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I held up a hand. “Let me work this, please, El. I’ll let you know if it means anything.”

“Val—”

“I have to run down everything from the stub of a pencil to dirt on the floor to a candy wrapper in the trash.”

“There was a candy wrapper in the trash?”

“No, it was just an example. The point is that I’m going to chaseeverything, and a lot of it isn’t going to end up meaning jack shit. So I don’t want you to get excited that something’s going to come of something every time it ends up being nothing. Okay?”

His expression said he kinda didn’t think that was okay.

“Elliot, I need you to trust me. Okay?”

I saw the resignation slide over his features. “Okay.”

“Thanks.”

I went back up to the office.

The belt that hung Gregory Crane wasn’t his.

Now I just had to figure out who to convince of that. And how.

In the mean time, I went back to cataloguing the room, working my way up each shelf, taking pictures as I went, opening and leafing through books, and so on.

I was looking at a fairly sizeable geode when something else hit me.

Gregory Crane had been struck on the back of the head.

I left the office again, going to the pile of papers from the funeral that Elliot had left on one of the side counters in the kitchen, looking for the coroner’s report.

“Fuck.” It wasn’t there. There was no documentation of a head injury.

“Fuck what?”

I damn near jumped out of my skin at Taavi’s voice.

“Jesus. Make some goddamn noise.”

There was a tiny smirk on his lips as he walked over and handed me a large turtle sundae, vanilla frozen custard doused in chocolate and caramel sauce and covered in pecans. He had another cup of something with candy bits in it and a third with chocolate custard that had hot fudge and strawberry sauce—that one was Elliot’s. Elliot was obsessed with chocolate ice cream, sauce, chips, custard, whatever. Chocolate anything.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “He’s still in the basement.”

Taavi disappeared with Elliot’s sundae, and I leaned against the counter to eat mine. Taavi came back up, then took a spoonful of his own custard.

“What’s the flavor?” I asked him.

“Really Reese’s,” he answered, then flashed me a momentary grin. I know how much Taavi loves peanut butter. Sometimes, he’s just such adog. It’s kind of adorable. “Now,” he said, licking off his spoon. “‘Fuck’ what?”

I sighed, then took a bite. When I’d finished it, I answered him. “There was no mention in the coroner’s report of a head wound,” I told him.

Taavi frowned. “Didn’t Gregory say he was hit on the back of the head?”

“Hard enough to knock him out, yes. And he said he—” I had to swallow around a non-custard lump in my throat. “—he said he didn’t wake up until just before he… died.”

Taavi let out a little huff. “They’d have had to hit him pretty hard, then.”

I nodded, stabbing my spoon into my sundae. “Yeah, they would have.”