“There’s no need to be ashamed of it.”
I don’t answer. What does he want me to say? I already feel like the dunce cap kid after getting yelled at by some asshole in a suit. I get it. I’m not very good at paperwork. I’ve never done it in my life—not once. And I certainly don’t want to flail around like an inept lump of jelly in front of Miles. I’ll handle my own shit if it kills me.
We enter Shelby’s office, and Miles lets out a long sigh. “Don’t get like this.”
“Like what?”
“Let me help you.”
“I told you—I don’t need your help.”
“Okay…. As a favor to me, then. Let me help you.”
I turn on my heel and find him staring at me with a level of determination he normally reserves for the extreme. His dark eyes are unambiguous. He wants to do this. I like the look, and it takes me a moment to remember what we’re even fighting about.
“Fine,” I mutter.
“Thank you.”
“But no one else can know,” I continue, curt.
Miles offers me a half smile. “Of course not.”
I actively mocked Jayden for being incompetent—it’s a little hypocritical, considering I have no education, and I’m much older, and I don’t even have a grip on my own profession. It’s starting to hit pathetic.
Shelby’s bottom drawer still has some files I haven’t examined, so I shake my head and walk over, intent on gathering them up. Before I stoop down, I spot a clean line through a patch of dust on a stack of files. I stop and glance around. There are hand marks on most of the files. And things have been moved around.
Davis is dead, and Shelby is in the hospital. Miles and I should be the only ones with access to this office.
“Hey,” Miles whispers. “I think someone might have been here.”
“Yeah,” I reply. “I was thinkin’ the same damn thing.”
CHAPTER NINE
“WHY?” MILES asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Did Shelby have something important in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“How well do you know Shelby?”
I give Miles a hard stare that says everything. I don’t know Shelby at all. I worked with him because he didn’t ask a lot of questions about my past. That’s all I wanted. Now look what it’s gotten me into….
Since I have no clue what someone was looking for, I go back to my own work. I pull out the rest of Shelby’s files from the bottom file drawer and motion to the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You don’t want to try to figure out what happened?”
“There aren’t any cameras in here, and it’s not like I knew what was here before someone snooped around. If something is missing, it’s all a surprise to me. Do you have a better plan?”
“Maybe you should call Shelby. Tell him what happened.”
That’s a valid starting point. I pull out my phone and call the man.
No answer.
With a long sigh, I type out a text message telling him I thought someone was in his office. I finish it up with: This news to you? I hope there’s a logical explanation, because I’d hate to have to deal with yet another problem. I’m already trying to solve a human trafficking scheme, essentially—I don’t have time for the Mystery of the Dusty Office Caper. I’m not a goddamn dime novel detective.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s go.”
Miles and I leave the building after locking up, and head over to our junker. It creaks as we throw open the doors, but I ignore it as I take my seat in the front passenger position. Miles takes driver so that I can read through the files. As he pulls out of the parking lot, I kick open the glove compartment and pull out a spare cigarette and lighter.
After lighting myself a smoke, I lean back and start reading.
“Have you gone to the doctor’s yet?” Miles asks.
“No.”
“I think you should set up an appointment.”
“I think you should stop bringing this up.”
“You smoked for a really long time.”
“And I drink a lot,” I say, exhaling a line of smoke. “And my back hurts from time to time. We’ve all got problems. I’m nothing special.”
Miles gets silent. I prefer it this way. I don’t want to see a doctor. I can already hear his diagnosis. Too much smoking. Too many fights. Too much alcohol. You’re set for an early grave.
I already know. Why bother wasting what little time I have with the process?
I engross myself in my reading in order to drown out reality. The macabre stories of kids going missing, teens found dead in basements, and boats filled with corpses are all distractions that remind me life is nothing but an unrelenting holocaust of dreams. So many stories of grisly death and heartache—it looks like Noimore has had a problem for three decades—but only recently has it hit epidemic levels.
But one file catches my eye.
Michael Shelby.
I flip through the pages and narrow my gaze. The file is old, the oldest one I have, and it has notes written all over it. Justin Shelby, age ten, no doubt Shelby’s son, went missing. His body, found two years later, indicated he had been sexually abused before being dumped in the river. Injuries on the autopsy report reveal he’d been harmed for an extended period of time. Experts suspect longer than thirteen months.
I take a long drag on my cigarette.
Fuck me.
No wonder Shelby is obsessed with catching these guys.
“Pierce?” Miles asks, breaking my concentration. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I mutter as I exhale a line of smoke. “Why?”
“You look upset.”
“Shelby’s kid was kidnapped a long time ago.”
Miles glances over at me with a frown before returning his attention to the road. “What happened?”
“He got tossed around between some guys and then thrown off a bridge into the Noimore River. He’s been dead for about twenty years now.”
Right around the same time Shelby said he got divorced. A perfect recipe for some old kook to go off
