Page 128 of Traces Of You

“Oliver is a weasel, but Lyle and me were around to monitor you both. Just like we were sent here to ensure this was done correctly,” Bobby said.

Randy’s squinted eyes and red face told her he didn’t appreciate the shot to his pride that he didn’t have a handle on the situation.

“I don’t need babysitters.”

“Yet, here we are. Do you think your cousin would have stolen the stash?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t know,” Randy said, running his hands through his hair. He turned his back on her. “Oliver knows Stiles is pissed. It’s his job on the line and he’s got people higher up breathing down his neck. He thought it’d blow over and we’ve been sitting back waiting for that to happen, but it didn’t.”

“Stiles?” she asked. Her brain was fuzzy, but that was the officer who filed her missing person report.

“You know him,” Randy said, laughing. “He’s the officer you thought you could get to help you when you were in the hospital last.”

The guy Oliver boasted was his friend.

Guess it wasn’t the type of friend she thought it was.

“There is a cop selling drugs with you?”

“He’s the supplier,” the third man said, coming in with a glass of water.

“Shut the fuck up, Lyle,” Randy said.

Lyle moved over with the glass and went to hand it to her, the rat still in his other hand. She lifted both of her hands and grasped it, trying to bring it to her mouth.

The inside of her cheek burned when the liquid touched it. Her teeth must have cut her flesh when she was hit.

Nothing she hadn’t felt before either.

“That’s how you found me?” she asked. “When I was pulled over?”

Randy looked at Lyle who shrugged and replaced the rat when Randy nodded his head to the cages again. “Yes. He caught it a day or so later. We didn’t think you’d be in the area, but had to risk it. Once he realized audits were being done on evidence, the walls were closing in. I don’t need Stiles framing me for this. The clock is ticking and he needs his product returned before he’s caught. Do you know what they do to cops in prison?”

Now she understood this.

It wasn’t the money, it was the product he had to put back. Drugs he was stealing from the police station evidence room.

Seriously?! Even if she’d taken them, did they think she’d be holding onto them a month later? They were all complete morons.

Product she never saw and didn’t know a thing about.

“That’s not my problem,” she said. “But I’m not your person. I’m telling you, look at Oliver. He hated you.”

“My cousin idolized me,” Randy said, his face turning several shades of red.

“You’re deluding yourself. All those times you talked down to him. That you told him he was a piece of shit. He talked in his sleep all the time. I know what he really thought of you.” At least that much was the truth.

“He listened to me. He didn’t have the balls to take care of you or anyone else he brought home. I taught him how to keep his women in line.”

She should have known. She’d seen signs of it.

It didn’t diminish what Oliver did to her though. Or to any other woman.

The pain he inflicted when his cousin wasn’t around.

“You couldn’t have taught him well enough if he was stealing from you.”

Who the hell knew where the courage came from to have those words slipping out?