Page 4 of A Simple Mistake (Deadly Mistakes #1)

FOUR

Gabriel

Two years ago

The police department I worked at before transferring to homicide was intense. It seemed like everyone hated their jobs and their lives, and the man in charge was only happy after he made at least one person cry a day. I’m pretty sure their tears kept him going.

This is only my second day here, but the atmosphere is much nicer. It’s not that they’re slacking off, everyone seems quite professional, but it also seems like everyone is enjoying their job and their coworkers.

When I head into the break room, a woman waves me over to her nearly full table.

“Hyde, right? Come sit with us,” she offers.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I’m Penny, this is Donna, Matthew, and Chris,” she tells me as she waves toward the others at the table.

“It’s nice to meet you. You can call me Gabriel,” I say, surprised they’re handing out first names when my last place was quite strict about using surnames only. My former boss said that by using first names, we weren’t treating each other with respect.

“So how’s working with Liam going?” Penny asks with a grin.

“Alright, I guess. I can’t say that I’ve actually worked with him much. He seems quite busy on his computer.”

“He did that to me too,” Chris says. “Day one, he ignores you, but day two…” He shakes his head. “My thoughts are with you.”

“Chris is the one who Liam made cry,” Donna explains.

Chris laughs. “I didn’t cry!”

“I’m sorry. Chris is the one whose eyes became moist after dealing with Liam.”

“He could make me moist,” Penny says as her eyes trail after Liam who buzzes right through the room and over to the fridge.

“Penny!” Donna whispers before laughing.

“What? You know I love unobtainable men. It’s a curse I must suffer through.”

I mean… she’s not wrong. Liam is quite attractive. His light brown hair is messy, like he hasn’t even bothered to run his fingers through it since he woke up, and his shirt a bit wrinkled, making him look a little unkempt, but somehow, he just pulls it off and makes it look intentional.

He holds up a container and looks around the room for a moment before spotting our table. At first, I think he’s coming over to sit with us until he stops beside Penny.

“Penny.”

“Yes, Liam?”

He pushes her food back and slides the container in front of her with a Post-it Note that I can’t read on top.

“Do you want it?”

“Ooh yes, please,” she says.

Liam gives her a smile but there’s something conniving about it as he says, “Have it on my desk before I leave.” And then off he goes.

“Are you being suckered by pie again? You know he’s using you to get his shit done first in the lab,” Donna comments as Penny cracks open the container and starts digging into some kind of chocolate pie.

“Oh, he can use me all he wants, this is so good,” she says.

“If you want to get away with murder, you just hand Penny a pie,” Donna explains.

“If it’s chocolate, I might even help you commit it,” Penny teases.

But now I’m curious what Liam’s working on. I’ve been able to help him with a whole lot of nothing, so I quickly finish up and head back to our office. Liam is back to his spot behind the computer.

“Can I help you with something?”

“Perhaps by being silent.”

“We’re going to get nowhere if I’m quiet all the time,” I say.

“Exactly.”

“You clearly have a lot to do. You worked through lunch as well. Please let me help.”

“If I find something that I think you can do, then I assure you, I’ll let you know. Oh! Maybe the trash needs to be taken out.”

I glance down at the empty trash can. “There’s nothing in it.”

“What is that picture of on your desk? It creeps me out. Maybe put that in it.”

I look at my desk, unsure of what is bothering him until I see that it’s a picture of my cat. “My cat? She’s adorable.”

“Is it?”

“Her name is Lucille Pawl. Get it? Like Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy ?”

“Don’t ever speak to me again. That name is atrocious. And the person who named that poor wretched thing should be banned from having pets.”

“It’s cute!” I protest.

“I’m busy, and hearing about your inability to name your cat is not making me work any faster.”

“Then let me help!” I say as I rush over to his side of the desk only to see that the work he’s so “invested in” is nothing more than the hardest level of Minesweeper. Liam stops his quick clicking to slowly look up at me.

“May I help you?” he asks, not even bothering to hide what he was doing.

“You’re playing a game ?” I growl in disbelief.

“Oh? You have a feisty side, do you? How cute.” And with that, he goes back to clicking at an alarming rate. If I weren’t so flabbergasted, I’d be impressed.

“Is this what you’ve been doing this entire time?” I demand.

“No, I played some Solitaire as well,” he says as he finishes the level without an error. I’m not even sure he laid down a single flag.

“I thought you were working! You made me clean the whole desk off, organize all of your cabinets, and treated me like a cleaning lady while you were over here playing games!”

Liam grins at me from where he sits in his chair, leaning back a bit as he gives me the cockiest expression. “No, I simply told you what you could do, and you did it without hesitation. You’re good at errands; I might keep you around a bit before I make you cry.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I’m not going to cry.”

“That’s quite possible, since after hearing that you named your cat Lucille Pawl, I have come to realize you’re quite ruthless.”

“What if we actually do our jobs and complete some of the cases we were given?” I ask. “These families are waiting for closure and you’re playing Minesweeper.”

“You’re saying Minesweeper isn’t as important?”

“I can’t fathom it is. What about this Vargo case? What do you have on that?”

“Next-door neighbor, in the kitchen, with a frying pan,” he says.

“What?”

“You wanted to complete it; there, it’s complete. The next one, I was like oh, this one might be interesting, but no, totally the son. He’s a good actor, but that makes sense since he was practically raised in the theater. He’s been the main star of every local show and then went on to do theater at his school. He had everyone fooled with his beautiful acting skills.”

I stand there for a moment, honestly confused how he determined any of this. Was the neighbor even related to the first case at all? There was no mention of him. I just came in yesterday, so I didn’t get to see the crime scene, but I got to watch the interviews. I would have bet money on it being the husband. It seemed like everyone else thought so as well.

“May I sweep some mines again, Your Majesty?” he asks.

“Explain how you came to this conclusion.”

“You’ll get nowhere in life if I explain it. You have the beginning problem, and you have the solution. How about you figure out the rest—and don’t forget to show your work.”

“Was it something you saw at the scene? I need to go to the scene, then.”

“Nope. You need nothing more than those files, your computer, and the interviews. Have fun.”

Is he lying to me?

I sit down and start to go over everything again. It’s different looking at it if you have the solution, but while minutes stretch into hours as I go over every inch of it, I start to wonder if he’s making a fool out of me. Is he over there highly invested in his game of Minesweeper while laughing at me for being gullible? I can’t even see how the neighbor comes into this. I pore over interviews, phone records, photographs, and all types of evidence. I become convinced he saw something at the crime scene that made him come to this conclusion—or that it was never a conclusion at all.

And just as I’m giving up hope, I see the most inconsequential text between the neighbor and the murdered wife where the neighbor texts, “What do you mean?”

It’s so mundane I didn’t even notice it at first, but when I scroll up, it connects to nothing sent prior to it and nothing after. I head over to deleted texts, yet there’s nothing deleted between them. But when I look at the husband’s texts, I realize that the neighbor was over at their house for a cookout when he’d texted that to the wife.

After hours of digging, I finally find what looks like an accidental screenshot in her twenty thousand pictures. It shows a hidden message from a messaging app I didn’t remember seeing. After scouring every bit of the information I have, and with help from the techs, I finally find her login information to check out the app myself. The person she’d been messaging had displayed her mother’s name, but the deleted pictures and messages tell a whole different story—one that shows the start of an affair that turned possessive the longer it went on. Instead of recognizing the red flags, she seemed to feed into it, loving the attention the neighbor gave her.

And slowly, ever so slowly, I begin to connect the problem with the solution.

The thing is, everything I saw as I dug through piles of information led me to believe it was the husband. The way he reacted in the interview, the way he didn’t cry in the body cam footage when the police entered the house where he’d just found his dead wife. The way he was stoically staring at her body.

Thrilled at what I’ve accomplished, I slide my findings across my desk and onto Liam’s. He lets go of the mouse and picks up my tablet as I watch him closely, curious what his reaction will be.

He scrolls through it then slides the tablet back to me without even a flicker of emotion.

“The look on your face tells me you want to be praised,” he says as he cocks his head.

“A ‘good job’ sticker or a sucker at the very least.”

Liam stands up, slides his chair in, and pats me on the head like I’m a dog. “Good boy,” he coos, and then with that, he heads out of our office.

Seriously? Seriously, that’s all I get? I organized the information with finesse. Yeah… maybe he figured it all out already, but I feel like I did a damn fine job!

I look down at my phone and realize with horror that it’s already eight in the evening. Wait… so was he waiting for me to figure it out before leaving? Did he really sit here for hours after work just to wait for me to finish up?

Why does that make me feel… kind of good?

I hurry into the elevator, sliding in before the doors can close, and Liam glances over at me. “I think we’re going to make fantastic partners,” I declare.

“Bring tissues tomorrow, I’m planning on making you cry,” he says.

“Why? What have I done? You gave me a problem, and maybe… it took me hours to solve it, but I did! Though I do understand that I would have been even slower without the solution… do I suck at this?”

“All humans suck at everything in life. Besides me. I’m perfect.”

I grin at that ridiculous statement. “I would love to say you’re joking, but you probably believe that.”

“Thank you.”

“For what? I wasn’t agreeing! You look like you picked your clothes out of a dryer that shut off seven days ago.”

“Makes me look unimposing, which causes people to not take me seriously and fuck up. There’s a plan for everything I do,” he says as the door opens, and he steps out. “I’m still just trying to fathom what your plan was when you gave your cat such an atrocious name.”

“She loves it.”

“Do you ever think she’s just trying to appease you because she lives in fear knowing that you dislike her enough to give her such a name?”

“Do you have any pets?”

“Absolutely not. While four-legged animals aren’t as irritating as humans, we generally don’t see eye to eye.”

“Sounds like a tough life,” I tease.

“Made tougher by happy people like you,” he says, and with a smirk, he heads out of the building and hurries off to his car.

And while I can totally see why people think Liam’s an asshole… there’s some weird kind of charm to him.

I think I kind of like him.