Page 55

“Not now, Taavi. I’ve got it.”

I was too busy dealing with Elliot to look to see how Taavi responded to that.

Because Elliot was fighting me—notreally,really, because I was pretty sure that he was strong enough to get out of my grip if he really wanted to. He was picking a fight—unfortunately for me, he was picking a fight in badger form, and that meant that I was going to come out of this a little worse for the wear.

Somehow, I hauled him into his bathroom and half-threw him into the bathtub before turning on the shower full blast—cold. He glared up at me from the tub as though trying to decide if he was going to lunge at me.

“Fuck you, you asshole,” I panted.

He growled at me again, and I left the bathroom, pushing the door shut rather emphatically. Then I looked down at my arms, which were now covered in bleeding and raised scratches. It wasn’t too bad, considering how much damage Elliotcouldhave done, but I really didn’t appreciate it.

I stopped in the guest bathroom to wash my hands and arms and put a half-dozen Band-Aids on the worst scratches. Then I stripped out of my now-muddy clothes and put them into the Cranes’ washing machine. I put on clean jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt, then, swearing under my breath, grudgingly grabbed dirty clothes out of Elliot’s hamper to fill out the load and turned the washer on.

Taavi looked up at me as I stormed down the hall, my hands still shaking a little.

“Is he okay?”

“Fuck if I know,” I answered honestly. Elliot could be an ass sometimes, but he wasn’t typically this short-tempered, and while he’d scratched me—mostly accidentally—a few times over the years, he didn’t usually leave me bloody. It’d happened a time or two when we were over-hormonal teenagers, but I couldn’t remember the last time he’d really gotten pissed enough to draw blood.

Making it worse was the fact that I didn’t actually know why he was pissed at me—I understood being pissed, but what I’d done this time to earn nearly losing a finger, I didn’t know. Maybe he was still mad about Taavi. Maybe he was mad at me for not having already solved Gregory’s murder.

Fuck if I knew.

“Areyouokay?” Taavi asked me next.

I blinked at him, then shook my head.

I wasn’t okay. I felt guilty as shit about it, because I was supposed to be the support system, and I wasn’t feeling very supportive.

I felt like if somebody gave a good huff, they could fucking blow me over.

Taavi put down the knife he was using to chop onions and came over to wrap his arms around me. Even though he’s so much smaller than I am, I leaned into him, feeling his wiry strength holding me up.

“I don’t think any of us are okay,” I suggested.

“No, probably not,” he agreed.

“So what do we do about it?” for once in my life asking the question without even a trace of sarcasm or defensiveness.

Taavi pulled back just far enough that he could look me in the eye. “You’re the detective, Val. You tell me.”

And then I felt like a total dumbass again, because Iwasthe fucking detective. Or at least, I had been.

I’d been so stuck on the fact that this was my best friend and my best friend’s dad that even while I’d paid attention to some of the details, I hadn’t actually been thinking about it like a cop.

If my conversations with the Shawano PD were any indication, they weren’t thinking like cops, either. At least not good ones. Or honest ones. And whether they were incompetent or dirty as fuck, if they weren’t going to do their jobs, someone had to.

Someone, meaning me.

Because while I’m sure Elliot had called me here because I’m his best friend, he’d probably also called me because I could help him in a professional capacity. And I’d been so mired in my own fucked up head that I’d somehow managed to forget that the way I could be most fucking useful was by being a goddamn homicide detective.

* * *

I was smashingbeans when Elliot finally dragged himself out of the shower and back to humanity. It was clear from the way he shuffled into the kitchen and practically threw himself on one of the island stools that he wasn’t particularly happy about it, either.

I almost made a snarky comment, then decided that I should probably be sensitive enough to keep it to myself, but that left me not knowing what to say. So I just didn’t say anything.

Turns out, that was probably worse.