lot.
She felt his gaze on her, studying her as if he expected the way she looked to give away some vital answer. “What do you mean?”
“He’s a big, scary-looking dude, but he has the heart of a puppy. I don’t want you messing with him.”
“I’m not messing with him.”
He turned to her, gave her a full-body scan—eyes lingering on her bare legs. “Sleeping with him qualifies as messing with him.”
Suddenly, the giant T-shirt dress and the clothes underneath felt invisible. “I’m not sleeping with him. I slept with him—the snooze, snore, snore kind of sleep.”
Gill cocked an eyebrow at her. It was the same as calling her a liar. He parked in front of the diner. She opened her door.
“I don’t know what your motives are, but if they are less than lily-white angel-babies, I’m going to find out. And the full force of the FBI will come down on you.”
She got out of the car but left the door open, trying to formulate a response that didn’t sound defensive, but she couldn’t come up with anything.
Gill leaned over the passenger seat to see her. “There’s a lot you don’t know about him. Ask him about himself. Ask him about his hearing. Ask about his childhood.”
She slammed the door and walked toward Morty’s.
Gill might be a big and mighty FBI guy, but he wasn’t subtle. She recognized his last words for what they were. A setup. He thought something about Lathan’s past would scare her off. Nothing about him could scare her off. The only thing she really feared was her own past.
*
Lathan left his office, shutting the door behind him, then stepped up to the retinal scanner, and waited for the internal light to switch from green to red—locked. He stepped off the porch and started down the short trail back to his house.
His office looked like a hunter’s cabin in the middle of the woods. Except that it had security rivaling a bank and an underground air-filtration system so there would be no scent contamination among the evidence.
He massaged his chest. It had ached all day. Well, not really all day, but from the moment he’d left the house, it’d felt like he had a bad case of indigestion and it hadn’t eased one bit. In fact, it had only gotten worse. He saw a roll of Tums in his future. He hated to eat things like that, but sometimes they were all that helped.
When he walked through the back door, he saw Gill at the table, typing on his laptop.
Lathan set the evidence bag with hair and tooth inside on top of the fridge—out of Little Man range—and handed Gill the reports. “You’re going to find this interesting.”
Gill leafed through the pages.
While Lathan waited for the moment when everything clicked for Gill, he rubbed the pain in his chest.
Gill sat up straight. “The Strategist? Never saw that coming.”
“Me either.”
“So Janie Carson and the hair-and-tooth victim are both linked to the Strategist.” Gill seemed to be speaking the words out loud as if that would make them more believable. He scribbled a note on a pad of paper next to him. “One thing the lab noticed was the slower rate of decomp on the eye comparative to Janie Carson’s body. They’re running tests to see if a preservative might’ve been used. We might even be able to find a brand and then get a list of purchasers. The eye could give us the lead we need to find him.”
And all because Honey had a dream. “You get me some comparison samples, and I can tell you which preservative was used.”
“If the tests are inconclusive, then we’ll bring you in.” Gill sat back in his chair and pinned Lathan with a sharp look—the kind that would cut a lesser man. But Lathan had a thick skin. “Don’t you think this is strange? She claims to be having dreams where she brings stuff back to reality, and that stuff just happens to be things from the Strategist’s victims. And you just happen to be the only person who knows the Strategist exists.” Gill shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidence.”