I stood. “If Davis doesn’t want us here, we’re leaving. Zach can’t help unless he gets the chief’s full cooperation. Stay safe, Grady.”
I headed for the door, but he stopped me with one small phrase. “It was me.”
“You? Have you lost confidence in Zach’s ability? That bullet tore into his body, but his mind’s as sharp as ever.”
“Would you sit back down and hear me out? Please?”
I thought about it, and then reluctantly did as he asked.
After I was settled back down, Grady said, “I fought Davis on bringing anyone into this, but he has more confidence in your husband than he does the state police. For now, I’ve gotten permission from Raleigh for us to handle this ourselves, but if there’s one more body, they’re going to take over.”
“Then Zach had better get started. But there’s one condition, or we’re going straight home.”
“This used to be your home,” Grady said.
“That was before.”
“It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Trust me, it feels like a lifetime, and I don’t have any interest in ever coming back.”
He sat there and mulled it over, and then finally asked, “What’s the condition?”
“You have to take this seriously.”
“Okay.”
I looked closely at him. “What’s going on? We both know you don’t give up that easily.”
Grady shrugged. “Not unless it’s a battle I don’t want to win. I’ll ask Davis for protection, but it’s not going to be around the clock.”
“Then I’m sorry we couldn’t help.”
As I got up, he did, too. “Are you serious, Savannah? You’d just walk out on an old friend when he needs you the most?”
“I don’t have much choice. If you aren’t going to take steps to protect yourself, it puts even more pressure on Zach to figure out who your killer is, and it’s going to be hard enough for him to do without worrying about you.”
“Okay, I didn’t think of it that way.”
“Brighten up,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. Now, let’s go find my husband so we can tell him the good news.”
“I didn’t have a chance, did I?” Grady asked me as we went to the front door.
“That’s not true at all. You nearly lost us, but you managed to redeem yourself at the last second.”
“What can I say, I’m a clutch player.” He tossed his towel onto the kitchen counter and ran a comb through his hair as I opened the door. Zach was on the porch, in deep conversation with someone.
He held a finger up to us, and then said, “We’ll be right there.”
Before he even looked at Grady, he glanced at me and asked, “Did he agree?”
“Around the clock police protection until you find the killer,” I answered.
“Good enough. Let’s go.”
“Are you ready to go to the hotel?” Grady asked.
“No, there’s been another note from the killer. He put a picture in this one, too.”
If we’d had any chance of a pleasant conversation on the way to the police station, that information ruined it. I didn’t have any facts about the case, or how the killer operated, but then again, it wasn’t my job to solve the case. I was there for moral support, along with a prod every now and then if I thought my husband’s investigation was going off course. I considered myself Zach’s unpaid and extremely unofficial consultant.
And I liked that just fine myself. I had no desire for the limelight, or any credit for solving one of my husband’s cases, any more than I wanted his name on one of my puzzles, even if he did spot mistakes from time to time. Zach liked to solve puzzles, claiming they helped distract him from the cases he worked on, and he was my tester when I wasn’t sure about a puzzle I was ready to submit. Most of them went straight to my publisher, but every now and then I had Zach solve one to make sure I was playing fair. We were a team, both in our professions and in our marriage, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And now we were going to try to find a killer before he had the chance to strike again.
Chapter 3
“YOU NEED TO SEE THIS,” DAVIS TOLD ZACH WHEN WE walked into the police station. “It just showed up four minutes ago.”
“What is it?” I asked. Grady had waited around just long enough to be assigned a police officer as a bodyguard, and then he’d taken off for his office. We couldn’t convince him to lay low until Zach caught the killer, but he had to be safer at city hall than in his house, or worse yet, jogging alone on the streets of Charlotte.
“This is official police business,” Davis said.
“Zach’s not a cop anymore, either.”
