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“He could have hired someone,” Cole said. “I mean, he’s a cop. He must know the right people to talk to.”
“It’s not just that… it’s the whole thing, the setting up of the insurance. It feels too elaborate. I just wish I knew the deal with that—who took it out, whether it’s really connected to the killing. Is there a way of finding out?”
“Maybe…” Cole said. He rubbed his temple. He looked like he was thinking hard. “Shit, this stuff was Gabe’s area, really. The easiest step might be to try to get hold of the policy documents, work out if there’s any mistakes, something that might indicate someone other than Gabe took it out. If that’s the case, it might be enough to get the police to take a look at the back end. If they could get the IP address of the person who set the policy up… Would Jeff have known enough to use a VPN, d’you think?”
“I don’t know.” My head was aching. “He’s not very techy. I think they did send me the policy documents. Hang on.”
I opened up my laptop, navigated to the email the insurers had sent me, and clicked to view the attachments. The one marked A summary of your policy looked the most hopeful, and I opened it.
A long PDF appeared on my screen, and I scrolled down it, scanning past the legalese for information about Gabe. There was his name, including middle name, all correct. Height. Weight. Occupation. Date of birth, correct. Moderate drinker. Nonsmoker—well, that last one wasn’t strictly true. Gabe liked the occasional joint. But it was true that he didn’t smoke cigarettes, and anyway, I wasn’t sure that Gabe himself would have admitted to the odd toke on an insurance policy. It didn’t seem that relevant. But there was a lot of information here, all of it correct, and I couldn’t see how Jeff could have known half of it.
“This wasn’t Jeff,” I said aloud. “It can’t be. There’s stuff he couldn’t possibly have known. I mean, how many people know Gabe’s middle name is—” I stopped, corrected myself painfully, “—was Charles?”
“There’s always phishing,” Cole said, a little doubtfully, but I shook my head.
“Jeff’s not savvy enough for that, I told you. It’s not just that he’s not techy enough; I don’t think his brain would work like that. He’s a ‘use your connections to fuck them over’ kind of guy.”
“Wait.” Cole put down his glass. “Hang on. Jeff’s connections. What about the police database?”
“What do you mean?”
“This Jeff guy—he’s a police officer, yes? And Gabe—”
“Was arrested when he was seventeen,” I finished, suddenly seeing where Cole was headed. “Fuck. But he was a juvenile. Do you think it could still be on the system?”
Cole shrugged.
“Honestly? I have no idea. I know a conviction like that would be spent in terms of having to declare it, but I’d imagine it’s still logged somewhere—and probably somewhere a guy like Jeff could take a look. I don’t know what they keep on file, but I’d imagine date of birth, height, and so on are pretty much a given. Weight, well, Gabe’s put on a few stone since he was seventeen, but nothing you couldn’t size up from looking at him. And the rest…”
“As for the rest, you could probably make a pretty good guess. Fuck.” The realization felt like cold water on the back of my neck. I ought to feel—not happy, exactly, but at least a kind of grim satisfaction that I might be getting closer to finding out what had happened to Gabe, and who had set this up. But I didn’t—I felt instead a kind of unfolding horror. Because if it was Jeff, then the chance of the police solving this had just gone from slim to virtually nil.
It wasn’t that I thought Malik and Jeff were in cahoots—not exactly. I couldn’t see tough, driven Malik sitting down with a bent colleague and cooking up a plan to murder an innocent man and lock up his wife. That just didn’t seem plausible to me. But the idea that they wouldn’t push too hard to investigate one of their own, that they might treat a report from an unstable, hysterical girl with a history of “false” police reports against her ex with skepticism… yes. That seemed all too plausible indeed.
“If this is true,” I said blankly to Cole, “how the fuck do I prove it?”
“Look.” He put his arms around me, and I felt the same urge I’d felt the day before when he hugged me in the church—the urge to put my face on his chest and cry, as I would have done if he were Gabe. Only I still couldn’t cry. I couldn’t seem to let go enough to cry. “Jack,” I heard his voice, close to my ear, the warmth of his body, his height, his presence somehow so like Gabe’s, in spite of their differences, that it made a lump rise in my throat. “It’s going to be okay.”
We sat like that for a long time, Cole’s arms around me, my cheek pressed against his chest, listening to his heart. For the first time in days I felt… safe. But I knew that was an illusion. Cole couldn’t protect me from what might be coming any more than Gabe had been able to protect himself.
“I don’t think it is,” I whispered.
“Jack.” Cole touched my chin, tilting my face to look at him. “Listen to me—it’s going to be okay. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so much.
The problem was, we both knew it was bullshit. That wasn’t a promise Cole could make. And the worst had already happened. Gabe was dead. Me getting convicted of his murder… well, that would be just the cherry on a cake of shit.
I sat, silent, looking up at him, at his furrowed brows, his dark blond hair, his troubled blue eyes, turned deep navy in the candlelit dark. He put his hand to my cheek.
And then he leaned down and kissed me.
For a moment I thought—I don’t know. I thought perhaps it was just his compassion for me, a gentle brotherly kiss meant for my cheek or forehead that happened to land on my mouth. But then his lips parted, his hands came up to cradle my face, and I realized he was kissing me. Properly kissing, his mouth open against mine, his tongue against my lips. And for a second, a strange, wine-muddled, longing-filled second, I let him. No, more than that, if I’m being completely honest—I did more than just let Cole kiss me; I kissed him back.
But then something inside me lurched, a sense of the deep, absolute wrongness of this, however much I wanted to feel someone’s arms around me and their body pressing against mine. Yes, I wanted someone—their lips, their heat, the softness of their bare skin—but I didn’t want just anybody, I wanted Gabe.
“No.” I said the word indistinctly at first, my mouth muffled by Cole’s. And then more forcefully, pushing at him with my hands flat against his hard chest. “No! Cole, I don’t want this!”
Cole staggered back as though I’d slapped him, though in truth my shove hadn’t been that hard.
