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“Oh,” he said again. Then he looked up at me, stylus still on his tablet. “Are you Menominee?”

I laughed. “Fuck, no. You’ve met my parents. They’re white-bread German through and through with a little Scandinavian mutt thrown in.” I studied him for a moment. “Why?”

“Just trying to get a baseline for who falls in which buckets.” He tapped the end of the stylus against his mask. “You met the younger Mr. Crane in school?”

“Yep. Kindergarten. Some other kid was picking on him because his hair was in braids. Called him a girl.”

“And you stuck up for him? That’s sweet.”

I laughed again. “I didn’t have to. Elliot punched the kid in the nose, blood fucking everywhere. I was the kid who stole an extra cookie from snack to give to him because he was sent to the principal’s office.”

The corners of Smith’s eyes crinkled at that. “I knew you were trouble,” he remarked.

“More like I attract trouble, Elliot included.”

“Are you, uh…?” He gestured with the stylus, those pink spots coming back to his cheeks.

“Me and Elliot? No. We’re not each other’s type.”

“I hope that wasn’t offensive.”

“Not at all,” I replied, amused. “We gave it a shot for about a month in college, but we’re both assholes, so it didn’t work out.”

“You stayed friends, though?”

“Yep,” I answered.

“Good friends?”

“Yep,” I repeated.

“And that’s why you dropped everything to come out here?”

I leaned forward, resting my elbow on the edge of Smith’s desk. “Elliot and I are as close to brothers as you can get without actually being related. It doesn’t matter to me why he asked me to come back. He’d do the same for me in a heartbeat if I asked him to. So yeah, when he called me and told me his dad had been murdered, I came fucking running.”

I could feel Smith studying me, assessing whether or not I was telling him the truth or hiding something. “Any chance he could have done this himself?” he asked, then, and the question hit me like a slap to the face.

“Fuck, no,” I snapped.

“You understand I have to ask.” Smooth. Calm. I knew exactly what he was doing. Trying to assess whether or not some part of me thought Elliot had it in him—or had any sort of fucking motive—to kill his own father.

“Yeah, I fuckingunderstand you have to ask,” I ground out. “And I alsounderstandthat you’re trying to get me to show some sort of reaction that will tell you what I’m hiding. I’m not fucking hiding a damn thing. You want to know something you think I know? Fucking ask me what you want, don’t try to mess with my emotions.”

He held my gaze, steady. He might be green as fuck, but I could see what it was that had gotten him promoted to detective, even if it was in this shit-hole town. “Okay,” he said, finally. “I don’t suppose you happen to know where he was when his father was killed?”

“Somewhere near Madison, I imagine. When he called me, he said he was going to drive up as soon as he got off the phone—so I assumed he was at home.”

“Home is Madison?”

“For him, yeah. Not me, obviously.” I knew Smith knew where I lived.

“And I assume you have a plane ticket that says when you arrived in the state?”

I should have expected that one, but I hadn’t, because it had never once occurred to me that I might be a suspect. I tried to remember where the fuck I’d put the printed-out tickets Taavi and I had used. “I can look in my room at my parents’ house for those, but I’m sure the airline can confirm that we checked in and boarded our flight out of Richmond.” I was trying to be patient. To answer his questions, as frustratingly annoying as they were, because as pissed as I was, he was right—he did have to ask these sorts of questions in order to eliminate people.

Especially if he was going to let me help with the case. I had to very clearly and obviously not be a possible suspect.

“Who is ‘we’?” he asked, then.