One of Those Faces (49)

“I don’t understand,” I said once I regained my voice. “I thought—”

“We’re going to keep investigating, but for now, he’s out.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I touched my neck, pressing against the scar. “He knows I’m a witness now.” Iann returned to my side.

“He’s not going to hurt you,” Wilder said in a lowered voice. “I’ll make sure of it. He won’t try anything now that he knows we’re keeping tabs on him.”

Maybe.

“Harper?” Wilder’s voice broke the silence.

“Yeah, I get it.” I hung up.

Iann looked at me. “What’s going on?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “They had to let Jeremy go,” I said. “He saw me. When I went there to identify him.”

“How could this happen? Why is he out?” Iann asked, his voice raised above its usual soothing tone.

“They said there wasn’t enough evidence against him right now.” I felt like throwing up. I could see Holly’s fingers flash through my mind’s eye.

You don’t care about Holly. You’re just scared you’re next.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


I paced in front of Erin’s apartment, waiting for someone to answer the intercom. As soon as I’d woken at 7:00 a.m. and realized Erin hadn’t so much as texted, I headed to her place, calling her over and over again on my way, all the worst scenarios racing through my mind.

“Hello?” Erin’s voice was groggy over the speaker.

Thank god. “Hey! You’re home?”

Erin didn’t answer but buzzed me in.

I was so glad that she answered that it didn’t occur to me until the elevator opened on her floor: What if Jeremy was with her?

Erin was standing in the doorway, her red eyes barely open, her silk pajama set and matching robe wrinkled. “What are you doing here? It’s way too early.”

I stepped in beside her and closed the door, looking around for signs of Jeremy or her roommates. “You never called me back.”

She leaned against the kitchen counter. “Oh, shit! I totally forgot. But in my defense, we got pretty wasted last night.”

“We?” I didn’t see any coat or men’s shoes near the entrance.

She yawned. “Me and Jeremy. We went out last night.”

“Where is he?”

“He left a couple of hours ago. So, what’s going on? What’s so urgent that you got me out of bed at the crack of dawn?”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Jeremy.”

She stared at me. “Okay . . .”

Just spit it out. “Has he mentioned anything about his ex-girlfriend to you?”

“Uh-huh.” Her eyes were more alert now. “You mean Holly? Yeah.”

That was surprising. “Did he tell you that he’s a suspect in her murder?”

“Wait, what?”

“I found out that he used to be involved with the girl who got strangled in front of my apartment a few months ago.”

Her expression changed, but she said nothing. Erin would never be so quiet if this was her first time hearing about it.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

She shrugged, then opened the fridge and extracted a carton of orange juice. “I mean it’s weird, but he hadn’t seen her in months before she died.”

“Yeah, but—”

She laughed. “It’s ridiculous to me that you’d assume he did something to her just because they used to date.”

My mind twisted, trying to come up with an explanation for her cold reaction. “First of all, I’m not assuming anything. The police are looking into him. Second, aren’t you the one who says, ‘It’s always the boyfriend’?”

She shook her head. “What’s your point, Harper?”

“I was scared for you. I thought Jeremy might do something.”

“To me?” she scoffed, pouring orange juice into one of the glasses on the counter. “So what? He had a bad breakup, okay? And he told me that Holly was into some messed-up stuff. We all have rough stuff in our past. And I’m sure you haven’t even told Iann about all of your baggage. But Iann’s no saint either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She took a sip of juice. “Nothing, just . . . I’ve been out with him and Jeremy’s other friends more than you.”

All those times I’d brushed off Iann’s invites to a happy hour with his colleagues, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that Erin would be there with Jeremy.

“And maybe he’s not entirely sharing everything with you either.”

I was going to resist the bait. I could see from her smirk that she wanted me to ask her more, to demand she tell me what I didn’t know about him. “Don’t you think it’s strange that Jeremy showed up at our studio the night Holly was murdered?” I wanted to point out the resemblance between Holly and me, but I couldn’t make sense of that myself.

“He left with his friends that night. You saw him.”

I had. And he’d left early enough to get to my street and lie in wait for Holly. “The police asked me to identify him.”