What Have You Done(28)

“What?”

“Someone was calling her, and the damn thing started ringing in my car. How did it get there?”

Sean looked out beyond the park as cars rushed by beyond the iron railings. “I think you might be right. I think someone might be trying to frame you. I’m not sure why, but we have to find out who’s doing this. Things are starting to spin out of control. All we need is for this guy to start contacting the department or a newspaper, and then we’re all suspects.”

“You think they’re going to try and blackmail me?”

Sean chuckled. “If that’s the case, they picked the wrong family.” He looked at his brother. “We need to be honest with each other. About everything. Starting now.”

“I am being honest.”

“Last night, Don went to Kerri’s apartment to try and get anything related to your affair out of there so we could buy some time to figure out what was going on. He got some pictures of you two, and they were time-stamped. You told me it had been three months since you last saw her, but the pictures say it’s been two weeks. Why would you lie about that? To me? I’m trying to help you.”

Liam could feel his face flush. He shook his head and started walking again. “I was freaked when I saw her at the scene. Truth is I didn’t want to tell you we were still seeing each other because I know how much you helped me patch things up with Vanessa. It wasn’t romantic. Not really. We were friends. I needed her company, I guess. I didn’t want you to be disappointed with me. I had no idea all this other stuff would come up.”

“I need the truth from now on,” Sean said. “All of it. No matter what you think my reaction might be. You have to let me know what’s going on. This affects me too. We’re in this together.”

“Okay.” Liam walked behind a row of bushes, hiding himself from the other people walking through Fairmount Park. “One more thing.” He unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the scratch that ran down his chest. “If that really is my blood under Kerri’s nails, I’m assuming this was how it got there.”

Sean studied the scratch, carefully reaching out to trace it with his finger. “Jesus Christ, Liam. What is happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think for a second. How could Kerri scratch you and you have no memory of it?”

“The same way I woke up in the tub and have no memory of how I got there. The whole night’s just gone.”

“But if someone’s framing you, they would’ve needed to come in direct contact with you to make that scratch. With what? Kerri’s dead hand? That means you could’ve been at the Tiger that night. Or the club.”

“I know.”

Sean reached into his coat pocket and rummaged around for something. He came away with a pair of sunglasses and pushed them into Liam’s hand. “Hold these.” He searched through his pocket again and finally pulled out his phone. He looked at the screen, read something, then put it back away and grabbed the glasses. “Don downloaded a bunch of files from Kerri’s computer onto a flash drive and then wiped it clean so no one would find anything connected to you.”

“What was on the flash drive?”

“No idea. I destroyed it.”

“Why would you do something like that? There could’ve been something on there that could’ve cleared me.”

“Or there could’ve been stuff on there that sealed your fate. I made a gut call and did what I thought was right. We don’t need any more evidence that points to you.” A crowd of tourists walked past them, fingers pointing in all directions. When they passed, Sean spoke again. “What else did you find from the investigation so far?”

“The shoe print on the rug came back. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a Timberland boot. I forget the model number off the top of my head, but it was common enough to know it’d be a long shot. It’s one of their bestselling boots.”

“You have a pair of Timberlands,” Sean replied, again watching the traffic round Kelly Drive. “This just keeps getting better.”

“What should we do?”

“Don said Heckle and Keenan already ordered her phone records from the apartment and her cell. Your number’s going to be on them. She called you the night she was killed, and you called her back the next day.”

“Yeah.”

“They’re going to trace your number back to you, and when they do, the dominos start to fall. I’m telling you, you’ll be charged with murder, and they’ll stop looking for who really did this. No one’s going to believe you’re being framed when you have a goddamn scratch down your chest and your blood in Kerri’s nails. You need to find a way to intercept those records, delete your number, and get them back to Heckle and Keenan. If you can bury that side, we can make this go away. Shred the fingerprint report and tell them it came up empty. If we let this go long enough without anything concrete, they’ll file the case away unsolved.”

“I don’t want to make it go away. I want to find out who’s trying to frame me. I want to find out who knows about me and Kerri and arrest them.”

“We will,” Sean replied. “But we have to do it on our own time. We don’t need an open investigation that points to you and only you. As soon as someone catches wind about your affair, it’s over. If there’s this much evidence against you, they’ll get a conviction. We need to make this go away, and then we can investigate on our own. Get the phone records.”