AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I pressed up on my toes and placed a gentle kiss on his lips. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”
He growled. “Think about it?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Well, yeah. I mean, you’re asking me to move, to uproot my entire life to come to backwoods Minnesota.”
His chest rumbled with a snarl. “Taylor Ridge isn’t backwoods and you hate New York.”
I tilted my head. “No, you hate New York. I have a life there. It may not be my favorite place to live, but it’s been my life. What happens if I give it all up? You want me to be your little housewife, Chief? Make sure everything’s sparkling when you come home?”
He grasped my face and shook me a little. “Goddamn it, Raven! You know that’s not what I want. I want you to write here, be among friends, and be here when I get back.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about being so available. “Let me think about it a while and I’ll let you know. I plan to stay through February at least anyway, so there’s no rush to decide.”
He grumbled, not really agreeing with me, but it was the best I could do. If he lived with me for the next two months and still wanted me to move in with him then hell, maybe I would. But I wouldn’t give up my apartment yet. It was too soon to think Ransom would want me forever. He wouldn’t. He’d find someone who checked all the boxes and squash me back into the friend zone, ruining me in the process.
His words startled me. “Will you come to lunch? Everyone’s over at Manacetti’s. You’ll like it.”
I gasped and whacked his arm. “Food? How can you think of food at a time like this?”
He scrunched his nose. “A time like what?”
I towed him behind me. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Back at the desk I was using, I explained that the numbers the source gave me last night were volumes and page numbers of magazines. “So, the librarians helped me pull the issues from his notes and you know what?”
He leaned over the desk resting on his palms. “What?”
I smiled. “On all the pages, it’s pictures of the same model.”
His eyes narrowed. “How can you be sure? She looks different here.”
I smiled. “Magazines give credit to the models and photographer, other people involved in the shoot, but it’s usually in one of the back pages when it’s not a major model. It checks out. It’s all the same girl.”
He narrowed his eyes. “So, what does this mean to you?”
I was aflutter, vibrating, bursting with excitement. “I have no fucking clue! Isn’t it great?”
Ransom leaned on the table staring at me. “I don’t get it.”
I grasped his forearm where he leaned on the table. “It’s a totally random new clue. It may be a red herring and have absolutely nothing to do with anything or it may break the whole case wide open. It’s a total mystery. And I can’t wait to figure it out!”
Ransom looked at me like I was crazy. I probably was. But this was the best part about investigative journalism. Finding pieces and then deciding how they went together or if they even belonged in the same puzzle. Maybe the true killer called me to get me to look at another path and lead me away from his trail. Or maybe he knows the true killer and he’s trying to get me to take a different approach. I could pursue both, though, look in both directions and see what was worth going after. I didn’t have to be stuck at all. I was adaptable. I was flexible.
“You sure as hell are flexible,” Ransom growled near my ear.
My neck snapped to find him leaning in suggestively. I must have said that out loud again.
It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate his dark, playful side. I did. But I was working. And I wasn’t climbing him like a tree in the middle of the public library.
“I have to make copies of these,” I said, standing abruptly, “I’ll be back.”
He stood up and offered to help.
Quickly, I made the copies and planned where I would go to learn everything I possibly could about Jerika Juergen. She was in every picture, so she was what the source was trying to tell me. There might be more connections, so I needed to scour every page and look for any other commonalities in the magazine pages and see if there was any connection to the other models.
Jerika’s name admittedly had a familiar ring to it, but I couldn’t place her. She wasn’t a model I remember interviewing or working with in the last few years. And I was pretty good with names. Made me wonder what happened to her since all the magazine articles were at least a few years old.
I shook my head. “I need to get these closed up and back to the circulation desk.” Pulling out all my bits of paper that held pages for me, something caught my eye. “Wait, hand that one back.” Paging through, I found it. The picture of Harry Norman’s castle. Checking my list, I didn’t see any page references to it, but I noticed it was one of the more recent magazines, just two years old. The photos were taken in commemoration of his purchase of this giant mansion in the Hudson Valley. Flipping through the pages, it looked like Jerika’s spread was much farther back, almost an afterthought. I knew placement in magazines meant something. It’s what made me feel smug about my writing compared to some of the staff writers at Fresh Faces. Looking around for rogue librarians, I snapped a few pictures of the spread with Harry Norman on my phone.
