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She couldn’t keep the grin off her face as she mentally replayed the phone call less than an hour ago from her literary agent.
She’d gotten the deal. A book deal. The words pulsed in her mind, quick and electric, as if they’d slip away if she didn’t keep moving, keep breathing, keep herself from shouting it out right there in the lunchtime swarm.
Her advance was enough to replace one year of her salary at theTribune,and she planned to give her notice so she could put all her energy into turning in the best book possible by her deadline with the publisher.
After hitting the button for the elevator, she tapped her foot against the stone floor. The doors opened. People filed out, and Holly stepped forward, bumping into someone on her left. She turned, seeing it was only a boy. He was older than her nephew she’d never met, probably closer to ten.
“Sorry,” she said, smiling down at him when he met her gaze.
He peered up at her with large brown eyes, but he didn’t smile back. Warmth moved up her chest, pooling in her throat as she thought of Meg’s son.Tanner.That probably wasn’t his name, but she liked to think it was and that Meg had gotten what was likely her final wish.
“Come on, son,” a male voice called from behind her. The boy hurried after his father.
Holly slipped inside the elevator before the doors closed and tried to force the boy from her mind. If she saw Tanner in every boy she encountered, she would go crazy. She pressed the button for the fourth floor and lifted her head toward the ceiling as it ascended, still blown away that she was going to have her name on a true crime book published by a major New York publisher.
There’d been a time when getting a book deal like this would’ve been all she’d ever wanted. Now she saw it as a means to an end. Her true crime book would build a readership, amplifying her platform to raise awareness and pursue justice for Meg’s murder. Just the thought of catching the guy who killed her sister caused a spark of excitement inside her.
After getting off on the fourth floor, Holly pushed open the heavy door to the Major Crimes Unit. The unit’s gray-haired secretary looked up from behind the front desk and smiled.
“Hi, Dear.”
“Hi, Colleen. Is Jared here?”
Before Colleen had a chance to answer, Jared’s voice boomed from behind the closed door to the office he shared with his partner across the hall.
“I don’t care, dammit,”Jared shouted.
Colleen warily followed Holly’s gaze.
“You should’ve held him back longer,” Jared continued, his angry tone permeating through the wall. “I don’t buy the alibi. If you’d just given me a little longer with the kid, I could’ve gotten him to talk.”
Colleen returned her attention to Holly. “I don’t think I should interrupt him right now. You okay to wait a few minutes, Hun?”
Holly forced a smile, wondering what Jared was so pissed about. “Sure.” She sank into a folding chair against the wall as another male voice sounded from the other room.
“If we were holding the kid against his dad’s will, any statement you got from him wouldn’t be admissible.”
It was Andy.
“We weren’t charging him with anything,” Andy continued. “You know I couldn’t legally keep him away from his kid any longer. I kept him occupied for as long as I could.”
“That’s bullshit,” Jared said.
Colleen’s eyes met Holly’s for an awkward moment before she looked away, making herself busy by rearranging an already neat stack of papers on her desk.
“He agreed to take a polygraph,” Andy said. “What more do you want?”
“We shouldn’t have let him leave. Now he’s got time to get his story straight before he takes the lie detector test.”
“You know there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“That’s a load of crap.”
The door flew open, and Jared marched out of the room. His jaw was set in a hard line, and there was an intense, piercing look in his eyes even though he wasn’t looking at Holly. His narrowed gaze was set on the unit’s main door. He strode right past Holly without so much as looking in her direction, slinging on his suit jacket as he stormed out of the unit.
Holly spotted Colleen gawking at the door before the secretary looked away, attempting to appear reabsorbed in her busywork at her desk. Holly got up and moved across the hall to the open office doorway. Inside, she found Andy leaning back in his chair with both hands on his white head of hair.
“Hi, Detective. Can I come in?”