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Who killed Gregory Crane.

Why.

Whether the Shawano police were covering it up or just incompetent.

And how the fuck to get Elliot through this.

Not necessarily in that order. Because if I was dealing with incompetence, I might be able to workwiththe Shawano PD. Especially if I could find somebody who cared about actual justice.

But if they were covering things up… well, then I was up shit creek. Possibly without a paddle or even a canoe.

What I was actually hoping was that Ward would be able to tell me both the who and the why. But it was after eleven at night here, so post-midnight back in Richmond, and while Ward used to keep weird-ass hours, now that he was a married man with a fucking kid, he actually went to bed at a normal hour most of the time.

So tomorrow morning I was going to call my boss and ask him to summon my best friend’s dead dad to ask if he could tell me who killed him and why.

But Taavi had asked me a question. “Not there,” I answered. “And I don’t know if they—whoever they are—will even target him at all.” I grimaced, running a finger over the pattern on the bedspread. “Faking a suicide isn’t a good way to kill more than one person,” I explained. “You can get away with it once, but the likelihood that you’d be able to pass off two suicides in the same family, that close together, is pretty low.”

Taavi was quiet for a moment. “What if it wasn’t meant to be a faked suicide?” he asked, softly.

“Why else would they hang him?” God, I sounded like a callous bastard. It’s one thing to talk like this about a victim you never knew—and you certainly didn’t do it around members of the family. At least I wasn’t having this discussion in front of Elliot. Or, worse,withhim. But it didn’t make me feel like less of a heartless dick because I was still saying it. About a man who had carried me as a kid, tended skinned knees, fed me, dried my tears, and loved me.

A man I’d also loved, although friends’ parents are never quite the same as your own.

But I had loved Gregory Crane. I was sad he was dead. I was just a lot more pissed off than I was sad, and my reaction to being pissed off about his death was to figure out what motherfucker did this to him so I could take them the fuck down.

I looked up at Taavi’s too-pale expression.

“Lynching,” he answered me, after a long pause.

Fuck.

5

I slept like shit.I hadn’t really expected otherwise, although I didn’t wake up screaming, crying, or vomiting, so I guess that was a win. Taavi hadn’t fared much better, although I was pretty sure that he’d managed an hour or two more than I did. At least I’d gotten to watch him sleep, the lines of stress and worry easing as he finally slid into slumber.

At seven in the morning, awake, dressed, and sitting on the end of my bed while Taavi showered, I pulled out a notepad, picked up my phone, sighed heavily, and called Ward Campion.

“Hart. How are you holding up?” He sounded sympathetic, but not annoying about it. Which… I guess made sense, since my boss spends a lot of time talking to families who suffered the loss of a loved one, either recently or in the semi-distant—or sometimesreallydistant—past. He was a master of talking to the bereaved.

“Fucking pissed,” I replied honestly. “The cops are calling it a suicide, and I smell a pile of bullshit.”

“And you want me to confirm that, I take it?”

I was asking him for a favor, so I should at least try to be polite about it. I’m a dick, but I try not to be atotaldick. “Yes, please. If—”

“I’ve just been waiting for you to call,” came his response. Kind. Considerate. My boss really is a nice guy. It’d probably be a lot easier on him if he weren’t, since he was pretty much always surrounded by death, violence, and grief, and I knew it sometimes got to him. Hell, it sometimes got tome, and I’m the dead-inside asshole of the company.

I heard Ward draw in a deep breath, then slowly let it out.

I wasn’t going to see or hear anything, especially not all the way the fuck over here in Wisconsin. But he would.

Gregory Crane would materialize before him, stocky and built like Elliot, long dark hair with a handful of grey, wide cheekbones and a full mouth like Elliot’s, but with a cleft chin Elliot didn’t have. Dark eyes that could sparkle or glow or cut you like ice if you seriously pissed him off.

“Hart?” Ward interrupted my thoughts.

“Yeah?” Even though I was ninety, no, ninety-eight percent sure Gregory Crane hadn’t killed himself, I was half-afraid that Ward was about to tell me he had.

“He was definitely murdered.”