He just shrugged and walked past me.
“We’re heading out,” he said from the back room. “Come grab your laptop.”
I followed him and closed the lid, picking it up. He was packing another bag full of stuff.
“Two murders in two days,” I said softly. “It’s crazy.”
He looked at me seriously. “We’re closing the office.”
The words hit me like a hammer. “No way!”
“Sorry, sis. We have to.”
“No. We can’t close this office. We’re helping people!”
He gave me a wry smile. “We’re taking pictures of perverts and cheaters.”
“We’re saving marriages and getting people out of bad ones.” I paused. “And what about Mrs. Suarez? We helped her.”
His face clouded over at the mention of Mrs. Suarez. “We can’t help anyone anymore,” he said softly, and he went back to packing.
What was he talking about? We couldn’t just give up. We hadn’t even started investigating the murders.
“Easton,” I said, walking over to him. “Stop.” I put my hand on his arm.
He looked at me sadly. “We’re going to do more harm than good if we keep seeing clients, Laney.”
“What happened?”
I could see the pain in his face. But more than that, I could see the anger. Brutal anger, fierce and intense.
“The girl was Mrs. Suarez’s daughter. She was only sixteen.”
My mouth dropped open and my hand fell away. “What?”
“Get your stuff together. We’re leaving.”
He continued packing and I stood there, completely numb.
Mrs. Suarez’s daughter had been murdered? Easton clearly thought that we had something to do with it. Because we were helping people, they were getting killed.
I shook my head. That couldn’t be true. What we were doing was good. Sure, it wasn’t the most important or vital thing in the world, and mostly it was catching cheating husband, but still. We brought peace into people’s lives. We did things for people that they couldn’t do for themselves. We found the truth.
I didn’t want to give that up, not when I had finally found it.
Easton stopped in front of me. “Laney,” he said, snapping me out of my trance. “We’re leaving.”
“No,” I said, but he was already walking into the front office. I followed him out there. “No, Easton. Wait.”
“Listen to me,” he said, wheeling around and staring at me. “This young girl is fucking dead because of me. Do you understand that?”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, barely a whisper.
“Her fingers were cut off. She was strangled to death. All because her mother asked for my help.” He shook his head, practically vibrating with rage. “We have to close the office until this piece of shit is dead or caught.”
I nodded slowly, stupidly, unable to say anything more. How could I argue with that?
He slung his heavy bag over his shoulder and grabbed the pistol from the desk, slipping it into his pants. He gave one more look around the office and then nodded.
“Come on,” he said.
I followed him out. He locked the door behind us.
I felt like my world was suddenly shifting again. The last two days had been an insane rollercoaster. I had gone from being annoyed that he had moved into the room next door to suddenly afraid and nervous when he wasn’t around.
And the bodies were beginning to pile up.
I followed him silently out to the car, nervous about where this left us, or if that even mattered anymore.
16
Easton
I couldn’t believe I was so fucking stupid.
As we drove back to Laney’s house in silence, I kept going over and over in my mind all of the idiotic mistakes I kept making, over and over again.
Mistakes that distracted me. Mistakes that kept me from hunting down this murdering fuck and bringing him to justice.
Sure, I wasn’t in the FBI anymore. I wasn’t in law enforcement. But whoever was doing this was clearly somehow targeting me, somehow sending me a message. In a lot of ways, it was all my fault that these women were getting killed. Plus, I was closest to the case, knew the most about it. The sheriff had even directly asked for my help, which only proved that they were out of their league. I was the reason, the catalyst for everything, and people were being yanked into something they never wanted to be a part of because of me.
Especially Luisa Suarez.
While the poor girl was getting strangled to death, I was probably too busy fucking my distracting stepsister in my car. I was thinking with my cock and not with my head, and someone had lost their life because of it.
Would I have caught the guy before Luisa had died? Probably not. But maybe I could have been better informed, more engaged, and maybe I could have changed something. Maybe Mrs. Suarez would have reached out to me sooner if I were more interested in her. Maybe I could stop the next killing, at least.