"Let me get this straight." Dixon stopped in front of us, his feet planted wide. "I've just had the privilege of deploying half the force to drag up the skeleton of a physical abuser and control the resulting media frenzy. The murderer can't be brought to justice because he's dead, but this will open an inquiry anyway. To top it off, this hasn't accumulated any new evidence for our current inquiry. All you have from it is a notebook full of babble."
My gaze drifted to the scene behind him. Men and women in wetsuits were climbing out of the stream and starting the long process of packing up their equipment. Cassia was standing at the edge of the water with a forensic anthropologist, because Paris was, indeed, just a skeleton.
Finding him hadn't helped our current case, and it had cost us time and resources, and it was going to cost us more by opening a new inquiry. But it had needed doing, both from a policing point of view and a personal one.
DC Laney was in charge of Frankie, and she would have a long afternoon taking a complicated statement, starting with the relationship and ending with the letter. But for now, Frankie was standing as close to the skeleton of her boyfriend as she was allowed. Behind us, journalists and TV reporters were squawking in the mouth of the alley, but she didn't once turn her head towards the commotion. She didn't look at the divers, she didn't look at Cassia, and she didn't look at us. She only had eyes for Paris.
Alex and Sebastian were standing with me, both of them equally distracted. Sebastian was watching Cassia. Alex was deep in thought, examining something only he could see.
I was the first person to drag their gaze back to our governor. "Yes, sir."
Dixon folded his arms. "You do remember what the golden hour is, don't you, Amber?"
"They're a long way past that, sir," Sebastian said.
"And getting further by the minute!" Dixon fixed me with a glare. "If you don't have enough evidence to charge Frankie, go and bloody get some! That's what search warrants are for."
Beside me, Alex inhaled sharply as if someone had just pulled the plug on his thoughts. He squinted at me, his gaze a question.
I shrugged. "That's what I was planning on doing next."
We made an about-turn and crossed the small courtyard to the mouth of the alley. Alex lowered his voice as we put the others behind us. "At least this might be the start of some closure for Frankie. I think that's worth something."
"I know you do. I think it, too."
"I was also thinking that it's strange you know about this place."
"It's right next to Iron Paws. I've always known about it."
We entered the alley. Alex glanced over his shoulder. "I don't think you can see the river from the street. You don't make a habit of coming down here on your own, do you?"
"Not anymore. I used to come down here as a teenager with my boyfriends. It was a secluded place for a goodbye kiss. Or a hello kiss. Whatever."
Alex's eyes darkened. "I thought you were a terror at school?"
"Some boys like a bad girl."
"Do they, now?" His heated gaze met mine.
We slowed to a stop. A tabphone camera flashed.
I realised that we were just five feet away from the journalists, and I stepped back. "Not here. Come on."
***
By the time we turned up at Janet Temple's flat with an army of PRBs and a search warrant, it was the afternoon. Janet seemed lost for words when we explained what we were there for, but she duly pointed out Frankie's room. Alex and I took two of the PRBs straight inside, leaving the others to search the rest of the flat.
Janet finally found her voice as she drifted down the hallway after us. "You won't find anything in there."
She wasn't joking.
The room was a moderate size. A double bed was pushed against the far wall, with a large wardrobe, chest of drawers, dressing table, and desk arranged around it. But the bed was stripped and the pine surfaces were clear. I would bet the drawers were also empty.
I stepped aside. "Alex, tell the PRBs to search it anyway. I'll explain things to Mrs Temple."
Janet took me into the only room that wasn't being searched yet: the kitchen. It was similar in style to Petr and Nora's, but instead of papers and washing up, it contained a storm of sewing supplies. The central island was covered in swathes of red velvet with paper patterns pinned to them. She pulled a stool out and sank onto it. "I saw on Xplora that you've found a body. You think it's Paris Abel's...?"
Hello, Clyde.
"That's right." I sat down. "We haven't officially confirmed his identity yet, but it's where the directions led us."
Alex entered the room, black nitrile gloves already pulled over his long fingers. I nodded discreetly, and he opened the nearest cupboard door.
"Directions?" Janet asked. "What directions?"
"Are you aware of the truth behind Paris Abel's murder?"
She shook her head. "He went missing. No one knows the truth."
"Your husband did." I watched her carefully. "We have evidence to believe that he murdered Paris."
Janet paled. "What?"
"Your sister-in-law kept a diary confessing it all. She witnessed Lonn beating Paris to death."
"No." Janet shook her head. "Not my Lonn..."
"Frankie read the diary not long after her mother passed away, and she believes Lonn told you the truth. Did he?"
"No!" Janet yanked a scrap of velvet towards her and frantically unpicked the pins, her fingers trembling. A few long seconds ticked past. Then she raised her head. "Did Frankie send me the letter?"
"I'm afraid so."
The pins came out more violently, but her voice lowered to a murmur. "No..."
"Frankie doesn't appear to be as close with you as you led us to believe. She comes back to eat with you every Thursday night without fail and she flew in here like a hurricane on Friday. But she doesn't actually care that Lonn's dead, and you've stripped her room bare. Has everything just been for show?"
Janet's fingers stilled over the fabric. She slowly laid the last pin down. "Never on my part. I've tried so hard to make Frankie feel welcome here, even though she's always been distant at best and prickly at worst. I thought it was grief until now."
"Then why does she come home from university every Thursday night?"
"The regular dinners were my idea. I thought she would change with time as she settled in. But she's quiet whenever she comes, and in the holidays, she keeps to herself. She never even unpacks her belongings. The only time she ever comes out of her shell is when Nora visits -- Nora Fitzroy. I assume you've met her at the lab? She was Lonn's assistant."
Alex rummaged around on the counters in the corner of my eye.
"We've met her," I said.
"She drops in every now and again on a weekend, and she occasionally attends the Thursday dinners when her husband is out. Frankie's interested in her work, and she's closer to Nora than she was to us. I suppose I see why, now. Nora has nothing to do with Paris and our family."
Behind her, Alex slammed the last cupboard shut and shook his head at me.
Frankie had erased herself from this flat. We weren't going to find anything.
***
Our second search warrant was for a dorm at Socrico University. It was part of a six-bedroom same-sex flat and locked by a fingerprint system. Alex miraculously overrode it even though he'd lost all the colour in his cheeks on the walk to campus.
As the windowless door swung open, I put my hands on my hips. "Alex, sit down and stay still. I'll search by myself."
Not much wider than a cupboard but unusually deep, Frankie's dorm room felt claustrophobic even before the clutter was considered. Clothes were leaking out of her wardrobe, a glass beaker was bursting with pens, and hair accessories were hanging from the bed's headboard like fabric wind chimes. She'd crammed her whole life into the space.
Alex advanced into the room, past a door on the right that made the front end slimmer still. The space widened a fraction further in, and he sat down on the single bed in the corner. He immediately raised the pillows and looked underneath them. "We're not going to find anything."
"Probably not." I thumbed through a stack of leaflets advertising Rise & Grinder on Frankie's desk. When I put them down, I knocked a huddle of red lipsticks across the surface. "Oh, fuck. How does she find anything in this mess?"
"She's in her first year. So she's eighteen, or maybe nineteen now."
"Does that give her superior searching skills?" I arranged the lipsticks again and swept a few envelopes aside. They revealed an old tablet, the battery flat. Preferring to write on paper was another thing she'd inherited from her uncle.
"No," Alex said, "it means that, while she has a motive, she can't have killed Lonn. She's very small and slim, and it wasn't a quick attack. Lonn struggled violently against his murderer -- and lost."
"It's a good point." I flung open the wardrobe doors and rummaged through the mess of clothes inside. "But no one's coming off the table until we have more evidence."
"And we've got nothing."
I emerged from the wardrobe empty-handed. "Exactly. God, if we just had one more piece of evidence, it would really go a bloody long way."
***
At the end of the day, we returned our spyware to Sten. He said nothing to indicate how he thought we were doing, but I didn't need him to. We would fail if we didn't close the investigation, and the investigation was going nowhere.
It was still bright when we went outside -- and Alex was still pale. His complexion under the artificial lights made him look like a vampire. I linked our hands together with a sigh. "Maybe you should go home and have an early night."
"I'll be fine in half an hour, I promise."
"I know, but it surely must leave you exhausted. And we didn't exactly rest last night." I rushed on with the next bit before he could use that to make me change my mind. "Anyway, I promised Nina that I'd have a catch-up with her, and I need to check on Cassia."
"In other words, you're just too busy to have me." He smiled. "Fine. But I'll still walk you home."
We made the journey in a companionable silence not broken until we reached my block and entered the lift. Just as the doors were closing, Alex's tabphone buzzed. He fished it out, and his gaze softened as he read the message. Then he looked back at me with a mischievous grin.
I felt as if I'd missed a joke that I'd been the butt of. "What?"
"My parents have taken some time off work, and they're coming to Socrico tomorrow. They want to be here when our results are announced." His grin widened. "They're staying at The Diamond Hotel, and they've already booked a table in the restaurant for six o'clock tomorrow night. They're looking forward to meeting you."
"What?" Cold shock descended over me. It was swiftly broken down by panic. "Tomorrow? That's not nearly enough time!"
"For what?" He typed out a reply as the lift doors opened.
"To prepare myself!" My voice was turning shrill. "What are you telling them?"
"That we'll be there." He slid his tabphone into his pocket and dragged me out of the lift. "I had no time to prepare myself when I met your mother. I was carrying your bleeding cat in my coat when she suddenly appeared."
I laughed softly. "Yeah, but Mitzy was getting all the attention then, not you. God, what are they going to say to me?"
While I knew that Alex had their support for the Trials, I wasn't sure if it extended to me. I had, after all, led my sergeant astray.
"They'll love you," Alex said. "If you'd like to make things fair, I could ask them to rearrange the booking for a larger table. I rarely see Cassia unless there's a dead body involved, and I've never talked with your mother for longer than ten minutes. And I've only met your father once."
My heart warmed. That meeting with my father had happened after I'd asked Alex to fix the family tablet. We'd taken it to my parents' flat together, and my sergeant and my father had got along well.
"It's okay," I said. "I'll meet them alone. But...if they like me and if we have a good result to celebrate when the Trials are over, maybe we can bring both families together."
"I think they'd like that. If we pass, they'll become one family anyway." He put his hands on my waist. "Our family."
His words only had a second of processing time, and my heart was in the middle of doing a flip when he kissed me.
The world narrowed, but what I lost in outside awareness was found internally. A shiver rushed through my body, then balled into a fire that nestled low in my pelvis. I was sure that my knees would have given out if Alex hadn't been holding onto me.
Eventually, he pulled back. And staggered.
I grabbed him again, torn between amusement and concern. "I feel the same way. Are you all right?"
"Are you sure you want me to leave after that?" He braced his free hand against the wall and took a deep breath.
"Well, I am worried about you walking home now. You could come in and lie down until you feel better."
His eyes darkened. "Just lie down? I don't think I could promise that today." He backed off. "I'd better go."
"Are you sure that you'll be okay?"
"Yes." He grinned wickedly. "As long as I don't kiss you again."
***
In between feeding Mitzy, showering, and worrying about whether Alex had got home without fainting, I attempted to call Cassia. She was either ignoring me or finishing an unexpected post-mortem because she wouldn't pick up.
Clyde was eager to talk, though. Rumours are flying about your Trial. Why don't you give me an exclusive to set the record straight?
I gave my tabphone the middle finger, before briefly abandoning it to make a cup of tea and find some chocolate. When I sat back down, I called Nina.
My best friend picked up on the first ring. Her hair was woven into her trademark plaits, and she was chilling out in her living room in a lilac tank top and denim shorts. She sat up properly and brought her tabphone so close to her face that she almost went cross-eyed. "The Trials!"
I tried to keep my lips straight. "Is that a new greeting I'm not aware of?"
"Fine." Her voice was tinged with amusement. "Hello, how are you, etcetera. Now tell me about the Trials."
I released my tabphone so that it was hovering in the air. "I wish there was a lot to tell. As per usual, the investigation is far from being a walk in the park. It feels like we're running around in circles."
"Fill me in as if I don't know a thing." Nina reclined on a sofa. "The article didn't tell me much."
"You mentioned that you've been busy."
"Yeah, I've been working overtime."
"Where?"
"Cheeky!" She winked. "At the station, obviously. Well, and a little in the bedroom. Erin's very --"
I covered my ears. "I wish I'd never said anything! I've already heard far more about your antics in the bedroom than any best friend should."
Nina grinned. "Okay, I'll let you take back the floor. Tell me about the investigation."
"The victim was stabbed to death. We still haven't arrested anyone -- but we did find a skeleton in a stream today."
"Whoa! You've skipped from the beginning to the end."
"Now you're hooked."
"I was hooked anyway. Now I'm just confused. How did you get from Victim One to Victim Two?"
"He's not exactly Victim Two. He's Victim One of a different murder that happened two years ago. His name is Paris Abel, and our Victim One beat him to death. We have someone in mind who might have killed our victim in revenge. On the other hand, he might have been murdered for his position at work or for his money. Who bloody knows?"
"Business as usual, then. And how are you performing on the relationship front?"
I bit my lip. "I don't know. We have to wear video-recording contact lenses, microphones, bracelets to monitor our heart rates and blood pressure, and electrodes to monitor some of our brain activity. Alex has been experiencing side effects from the video contacts. So we argued a bit about that at first. Today was all right, though -- apart from possibly being the least progressive one yet." I stopped, remembering my new problem. "Oh, and his parents have fucking invited me to eat dinner with them tomorrow! What am I going to do?"
Nina, bless her, didn't miss a beat. "Can't you record what you're doing some other way?"
"No. Sten won't let us."
"Okay. Then I guess all you can do is try to look after Alex, which I know you will have been. You're a big softie. And why wouldn't his parents like someone who cares for him so deeply? All you need to do when you meet them is be yourself and not panic."
"Nina, I am panicking!"
"I know," she said patiently. "But why?"
"They're supporting Alex because they love him, but what if they hate me for striking up this relationship with him and landing us both in trouble?"
"It takes two to tango."
"Sometimes people forget that. Besides, I'm his superior. Technically, I should have known better."
"Alex is capable of making his own decisions, and he chose you." Nina grinned. "Look, if all else fails, just focus your mind on the food, okay? They probably do some kind of chocolate pudding. Where are you going?"
"The Diamond Hotel."
Her eyes widened. "No way! I heard it's lost some of its popularity since the murders. You can't really use them as a tourist attraction when the blood's barely dried on the floor. Maybe his parents didn't hear about it?"
"They must have. Even if they hadn't seen it on Xplora, Alex would have told them something. Either they don't care, or they think it's weirdly sentimental." I thought of our date at The Silver Star and the fondness I'd felt just looking at the door to the balcony. "Maybe it is. The day we arrested Jasper Jaydes there was also the day when we decided we were doing this."
It was also the day when we'd both almost been shot and I'd fallen down a flight of stairs...but never mind.
"Positive thinking! Great." Nina cleared her throat. "I'm trying so hard not to laugh right now, you know. You sound like a blubbering teenager going on her first date."
"Shut up."
"I'm serious. You're losing yourself. Just be Amber. Alex fell in love with you despite everything your relationship was risking. His parents will know that means you're a very special person."
My tabphone buzzed, and a message from the man himself briefly shared the screen with Nina. I made it home alive.
I smiled.
"That's him, isn't it?" Nina grinned. "I'll leave you to reply."
She ended the call.
"But we didn't even talk about your work!" I said to the empty screen.
It seemed only Alex wanted to talk now. I resigned myself to a reply. Did you get lost on the way?
Very funny, he messaged back. I came in and fell asleep before I remembered to tell you.
I typed, Don't know if I should feel offended or concerned.
Or exhausted myself. I stretched out on the sofa and yawned, suddenly realising just how tired I was. Perhaps I could close my eyes for five minutes...