Today's Promises (Promises #2)(46)

“Just until tomorrow,” I clarify.

“Why? Now is as good a time as any.”

“Look…” I blow out a breath. “It’s late. If we call him now, it looks really suspicious.”

Hands resting on her hips, she questions, “And just how does it look suspicious? I thought we were going with the story that we happened to be in Forsaken today and decided to stop up at the property to look around for evidence one final time. He knows we don’t want this case closed.”

I turn away, mumbling, “He’s going to be pissed we didn’t inform him first.”

Jaynie comes over to stand in front of me, so I have no choice but to deal with her insistence that we call Silver now.

“Listen,” she says. “We’re telling him it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, right?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“Okay, so we explain that that’s why we had no time to call him.” She pauses, like she’s thinking it over. Then she adds, “Better yet, you know how the cell service is up there, right?”

“Yeah, shitty,” I reply.

“Very shitty. So it’s believable when we say we wanted to call, but there was no service. We have those crappy pay-as-you-go phones as it is. It’s a good story, Flynn.”

I take a seat on our bed and run my fingers through my hair. Why am I so hell-bent on putting off this call to the detective?

Do I have a good reason?

You bet your ass I do.

As soon as we make the call, there’ll be no turning back. And if Detective Silver figures out that we planted the phony evidence, we are f*cked.

Jaynie included.

Hell, I should have made her stay back here in Lawrence. I should’ve done this on my own.

“We’re waiting till tomorrow,” I state firmly.

When Jaynie sees there’s no changing my mind, she releases a long sigh, effectively giving up. “Fine, Flynn. We’ll do it your way.”





Jaynie



We make the call to Detective Silver the next day, just like Flynn wants.

Seated cross-legged on the floor of our room, facing one another, the morning light slants in through the window, illuminating the side of Flynn’s head and making his sandy hair appear golden. He’s stunning to me. Even the little crescent-shaped scar beneath his right eye, that gift from his * father, doesn’t detract from his hotness factor.

He smiles over at me. “Here goes nothing,” he says.

“Or everything,” I reply, my own smile dying on my lips as the seriousness of what we’re about to do sinks in.

Blowing out a breath, Flynn hits the speaker on the phone and dials the detective’s number.

Thirty seconds later, he’s sharing the story we devised.

Flynn lays out what we came up with—that we stopped by the property on a whim, to check one final time for evidence. He adds that we tried to call the detective, but didn’t have any service.

“We were in the work barn,” Flynn continues, his voice a little strained, but only detectable by me since I know him so well. “Cell service is never any good on the property, especially in the barn. Anyway, while we were there, I remembered an old hiding place where I used to stash food.”

I can hear the detective loud and clear on speaker when he clears his throat, already not pleased with our taking things into our own hands. “Where is this hiding place, exactly?” he asks gruffly.

“On the floor,” Flynn says. “Or, more like, in the floor, in the ground itself. It’s a place I dug out, under a big concrete slab that came loose.”

He goes on, explaining to the detective how he lifted the loose slab yesterday and started to dig, far deeper than where he used to hide food. “And that’s when I uncovered what looked like a bloody towel,” he finishes.

“A bloody towel, huh?” The detective sounds wary, if you ask me.

But Flynn forges on. “Yes, a bloody towel. And when I looked at it more closely, I could make out the outline of what looked like it could be a knife underneath. I didn’t want to dig any deeper, though, and taint potential evidence. I just filled in the hole, and then Jaynie and I left the premises.”

The detective is mad as hell, at first. He lets us know it too. “That was trespassing, what you two did. Do you realize that?”

“Yes, we know,” we utter simultaneously.

“You aren’t supposed to go searching around up on that property, not alone, and not now or ever. I told you to call me if you thought of anything else.”

We apologize, again and again, and finally the detective calms down. He even goes so far as to grudgingly admit that it actually may be a good thing we found something to further the case.

“The Debbie Canfield files are about to be closed for good,” he informs us. “I estimate they’ll be asking me to wrap things up by the end of this week. It would’ve been sooner, but these things always seem to get bogged down in red tape.”

“The case won’t be closed now that there’s potential new evidence, right?” Flynn asks. “They can’t do that after what we found.”

“Perhaps not,” the detective responds. “But I must tell you that a bloody towel doesn’t mean much, nor does a knife. At least, not without a DNA match to back those things up.”