Hours later, the sound of Wes’s key turning in the lock barely registered in my mind. I looked up as he walked in. A knot in my neck twinged; I’d been poring through O’Connor’s information for so long, hunched over the kitchen table like Quasimodo, that I hadn’t noticed the time. Wes stopped short when he saw me.
“Whoa,” he said, his eyes widening as he took in the pillars of papers and folders strewn across the table and the floor. I’d built a fortress of kitchen chairs to keep Franklin away from the material on the carpet of the living room. He’d been sulking in the corner behind the sofa all afternoon, though he leapt to his feet and bounded over to Wes as soon as he walked in. Wes set his keys on the counter, absentmindedly scratching Franklin’s head. “Nicole, what is all this stuff?”
“It’s from O’Connor’s safe,” I explained. “I’ve been trying to sort through it all. Have you ever heard of the Davenport family? Or the Lockwoods?”
“They both own pretty big businesses from what I understand,” answered Wes. He leaned down to kiss my forehead. “Why?”
“I can’t figure out why O’Connor was so obsessed with them,” I said. I pointed to one of my sub-piles. “That whole stack is entirely on the Davenports. Newspaper articles about their banking businesses, stocks, social events that the wife has run, kids. I mean, everything that has ever been written about them in the past few years, O’Connor got his hands on.”
“Why?” asked Wes, skimming one of the articles.
I shrugged. “No idea, but check this out.” I handed Wes one of the manila file folders. “O’Connor has a copy of Donovan Davenport’s student record.”
“Who?”
“Donovan,” I repeated. “One of the Davenports’ sons. He just graduated from Waverly last year at the top of his class. Here’s the thing, though. Look at his transcripts.” I extracted the correct copies from the file folder in Wes’s hands.
“Looks like he was a pretty average student,” Wes observed, flipping through Donovan’s grades. “Cs across the board.”
“Exactly. So tell me how Donovan made the Dean’s List every semester when you need at least a three-point-eight GPA to qualify for it.”
“Really?”
I nodded eagerly. “Not to mention, Donovan got nailed for plagiarizing a ten-page paper for one of his literature classes during his freshman year. Except here’s the thing: he never got in trouble for it.”
Wes groaned in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. It was on his permanent record, but there’s a note that says the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and the entire incident was expunged. Wes, he was the valedictorian of his class. How the hell did he pull that off with a solid C average?”
“Sounds like Daddy paid off the university,” said Wes. “What else did you find on him?”
I handed him the first article that I’d read on Davenport. “He landed an internship with the Lockwood firm straight out of college. It’s full-time and salaried. What kind of entry-level internship is that lucrative?”
He skimmed through the article before handing it back to me. “I don’t know what to tell you, Nic. I’m not really surprised. It’s elitist bullshit, but that’s just the way the world works, you know?”
I threw the article on top of the Davenport pile. “It’s not just the Davenports,” I said. “It looks like O’Connor was investigating a few of the tenured professors at Waverly as well. He has their employee files too.”
“And now you have them? Nicole, you do realize that this is illegal, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Officer McAllen, but to be fair, I didn’t collect this information, remember?”
“Nicole, if the force finds out that all this stuff is here—”
“They won’t.”
“Nic.”
I looked up at Wes. His expression was stern, his mouth set in a hard straight line. The seriousness was out of place on Wes’s face. He was usually so easygoing, but if there was one thing Wes never joked about, it was his dedication to his job. I stood up from my seat at the kitchen table and snaked my arms around his waist.
“Weston,” I said, gazing up into his hazel eyes. “I promise not to compromise your job, okay? Just let me play around with this stuff a little while longer, and then I’ll get rid of the entire lot. Is that fair?”
Wes’s hands floated up to cradle my face, though he still looked unsure. After a moment, he sighed and said, “I guess there’s no point in protesting, is there? You tend to do as you like.”
“Which is why you love me,” I reminded him with a cheeky grin. Playfully, he hauled me forward, trapping me against his chest. With my cheek pressed to the zipper of his black police jacket, I laughed as he ruffled my hair. “Get off!”
He let me wrestle away but pulled me back at the last second and captured my lips with his. The apartment was calm and quiet as I melted into Wes. Then, as he was prone to do, Franklin barked and shoved his way between us.
“Cynic,” Wes scolded the dog, using his boot to nudge Franklin out of the way. “Listen, Nicole. Be careful with this stuff, okay? And maybe move it to the bedroom, just in case we have visitors.”
“I will,” I said. I sat back down at the table. “I haven’t even shown you the weirdest stuff yet.”
“I don’t even want to know.”
I waggled a stack of papers at him. “Or do you?”
He gave in too easily. “Fine. What is it?”
“Handwritten letters,” I said, handing them over. “Most
