“I just want to apologize again, ma’am.” Officer Derek Henley, the man who’d been in charge of taking her statement, led her protectively down the long hallway back to the front of the building. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but considering the statistics of how these situations usually play out, I think you can count yourself very lucky.”
He was right. It certainly didn’t seem that way now.
“What’s going to happen to Logan?”
She’d been asking the question, but had yet to get a straight answer from anyone. It had been suspicious enough that her boyfriend was visiting the city under a set of rather strange circumstances. Between that and the fact that when the officers arrived, Peter Schilling was bleeding and unconscious on the floor? She didn’t know what would happen.
Officer Henley shifted automatically forward to open the lobby door. “Between what you were able to tell us, as well as the emails we recovered and the hard evidence found at the scene, we’re not going to be pressing any assault charges against Mr. Chase. If anything, it was fortunate that he arrived when he did. And that he showed at least a bit of restraint...”
The officer trailed off, and for the first time all afternoon, Lacy stifled a bit of a smile. It would be impossible to accurately describe the policemen’s faces when they burst into the hotel room and saw the bizarre scene. The way Logan had lashed the man to the bathroom safety rails with his own belt. The way he’d gagged him with a washcloth for good measure. Or the way he and Lacy had proceeded to eat the entire tray of room service in front of him as they waited. They also burnt all the naked pictures.
Needless to say, it was going to make for a rather interesting case report.
“At any rate, he should be released from questioning soon.” Henley gestured to the chairs in the lobby. “You’re free to wait here.”
“Thanks.”
Lacy wrapped her clothes tighter around her and took a seat. She’d been in and out of police stations enough to know that there was a lot the officer wasn’t telling her. For example, what exactly was going to happen with the ‘hard evidence’ he’d described finding back at the hotel. Logan had gotten a fierce reprimand for tearing down the pictures and ‘tampering with a crime scene’ when the officers first arrived, but they softened slightly when they saw the content. Logan just told them he wasn’t thinking and burned them without a thought. At least the other pictures were still up to help prove their case that her attacker was a nut.
“Hey you.”
She looked up suddenly to see Logan sweeping towards her from down the hall. He was escorted by two officers, who hung back at the entrance to the lobby, and was wearing a look of utter exhaustion that matched her own.
“How is it only one in the afternoon?” he asked as he pulled her into a tight hug.
She laughed shakily, closing her eyes as she pressed her face into his jacket. “I was just thinking the same thing. It feels like this day has been going on forever.”
He pulled back, looking her up and down. “What do you say that we end it early? Call it a day and head home?”
“Home.” She nodded automatically, glancing around the police department with a little shiver. “Yeah, that sounds pretty much perfect.”
Chapter 30
It’s always a strange thing—trying to come back to earth after a trauma. Strange and highly individualized. There was no predicting what might happen, except to know that everyone involved was bound to react in different ways.
The first thing Logan did when they got back to Dylan’s house was to ransack the place himself. The naked pictures of him and his girlfriend might be locked away in evidence, but they were burned forever into his mind. He pictured every one—remembering the distance, gauging the exact angles. Then he tried to recreate them. Tried to imagine exactly where Peter must have been hiding when he took each one.
Those select places—usually closets or storage spaces—were torn apart with the voracity of a bloodhound. As Lacy waited patiently in the kitchen, Logan single-handedly dismantled his brother’s entire house. Unsatisfied with the security. Looking for hidden cameras, broken locks, or anything else that might explain how such a massive violation of privacy was able to happen.
But while her boyfriend was propelled into a whirlwind of action, Lacy had gone very still. She bustled around only long enough to heat up a pot of coffee, then perched in the center of the kitchen counter. Sipping it slowly. Watching Logan work. When he was finally satisfied, she simply cocked her head and the two of them headed upstairs to the bedroom.
Logan had torn that place apart as well, but the bed, at least, was clear. He and Lacy settled in the very center, nestling deep beneath the covers in each other’s arms.
“You’re going to have to explain all of this, you know.” After almost a half hour of quietly lying there
, Lacy finally broke the silence. “You’re going to have to tell your brother why his house looks like a tornado ripped through the center.”
Logan glanced down at her in surprise, then his lips turned up into a reluctant smile. “Does Cleveland have tornados? I might just go with that.”
“No tornados. But no hurricanes either,” she added as a quick afterthought. “So it still has that going for it over Florida.”
“Florida,” Logan murmured under his breath, so soft she almost wasn’t able to hear. His arms tightened around her, but his eyes were distant as they stared out the window. “Florida is starting to sound pretty good right about now.”
Lacy said nothing. Much as she wanted to, she could think of nothing to say.
To start, she didn’t know how he meant it. Did he just mean that he wanted to be as far away from this house and these horrible memories as possible? That he wanted to put an entire country between him and the Cleveland Police Department? That he wanted to take her with him?
Or did he mean something else? Had something broken between them today? Something that no amount of time or good intentions would be able to fix?