CHAPTER ONE

 

“Oh my God, Ivy, you’re not going to believe this,” said my assistant Brigit Johansen. She was standing in the doorway to my office, her eyes wide.

“Is it a client?” I said. I was a private detective, and Brigit’s job was to talk to the clients before I talked to them. Well, technically, anyway. These days, I was letting her help out with investigations occasionally as well.

“No,” she said, making a face. “Sorry.”

We hadn’t had a client in weeks.

The last client had been the Clayton Society. I’d solved a murder and proved that their leader, Gunner Bray, was innocent. Since then, crickets.

I sat up in my desk. “Well, what is it?” I had to admit that I was grateful for the distraction. I was pretty bored, honestly. There were only so many times that I could reorganize my files.

She motioned with one hand. “Come look.”

My office was comprised of two rooms. One was my inner office, and the other was the outer office where Brigit’s desk was. There was also a small waiting area out there for clients. When we had clients, that is. I got up out of my desk and followed Brigit into the outer office.

She sat down behind her desk and pointed at her computer screen.

I eased in behind her, looking over her shoulder. On the screen was a big headline. Breaking News. Shooting at Keene College.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Brigit and I had both graduated from Keene College, albeit over a decade apart. It was a nice little college, located in the small town of Keene, where nothing bad happened at all. Ever. This wasn’t possible.

I wanted to sink into a chair, but there wasn’t a chair to sink into. Brigit was sitting in the only available one.

She twisted back to look up at me. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I know they have these things all the time all over the country. But I never thought it would happen at Keene.”

“Yeah, me either,” I said. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t crime in the area. After all, I’d never make it as a private detective if nothing happened around here. But I worked in Renmawr, which was a twenty-minute drive from Keene, and home to Irish mobsters the O’Shaunessys. It was a much bigger city. There was crime here. A shooting here would have made sense, because there were shootings here all the time. Just not in Keene.

Ivy turned back to the screen, scanning the story. “Oh my God,” she said again.

“What?” I said.

“I know that guy.”

“What guy?”

“The shooter. Gilbert Pike. We were in the same general studies class last year.” Brigit had just graduated from Keene a year ago.

“Really?” I said. “What was he like?”

She swallowed. “Normal. Really, really normal.” She clicked back and entered a new search query, and suddenly, the screen filled with a new set of results. There were now dozens of links about this story, and there were pictures too.

“That guy?” I said. “I know him too.”

“What do you mean, you know him?” said Brigit. “How could you know him?”

“I know him from the bar,” I said.

“Oh, of course you know him from the bar,” said Brigit. “Because it’s like your second home.”

“Brigit,” I sighed. “Not this again.”

“I only say stuff because I worry about you. Alcoholism is a disease, you know.”

“Which I do not have. I don’t have a problem with drinking.”

“You drink all the time.”

“Not all the time,” I said. “Only after work.”

“Every day.”

“Brigit.” I glared at her. “Stop it. And while we’re on the subject, I would appreciate it if you’d stop leaving those little Alcoholics Anonymous flyers on my desk. I’m not going to a meeting, because I don’t have a problem.”

“Look, there’s some reason that you got fired from the police department,” said Brigit. “It’s probably because you drank too much. I mean, it’s not as if you can drag your ass into your own office before noon. I have a hard time picturing you eating donuts and drinking coffee.”

“Brigit, I was a homicide detective when I got fired. I wasn’t a uniform on the street eating donuts.” But she was kind of right. About the getting up early stuff. That had been difficult when I was working for the force. Thing was, it wasn’t the drinking that was the problem. The problem was—

No, you know what? Fuck that. I didn’t have a problem. The police department of Renmawr was sexist and stuck in the dark ages. That was why I didn’t have a job anymore, why I was slumming it here in this private detective gig. Not that I was bitter. Well. Maybe a little bit.

I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to think about this anymore. And when I opened them up, I was staring at the picture of Gilbert Pike again. I hadn’t known his name, of course. “I didn’t know him well,” I said. “I knew him well enough to say hi. We stood next to each other at the bar one night and talked about the weather once. He seemed like a nice guy.”

I wasn’t going to add the fact that I’d flirted fairly shamelessly with the guy. So, he was over ten years my junior. So what? That was kind of my problem. Hooking up with college co-eds. Hooking up with anyone really. Sometimes, I just needed sexual healing. And in a college town like Keene, there was usually someone willing if you waited long enough, waited until the bar was emptying out and there weren’t a lot of prospects left. Not that it was really a problem problem. I did it because I enjoyed it, at least that’s what I told myself. Sometimes, I had to admit, it felt more like a compulsion and less like a desire, but I only admitted that to myself in my very dark moments.

I’d never slept with the fresh-faced boy who’d shot his classmates. But I could have.

I swallowed again. “So, what happened? Are there casualties?”

“Yeah,” said Brigit. “Five people are dead, not counting Gilbert. He shot himself too.”

I winced. “That’s awful. Anyone wounded?”

She shook her head.

“So, he was good at it, then. He tried to kill people, and he succeeded.”

Brigit scrolled through the search results, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense. He’s not the type.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Well enough,” she said. “I wasn’t close with him or anything, but we did a project together for class. Usually, the guys who shoot up their schools are anti-social and psychopathic. He wasn’t either.”

I chuckled grimly. “Oh, come on, Brigit. School shootings have come a long way. It’s not just for pimply-faced trench coats anymore.”

She looked up at me. “I just can’t believe it, you know? Gilbert was a nice guy. Sweet and normal and happy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I would have said so too. But whenever I saw him, he was always drinking, and that tends to put someone in a good mood. For all I know, he was drinking his troubles away. And—to be fair—you haven’t really talked to him since you were in class with him, and that was over a year ago, right?”

She nodded.

“So, maybe things changed for him. You know what it’s like in your early twenties. You don’t have any perspective. You think that bad stuff is going to last forever. You don’t realize that things will get better.” Even as I said this, however, I wondered if it were true. In my case, my life had started going downhill when I was kicked off the police force, and it hadn’t really ever gotten better. I grimaced.

“Hey,” said Brigit. “I’m in my early twenties.”

“So, then you understand,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“I’m only saying that he might be completely different now than when you knew him.”

“I guess.” She sighed. “I feel so awful. Everyone will be mourning the other victims, and no one will be sad about Gilbert. They’ll just say he was a murderer, and they won’t remember any of the good things about him.”

“Well, killing five people is a pretty big deal.”

“Yeah.” She clicked down the internet browser and stared at her desktop glumly. Then she brightened and turned to me. “Hey, Ivy, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’ll come to my art show.”

I was taken aback. “Geez, I’m going to get whiplash from that subject change.”

She laughed. “Sorry. I just keep forgetting to ask you and I suddenly remembered. Will you come? I know art really isn’t your thing or whatever, but I don’t really have anyone coming, and I would feel stupid if no one showed up, and you usually don’t have plans in the evening, so—”

“I’ll come to your art show, Brigit,” I said.

She grinned. “Thanks.”

“The thing is, even though we work together, I feel as if we’ve gotten closer and closer over the past few weeks, especially since we almost died together, and I like to think of us as friends just as much as colleagues.”

“Uh huh,” said Brigit, who was pulling back up the search results and not even listening to me.

I glared at the back of her head. Trust me to get all mushy on her just when she wasn’t even appreciating it. I backed away, heading for my office.

“Where are you going?” said Brigit.

I shrugged at her. “I’m going back to work.”

“How can you work at a time like this?” she said. “All I can do is think about the families of those kids, especially Gilbert’s family. I can’t imagine how they must be feeling right now. Did they have any clue that he was capable of what he did?”

* * *

I furrowed my brow at Miles Pike, who was crumpled in the corner of The Remington at six o’clock in the evening, a full beer and two empty shot glasses sitting in front of him.

He noticed me and raised a hand in a half-hearted attempt at a wave.

I went to him. “What the hell are you doing here?” I had been avoiding him for weeks, ever since I’d embarrassed myself by thinking there was something going on between us when there wasn’t. Things between Pike and me were really complicated and confusing. We used to have a relationship, but we’d broken up around the same time that I’d been fired from the police force. It had a lot to do with the fact that I had what Pike called a “sex addiction.” The department agreed that I did and that it was interfering with my ability to do my job. I was let go due to “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Anyway, previous to the big public blowout spotlighting my extracurricular activities, Pike and I had an understanding when it came to sex in our relationship.

See, Pike didn’t like sex. He called himself asexual and said he’d never had any interest in doing the deed.

Of course, that didn’t work for me. I had to get laid now and then. Just to blow off some steam.

Anyway, while we were dating, I slept with other guys. I didn’t form any actual attachments to them or anything. They were just there for physical pleasure. I was emotionally attached to Miles Pike and him only.

It wasn’t an ideal setup for a relationship, but I was okay with it.

Thing was, Pike really wasn’t. He had resented the fact that I was sleeping with other men the entire time, and he just hadn’t said anything.

So, we’d broken up.

And since then, things had been pretty tumultuous between the two of us. I still had feelings for him, but we couldn’t really be together, no matter how we tried. Pike had even tried taking testosterone supplements to see if that made him want to have sex more. We ended up actually doing it for the first time a few weeks ago.

It was the best sex of my life—more real and earnest than anything I’d ever felt before. But Miles had hated it, and he told me he never wanted to do it ever again.

That was the last time I’d spoken to him.

“Have you been living under a rock all day?” he said. “Didn’t you see it on the news?”

“What? The shooting at Keene?” I said. Now that he mentioned it, I would have expected the bar to be a little more crowded considering. Nothing like a tragedy to bring out the drinkers in town. Still, it was pretty early, so maybe they’d be fading out of the woodwork in a few hours.

He raised his eyebrows at me.

I cocked my head. “He had your last name, didn’t he?” I sat down in front of Miles at the table. “He wasn’t…?”

“My brother,” Pike said into his beer bottle. “My little brother.”

I felt cold all over. “Miles…” I reached across the table to touch him.

He allowed me to grip his hand for a second, and then he pulled it away.

I retracted my hand, feeling like an idiot. Why couldn’t I ever remember how much Miles hated being touched? Even at times when it seemed like he might want to be comforted, he didn’t like it. And I always wanted to touch him.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“No,” I said. “I should know better. I should—”

“I’m a freak,” he said, taking a long drink of his beer. “Any other person in the universe would want someone’s hand on his during a time like this. But when you touch me, all I can think about is everything else you’ve been touching.”

I drew myself up, feeling offended. “Hey, I haven’t been sleeping with anyone else today. It’s only six o’clock. I’ve been working. Give me some credit.”

He gave me a wide-eyed look of confusion. “I meant germs, Ivy. Did you wash your hands after you ate? Have you rubbed your eyes lately? Touched your mouth? Do you have any idea how many germs are in a person’s mouth?”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Germs.” Miles was a neat freak, but I’d never heard him go off on this topic before. He was starting to sound a little crazy.

He let out a harsh laugh. “Listen to me. Usually, I can keep this under control. I force myself to face it when I have to, force myself not to wear gloves or carry around little wipes to clean everything. I want to do that, but I don’t let myself, and I’m as close to normal as I can be. But right now, I’m just… I’m upset, and I can’t stop thinking about—”

“I’ll get you another shot,” I said. “Bourbon okay?”

“Please,” he said, rubbing his forehead.

I went up to the bar and ordered Miles’s shot. I also got one for myself and a beer chaser. I didn’t usually drink liquor, but this situation called for it. I went back to the table and handed him the shot. I sat down. “I can’t believe that you never told me you had a brother.”

He downed the shot. “Two brothers, actually. Both younger.” He eyed my drinks. “You still drinking that piss beer, huh?”

My favorite beer was Miller High Life. It was the champagne of beers. I liked it, and I didn’t care what anyone said. I took a swig of it. “It’s not piss beer. It’s good.”

He made a face and took a drink of his own beer, which was a Goose Island India Pale Ale.

I downed my shot and made my own face. “Do you want to talk about your brother?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked at the ceiling. “No. I don’t know. When I found out, I tried to stay at work, but I couldn’t focus and the captain eventually told me to clear out. Said I wasn’t doing anyone any good there. I know she was right, but I still didn’t want to leave, because the minute I did, I’d be faced with the fact that I don’t have anything else in my life besides work. I don’t have a wife or a family or friends or anything. Except, you know, you.” He looked at me.

I licked my lips. “I thought we weren’t—”

“Damn it, I shouldn’t have come here. I didn’t know where else to go. I knew you’d show up here eventually. I was just hoping you wouldn’t already be here with that professor boyfriend of yours—”

“Crane isn’t my boyfriend. We’re just friends.”

“You fuck him, though, right?”

I sighed.

He took another drink of his beer. “I’m not close with my family. I’ve done my best to distance myself from them as much as I possibly could. But my little brother? Gilbert? Ever since he decided to come to Keene College instead of going Ivy League like my family wanted, I’ve been looking out for him. We spend time together almost every week. And I never saw this coming. I never thought…” He picked up his beer again. This time, he upended the bottle into his mouth and finished the rest of the liquid in one long drink.

“Miles, I’m so sorry.” My heart was breaking for him. I reached out to touch him again but remembered just in time and simply set my hand down on the table.

He looked down at my hand, which was now inches from his body. He shut his eyes. His voice came out scratchy. “Can we… can we get out of here? Maybe go back to your place?”

I nodded. “We can do that.”

* * *

The first time Miles and I were alone together—really alone—it was weeks into our dating. Miles always had some kind of excuse at the end of the evening as to why we couldn’t spend any more time together. He would say that we had a big case to work on, and that he needed rest. Back then, we were partners. It was before he’d been promoted to lieutenant. He’d say that he’d had a restless sleep the night before and yawn a lot. He’d say that he had to clean his bathroom. Really.

Anyway, it was weeks before Miles ran out of excuses and we ended up together at my place.

Miles was nervous the whole time. My place wasn’t exactly the cleanest. It wasn’t a pig pen or anything, but I wasn’t particularly concerned about keeping things tidy. There was a tangle of clothes on my recliner, because I tended to throw off my work clothes when I got into the living room and leave them there. And I hadn’t vacuumed in a while. The sink had a few dirty glasses in there, but nothing major. All in all, everything looked pretty good, at least in my opinion. But Miles didn’t seem to want to sit down on my couch or be near me or anything like that.

He was sweating, and he kept his hands in his pockets.

I remember that I kissed him, and he kissed back, and it was wonderful.

But that he ran out of the room afterward and started washing my dishes. Said he just couldn’t handle seeing them sitting there like that.

I guess I should have realized there was something up with Miles back then. But I was so in love with him. I brushed it off as quirky. Besides, we were good together. We were the best set of detectives on the force. We were both focused. Once we got on a case, we thought of nothing but that. Many nights we’d be out late, working the angles, pounding the pavement, or just sitting in the office going over the specifics. Neither of us could handle leaving things undone. We made sure to get it done right, every time. And because we were partners, we spent all our time together. We worked the same cases. We cared about the same things. It was only a matter of time before a bit of romance sparked.

But it didn’t last. And after it was over, I really didn’t know what to do without him. He was everything to me, always had been. I missed him all the time. There was a constant ache for him. Sometimes, I was able to forget what the ache was, but I always felt it.

After that first time in my apartment, we always spent time at Miles’s place, which was clean and neat. The only other time we’d ever been alone together at my place, Miles had come over to try to get it on with me, and there had been disastrous prematureness, after which he’d fled in embarrassment.

So, anyway, I was a little worried about going back to my place. I knew that Miles wasn’t comfortable there, and it wasn’t as if I’d cleaned recently. The moment we got in the door, I ran ahead of him, scooping up arm loads of clothes and taking them to the hamper, grabbing some empty candy wrappers and putting them in the trash.

“You don’t have to do that,” said Miles.

I bit my lip. “I can vacuum if you want?”

“Ivy.” He laughed a little. Then he looked around the living room. “Would you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Totally yes.” I got the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. It was a nice one that I’d found at Goodwill by luck. It was a canister vacuum, and with the proper attachment, it was excellent on hardwood floors, which I mostly had. I knew that some people did crazy things like polishing all their hardwood floors, but in my book, vacuuming was enough. It got up all the lint balls and hair and other nasties.

I swept the living room pretty quickly, running the vacuum all over the place—over the tops of the chairs and my couch, up in the corners of the room to get the cobwebs, over my drapes. It was the way I always cleaned. My vacuum cleaner was my all-purpose cleaning tool. It picked up everything.

When I turned off the vacuum, Miles was settled on the couch. “You vacuum like I do. I always vacuum everything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you probably do it once a week, and I only vacuum if someone’s coming over.”

“Once a day,” said Miles. He rested his head on the back of the couch. “Is that weird?”

I decided not to answer that. “Um, we need more booze.”

He sat forward. “God, yes. Please tell me you’ve got something besides High Life in your house.”

“You’re in luck,” I said. “I’ve got two bottles of wine.”

“Wine? Do you even drink wine?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “And last weekend, I was at a wine tasting, and I bought a couple of bottles.” I didn’t want to mention that I’d been there with Crane, because I thought that would just set Pike off. “Anyway, they’re both white. That okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “At this point, I really don’t care as long as it’s alcoholic.”

I poured us some wine and came back out into the living room. I sat down next to him.

He took a drink and then set down his glass. He looked at me. “You’re sweet to do that.”

“What?” I said.

“Clean up for me,” he said. “You probably shouldn’t do it, because it just reinforces my neurosis, but it’s sweet that you did. You do care about me, and I know I said you didn’t, but it isn’t true.”

I didn’t know what to say.

He seized my wrist and tugged me across the couch, so that we were very close.

My breath caught in my throat. I was near enough to smell him—the clean fragrance of the soap he used and the masculine scent that was just him.

He reached up to trace the outline of my jaw. His voice was a whisper. “I care about you too.”

And then his mouth was on mine. He tasted like bourbon and white wine and desperation, and I was drowning in him.

Abruptly, he pulled away.

I sat back, my fingers going to my lips.

Miles got up. He picked up his wine glass and started to pace. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started something that I can’t finish.”

I didn’t say anything.

He gulped wine. “He was so young, and so… good. Ivy, he was good.”

For a split second, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I remembered his brother. The reason we were here in the first place. The reason why Miles was falling apart.

He stopped pacing and looked at me. “I never told you much about my family, but they aren’t… good. My family is rich and old fashioned. They use people. They step on people. They don’t care about anything except how they appear to the world. I didn’t want anything to do with them, so I left. You should have heard my father when he found out that I was going to be a police officer. He was livid. But I stood up to them. I broke off. And then Gilbert did the same thing. He told me that he couldn’t stand being part of that. He wanted to break free of all of it too. I was helping him. When he had issues, he called me instead of my father. But he didn’t have many issues. He seemed fine. The last time I talked to him, I could swear…”

I got up and went to him. “Miles, I’m so sorry.”

There were tears leaking out of his eyes. “He was my little brother. I remember when he was born, when my mother came home from the hospital with him, and he was all wriggly and red with these enormous blue eyes, and I held him, and I thought that I wanted to do whatever I could to protect that little guy. My brother. My baby brother.” He let out a strangled sob.

I reached for him.

And then stopped. He didn’t like to be touched.

He wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

We were quiet.

I didn’t know what else to say. I’d said it before, but it was the only thing I could say. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I was younger then,” he said quietly, “and when I held him, I didn’t worry about being contaminated by the other person. I didn’t worry about germs and dirt and sweat. I want that again. Only it seems like the older I get the worse it gets. The harder it is to face it.”

“I didn’t know,” I murmured. I truly hadn’t understood the depths of this thing before. I thought it was about sex. Now I realized that the sex part was only a symptom, not the disease.

“I want…” He took a shaky a breath. “I want to hold you, like I held my baby brother all those years ago. I want you to hold me. Just be in each other’s arms, nothing else. Can you… can we do that?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

* * *

We slept entwined on the couch, because that was where we fell asleep. Miles’s arms tight around me, engulfing me in his scent. His strong, taut body pressed close to me. It was sweet torture, honestly. I wanted him so badly. But I didn’t even attempt to try to seduce him. It wasn’t the time. It wasn’t appropriate. And—for once in my life—I was able to do the appropriate thing.

When I woke, the spring sun was beaming in through the windows, and Miles was trying his damndest to get free from me.

“Sorry,” I muttered, pulling my limbs away from his.

“I just need the bathroom,” he said, stumbling off the couch and disappearing down the hall.

I sat up straight. My head was pounding. Ugh. Wine hangover. And I hadn’t even had that much wine the night before. Maybe two glasses. I guessed it was because of the combination of all the alcohol that I was feeling the effects. I hugged a pillow and gazed down the hall. Wine hangover notwithstanding, this was kind of awesome. I’d never woken up with Miles before. I’d never seen him in the morning.

He came out of the bathroom. “Do you ever clean in there?”

“Um, sure,” I said. “If I’m going to have company. Next time, give me some fair warning.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I need to go. I’m going to be late for work.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I know they aren’t going to want you to come in today. You’ll be no good to anyone while you’re grieving.”

He made a face. “Right. Of course they wouldn’t let me work.”

“Come to breakfast with me,” I said. “There’s a nice place in town where I always eat. After all that drinking, you could use some real food in your stomach.”

“Breakfast? Like this?” He looked down at his crumpled clothes. “I feel disgusting. I need a shower.”

“I have a shower,” I said. “I’ll even spray it down and run a sponge over it if that will make you feel better. And I think I have a t-shirt and sweats that would fit you if you want different clothes.”

He shook his head. “I can’t… Look, last night I was drunk, and I might have said things I shouldn’t.”

My face fell.

“Don’t be like that,” he said, his voice softening. “I didn’t mean…”

Silence.

“What did you mean?” I said. “Because it sounded like you were trying to let me down easy. And if that’s the case, don’t bother. I’m a big girl. If you’re not interested in me, I can take it. Don’t try and sugar coat it.”

“That’s not—” He let out an exasperated breath and shut his eyes. He squared his shoulders and tried to speak again.

But before he could get anything out, there was a knock on the door.

I furrowed my brow. Who the hell could that be? No one ever knocked on my door. I held up a finger at Miles. “One minute. It’s probably a Jehovah’s Witness or something. I’ll get rid of them.” I hurried out to open the door.

A man in a suit stood there. He was probably in his sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair. He flared his nostrils as he looked me up and down, as if he was smelling something bad.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“Where’s Miles?” he said.

“You’re looking for Miles?” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

He raised his voice. “Miles! Get out here now. You’re through disgracing this family. We’ve had enough of that just recently, thank you very much.”

Family? Wait, was this Miles’s—

“Dad?” Miles appeared behind me. “What are you doing here?”

“Collecting you,” said Miles’s father. “You were nowhere to be found yesterday, when you should have been with your family. You have no idea how much trouble I’ve gone through trying to track you down. I didn’t want to believe you were here with her, but I was saddened to discover it was true.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You know who I am? Because Miles never talks about you, so I don’t—”

“Your fame precedes you, yes. You’re the woman who was fired from the police department. My son’s former partner. The sex addict.”

I flinched.

Miles stepped between me and his father. “Leave Ivy alone.” He sounded both disgusted and embarrassed, and from the way he was looking at his dad, I could see he was directing both of those emotions at that man, not at me. Which was a relief, really, because it wasn’t as if I hadn’t made him feel those things before.

“Gladly,” said Miles’s father. “Just as soon as you come with me. I promised your mother that I would find you and bring you home. You’re not going to make me a liar, are you?”

Miles folded his arms over his chest. “Ivy and I were going to go to breakfast, actually.”

As happy as it made me to hear him say that, I was fairly sure that he wasn’t interested in going to breakfast with me two minutes ago. He was just using that as an excuse to piss off his dad.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s okay. You should be with your family at a time like this.”

Miles gave me an incredulous look.

I raised my hands, palms up. “I’m just saying that, generally, after a death in the family, you would visit with your relatives. When my parents died, every distant cousin I’d ever had surfaced and brought platters of cold cuts.”

Miles glared at me for a minute. Then he sighed, and as he did, he seemed to deflate. He turned back to his father. “All right, fine. I’ll go with you. For Mother.”

“Good,” said his father.

Miles turned back to me. “I’ll be in touch, Ivy. I promise.”

* * *

The dog was barking.

Above my head, in the apartment over my office, the dog was barking.

Again.

I sat there, grimacing at the ceiling. I wanted to kill Kitty Richards.

Mangle her. Mutilate her. Stuff her body in a storm drain.

Okay, maybe that was putting it a little harshly. Kitty Richards was a perfectly horrible person, but she didn’t deserve death. And besides, I wasn’t a killing kind of person. I caught murderers. I didn’t commit murder myself. So, I wasn’t actually going to hurt her.

But, boy, right then, I wanted to.

The dog belonged to Kitty. Her name was Fluffy, but I never called her that, because it seemed like a very undignified sort of thing to call a dog. Dogs were noble sorts of creatures, protectors and friends to mankind for eons upon eons. (I’d seen this special on television once about monkeys that domesticated dogs, so it could be that our relationship with dogs reached very, very far back into the past. It would explain why we were such perfect companions for each other if we really had evolved together.) Anyway, I didn’t think dogs should be called things like Fluffy. Furthermore, I didn’t think dogs should be kept locked up in tiny bathrooms over top of my office.

Because the walls were thin in this building. Very, very thin. And I could hear that damned dog barking. She’d bark all day. I knew she would, because it had happened before. And I didn’t like it.

I’d been given a bit of respite from the dog lately. My last case—the Clayton Society—had taken me out of the office most of the time, and I hadn’t had to tangle with Kitty or the dog.

But now, here I was, back again, listening to the dog bark and whine above me. It was driving me absolutely batty. And that was what my anger was all about, after all. I was frustrated because I couldn’t think with a dog barking away. It was about me and my sanity. The fact that the poor dog was locked up in a room the size of a closet with no way out, when dogs should be able to run around in the bright sun and breathe fresh air… That was just a side note.

I wasn’t a bleeding heart for animals or anything. I just thought that animals should be, you know, respected. Well cared for.

Anyway, in the past, I had gone up to Kitty’s apartment, broken in, and freed the dog to the porch, so that she didn’t have to be locked up in the bathroom. I’d used the spare key, finding it in all the places that Kitty moved it to, and when she got rid of the spare key, I used my lock picks to get into the apartment.

But as of late, Kitty had installed three different deadbolts on the door in addition to a security system, which meant that if I tried to break into her apartment, an alarm sounded and the authorities were called. I’d barely talked myself out of getting arrested last time, so I wasn’t going to be able to get up there and free the dog this time.

Last week, the dog had been put in the bathroom all afternoon, and I’d eventually just left and gone home early.

Today, I was starting to lose my mind. The dog had already been barking for an hour, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Brigit thought all of this was very funny. When I broke in last time and the alarm went off, she fairly gloated. She had warned me that I shouldn’t break into people’s homes, hadn’t she? In Brigit’s mind, I was learning my lesson.

I wandered out into the outer office. The barking was slightly quieter out here but only slightly.

Somehow, it didn’t seem to be bothering Brigit at all. She was perched on her office chair, staring at her computer screen and sucking iced coffee through a straw.

“Do you hear this?” I said.

She looked up, raising her eyebrows. “You didn’t tell me that Gilbert Pike was Miles’s brother.”

“That’s because I didn’t know,” I said. “The dog is really barking. You can’t tell me that’s not annoying you.”

“You didn’t know?” she said. “And yet you don’t sound surprised.”

“I didn’t know yesterday. I found out last night when Miles showed up at The Remington,” I said. “About the dog. I need to do something about this. Do you think the alarm would go off if I went through one of Kitty’s windows?’

“You saw Miles last night? I thought you weren’t speaking to him.” Brigit leaned forward at this. She was always eager for news about my relationship with Miles, even though it was none of her damned business.

“Yeah, we drank wine at my place, but he left to be with his family this morning,” I said. “I don’t think the window thing will work. I’d have to get all the way up to the third floor, and I don’t really have access to a ladder. There is that shed outside the building, though. I wonder if there’s a ladder in there…”

“This morning?” said Brigit. “Oh my God, did he stay with you last night?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it wasn’t like that. We’re not together or anything. He made that very clear to me this morning.”

“Oh, Ivy.” Brigit made a sympathetic face. “I’m so sorry. You were there for him in the face of this tragedy, and then he shuts you down? He liked used you.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not how it is. Really, it’s fine. Miles is a complicated person, and the two of us together is complicated.” I wandered over to the window to peer down at the shed that I was talking about. I wished I could know if there was a ladder in there without breaking into the shed. Which I’d have to do. The good news was that the padlock on it would be dead easy to pick, but the bad news was—

“I saw how heartbroken you were after last time,” said Brigit. “Seriously, he can’t just toy with you like that. You deserve better. You’re a good person, Ivy, and you deserve to be happy. I know he’s going through hell right now with his brother, but that’s no excuse for being an asshole.”

“He’s not an asshole.” I turned away from the window. There had to be an easier way to deal with this Kitty situation. One that didn’t involve breaking and entering. And one that would be permanent.

“Look, you can make excuses for him, because you love him, but I’m allowed to be annoyed at the guy,” said Brigit. “That’s what friends do, you know? I’m here to call him an asshole for you while you say that he’s just under a lot of strain. Let me call him an asshole for you.”

I headed back to my office. “I’d really rather you just stayed out of it. Knowing Miles, it was just an anomaly that he even showed up to see me yesterday, and I won’t hear from him for weeks until he’s got some missing persons case to kick over to us.”

She got up from her desk and followed me. “Well, that’s not cool. He can’t keep stringing you along like that.”

I picked up the phone and cradled it between my ear and my shoulder. “Honestly, Brigit, you have no idea the history here. If you knew the things that I’d done to Miles, you might be a little easier on him.”

“Well, I don’t know, because you won’t tell me anything,” said Brigit. “You keep me all locked out of your life.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know, I don’t hear you sharing all your deep, dark secrets.” I paged through the phone book on my desk with one hand, searching for a phone number.

“I would tell you anything you wanted to know, but you aren’t interested.” She put her hands on her hips.

“And you are way too interested in me.” Aha! There was the number. I put my finger on it to make sure I didn’t lose my spot.

“I’m not.” She was angry. “I have a healthy interest, because I care about you. Because we’re friends. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Brigit.” I rolled my eyes, dialing on the phone.

“Well, aren’t we?”

I held up a finger. “I’m on the phone.”

“You’re calling someone while we’re talking?” she said.

“ASPCA,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Hi,” I said. “I’d like to report an incident of animal cruelty.”

Brigit’s jaw dropped open. “You cannot be serious. Keeping a dog in a bathroom—”

“My neighbor keeps her dog penned up in a space that’s far too small for the animal,” I said. “I’m fairly convinced that the poor thing doesn’t have proper access to food and water either.”

“Would you like to lodge a formal complaint?” said the voice on the phone.

I grinned. “Boy, would I ever.”

Brigit shook her head at me in shock.

* * *

After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon being lectured by Brigit about how awful a person I was for lying to the ASPCA. I kept interrupting her to explain that I wasn’t lying. There was absolutely animal cruelty going on up there. I tried to remind Brigit that she had never actually seen the bathroom in which Fluffy was locked up in. It was small. Really small. But Brigit said that stuff didn’t matter. The truth was that I was harassing Kitty Richards and that I was going to get in trouble for it.

Whatever.

She chased me back into my inner office, still going on and on about why I was terrible. I eventually had to send her back to her desk and pointedly close the door.

Once I did that I could still hear her out there, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. Instead, she was sighing a lot and swearing under her breath.

I turned music on so that I wouldn’t have to hear her.

Brigit yelled something through the door at me, that I was passive-aggressive or something.

I ignored her.

Then she was banging on the door.

“What?” I said.

“Are you still coming to my art show?” she wanted to know.

I went over to the office door and opened it.

She winced as the loud sounds of Eddie Money poured out of the office. I liked to listen to classic rock. Brigit only liked country music.

“Of course I’m still coming to your art show. Why would you ask me that?”

“It’s only that you’re angry with me now, and—”

“I’m angry with you? You’re the one who’s ripping me a new asshole.”

She took a deep breath, and I knew that opening the door to her had been a bad idea, because she was about to start right in on why everything I’d done was so wrong and immoral and everything else.

And then I was saved, because Miles walked into the office.

He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and he looked incredibly informal, which wasn’t typical for him. At work, he always wore a suit, and the most he usually did to “get comfortable” was to take off his tie and jacket and unbutton the top button of his dress shirt.

I hurried over to intercept him. “Miles. You’re here. How are you?” Which was a stupid thing to ask, because he wasn’t okay. Of course he wasn’t okay. His brother had shot people and then shot himself. Miles must be feeling terrible, and he probably didn’t want to go into that. I was an idiot.

But he said, “Fine.”

I raised my eyebrows.

He grimaced.

Brigit rushed over to the two of us. “Mr. Pike, gosh, I’m so sorry to hear about Gilbert. I just want you to know that he was always a really great guy when I knew him, and I just can’t imagine what happened.”

He looked her up and down. “Thanks. Um, who are you?”

“That’s Brigit,” I said. “She works with me. You’ve met her like five times.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” He turned back to me. “Actually, what she was saying is why I’m here.”

“It is?” said Brigit, sounding excited. “Wait. How?”

He ran a hand over his face. “Is there somewhere I can sit down? I just feel kind of wiped out. I’m still hungover from last night, I think.”

That was why he should have come to breakfast with me. I would have fixed him right up. I knew the secret to after-drinking food. And it wasn’t, as some people thought, grease. Instead it was three things: healthy carbs to soak up the alcohol, protein for energy, and rehydration. Lots of water, of course, but fruit was also a great idea. Course, it didn’t make you feel like a hundred bucks afterward or anything. Nothing did that.

“Of course,” I said. “Why don’t you come back to my office?” I led him back into the inner office, where I had chairs set up in front of my desk for clients.

He sat down.

Brigit had followed us and was hovering in the doorway. I was about to shoo her away.

But then Miles said, “I want to hire you.”

“Hire me?” I said, motioning Brigit inside. “For what?”

“Well, you’re a detective, right?”

“You know that,” I said.

“And even though sometimes you end up solving murder cases, a lot of times, you solve other kinds of cases. Like whether or not people are cheating on their husbands and stuff, yeah?”

“Miles, you don’t have a wife for me to check up on,” I said. Then I gave him a sharp look. “You don’t, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Look, I want to hire you to try to figure out what drove Gilbert to do this. Like Brigit said, he was a great guy. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would just start shooting people. I need to know what happened. And it’s not something that I can do myself. If there was some way that I could make this a homicide investigation, then I could go digging on my own. But there’s nothing there to investigate, so there’s nothing I can do. I need someone else to look into it for me. Someone I can trust.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, obviously, I’d be happy to look into it, Miles.”

“You’ll find me answers,” he said.

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

“And I’ll pay you.”

“Oh,” I said, shaking my head, “something of this scope, on a lieutenant’s salary… Maybe we can work out like an adjusted rate or something.”

“I have money, Ivy. My family has money. Just tell me how much this would cost.”

I looked at Brigit. “Tell him our daily rate.”

Brigit told him.

His eyes got wide. “Wow.”

“I am the detective that brought down Ralph the Hatchet,” I said. “Besides, I get that much money for a few weeks in a row, and then sometimes I go a few more weeks without a job. So, it balances out.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Miles, recovering. “I’m going to pay you, Ivy. Just say that you’ll take the case.”

“I’ll take the case,” I said.

* * *

“No, this is his side of the room,” I said to Brigit, pointing. “That side is the roommate’s.”

“You sure?” she said. “That side has a poster of a big snowy mountain, and Gilbert liked snowboarding.”

“I’m sure,” I said, lifting up his notebook from his desk. His name was written in the upper right hand corner, along with his phone number. I guess he’d done that in case he ever lost it.

We were starting our investigation in Gilbert’s dorm room, which was so messy, it would have made Miles’s palms sweat. Gilbert lived in a suite-style dorm with three other guys. There was a kitchen and living room area, a bathroom, and then two bedrooms, each occupied by two guys each. The sides were both filled with identical furniture—a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a dresser, but the two roommates had organized them differently, so the room wasn’t a mirror image of itself. In its messiness, however, it was essentially homogeneous. Both beds were strewn with clothing. The floor was as well. Both desks were piled with a mixture of books, notebooks, and dirty dishes.

The roommate, however, had a computer on his.

Shouldn’t Gilbert have a computer too? I started to look through the stuff on the desk more closely, pushing aside papers and textbooks. “Where’s Gilbert’s computer?”

Brigit turned back to me from the wardrobe, which appeared to be mostly empty. Unsurprising since all the clothes were on the floor. “What?”

“He should have one, right?” I said. “All kids these age have computers, don’t they? Hell, when I was in college, practically everyone had one, so he’s got to have one somewhere, right?”

She furrowed her brow. “Well, maybe he only had a tablet or something.”

I raised my eyebrows. “For college? Is he going to type his papers on a tablet?”

“Good point,” she said. She began throwing aside the covers on the bed. “It’s got to be here somewhere. Maybe he had a laptop he browsed on in bed or something.”

I got down on my knees to look under the desk. “The thing is, we could find all kinds of stuff out about him from his computer. Maybe he was sending people emails about how he was feeling or something.”

Brigit grinned. “Maybe he kept an electronic journal.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Well, not really,” she said. “But it would be awesome if he did. I mean, then we’d have all the answers right there.”

“What we really need is his phone,” I said. “But I bet he had his phone on him during the shooting.”

“Yeah,” said Brigit. “But if it’s evidence, couldn’t Miles get it for us, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I said. I straightened and went over to his dresser. I began opening drawers, which were miraculously still full of clothes even though the floor and bed were covered in clothes. How many articles of clothing did Gilbert have?

The door opened. “Hey, what are you doing?”

Brigit and I both turned to see a guy entering the room. He looked about twenty. He was wearing a baseball cap.

“Ivy Stern,” I said. “I’m investigating the situation with Gilbert Pike, and we have permission from the family to search his room.”

“Oh,” said the guy. “Okay. Well, I was just going to get some clothes and stuff.”

“You the roommate?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “My name’s Jory. I just, uh, I can’t sleep in here right now, you know? It’s too creepy, knowing that he did what he did. So, I’m going to get some of my stuff and go crash with my girlfriend for a few nights. But I can wait until you’re done.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Can we ask you some questions about Gilbert?”

“Well, I guess so,” he said.

“Were you two close?” asked Brigit. “Sometimes people just end up as roommates because they need someone to live with. Was it like that with you two?”

“No, we were friends,” said Jory. “I was probably his best friend. I just…” He looked down at the floor, almost as if he might start crying. But then he straightened his shoulders and raised his gaze. “It’s really hit me kind of hard, you know?”

“What can you tell us about his state of mind in the past few weeks?” I asked. “Anything that, in hindsight, you can see was pointing towards him doing this?”

“That’s just it,” said Jory. “He would never have done this. And in the past few weeks, he didn’t seem any different than usual.”

“He wasn’t stressed out about anything?” said Brigit. “A test? A girl? Anything?”

“No,” said Jory. “Well, maybe. But not anything out of the ordinary. He was the same as he always is. I can’t make heads or tails out of this whole thing. I knew Gil real well. At least I thought I did.” He let out a helpless, bitter laugh. “Maybe you can’t really know anyone. If someone like Gil could do something like this, then maybe there isn’t any way to know what anyone would do.” He shook his head.

Brigit nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

He gave her a funny look.

“I knew him too,” she said. “Not as well as you, but I had a class with him last year—”

“Hey, I thought you looked familiar,” said Jory. “You go here, don’t you?”

“No, I graduated.”

“And now you’re a cop?”

“Private detective,” she said. “Well, an assistant, anyway.” She blushed. “It’s not important. The important thing is just trying to figure out why Gilbert did this.”

“I have no idea why he did this,” said Jory. “If you would have asked me days ago if I thought that Gil would ever do this, I would have staked my life on the fact that he couldn’t.”

That seemed to be the general consensus, didn’t it? What had been going on with Gilbert to cause him to snap like this? I looked around the room, wishing that the answer would jump out at me. But all I really saw was dirty laundry.

I turned back to Jory. “Did he have a computer?”

“Yeah, a laptop,” said Jory. “What? Isn’t it here?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Huh,” said Jory, making a confused face. “Well, come to think of it, he might have taken it home.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, I don’t always sleep here, because I stay with my girlfriend a lot. Off campus. But he did say something about going home for a couple of days. His family lives close enough that he could commute if he wanted to, but he always said that he’d rather live on campus. So, I don’t know why he was going home, but maybe he took his computer there.”