Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74604 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74604 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
That is, of course, until I was calling him for help…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Brock
I tried to give myself a little slack.
It was, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.
I knew it from almost the moment I’d laid eyes on her, and she’d given me a once-over that said her mind was on the same wavelength.
Things were absolutely going to get physical.
But it was supposed to happen after the job was done.
Admittedly, though, I wasn’t exactly focusing on the job the way I knew I needed to be.
This wasn’t a cheating spouse.
This was a woman who was nearly murdered.
If someone hadn’t come across her bleeding out on the ground, she likely would be dead right now.
She didn’t need me saying shit about going down on her, telling her that she wore her desire for me on her sleeve, or kissing her in the street of my hometown. Where someone like Clarke could see.
She needed me fucking focusing on the case, finding who it was who’d hurt her, and making him pay for it.
So that was why I pretended to be sleeping in when I heard her moving through her apartment, getting her coffee, putting herself together.
I knew that if I spent too much time in close contact with her, I wasn’t going to be able to keep my mind on the job.
So, I took the chickenshit way out of it.
I avoided her.
Once she was at work, I was free to roam through her apartment again, making myself a coffee, then shutting off all the lights, and closing all of the curtains before grabbing a flashlight, and slowly and methodically working my way through every inch of her house.
She’d said she’d gotten creep vibes from the super. A man who’d been in her house, roaming around.
It wasn’t absurd to wonder if he’d been leaving cameras behind, if that was why she’d found him in her bedroom instead of the kitchen where he belonged.
But after almost an hour of the painstaking project, I was reasonably certain there was nothing hidden in her smoke detectors, alarm clocks, her shower head, in her statues, or anywhere else for that matter.
It was worth a look.
It definitely would have pointed a finger a little more firmly in the super’s direction, anyway.
I watched out the front window, waiting for the man himself to appear to head down the street to grab some lunch.
He wasn’t creepy in the way you could often find a super to be creepy. Greasy-haired, unkempt. Clearly, that kind of inattention to detail would never stand at a building such as Chapel Lane.
The super, a man named Aaron, was five-ten, with a medium build that leaned a little more toward doughy than muscular, dark hair that was receding just at the temples so far, a wide face with a stern-looking brow over dark blue eyes, and the kind of lazy, shoulder-swinging walk that just made him seem kind of cocky.
Taking my cue, I grabbed my phone and my kit, and made my way down the elevator to the main floor, since it didn’t have an option to get off anywhere else.
I held my breath, wondering if the keen-eyed doorman would see me, but he was busy talking to the newspaper guy out front, giving me just enough of a chance to make my way across the lobby and out the door that led to the back alley.
The nice thing about old buildings like Chapel Lane was that the plans were pretty much public access, so I knew that from the back alley was a door that led into the super’s office.
He exited through the front because the alley was a dead-end to both sides thanks to a massive dumpster the building next door had placed at one end so they could toss construction debris into it.
“Nice,” I mumbled to myself as I found an old green metal door that had no fancy bells and whistles to keep anyone out, just an old lock that was child’s play to pick.
I hadn’t exactly been in a lot of super’s offices before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but it was a pretty roomy space with wire racks lining one and a half of the walls. The shelves were loaded down with what you might suspect—endless rolls of paper towels, toilet paper, room sprays, cleaners, and lightbulbs. There was also just about any kind of tool you might need from a saw to a toilet plunger and drain snake.
He had a small desk pushed up against the wall, and when I moved closer, all I found on top of it was some sort of electronic that he was clearly trying to fix.
Nothing overly, well, creepy.
No pictures on the walls. No stash of panties belonging to the female residents. No notes.
It was just the man’s kind of sad, dark, little office.
That didn’t mean, of course, that he was innocent.