Stop Me (Last Stand #2)(28)
Author: Brenda Novak

“Because I found him attractive as a woman. And that’s not something I wanted the other guys ribbing me about at the station.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Anyway, last I heard I was already fired from the department, so you can’t be Internal Affairs.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I have a few questions for you.”

His eyes raked over her again. “And those questions brought you all the way here?”

“It’s about the Fornier case.”

His smile disappeared—and with it that single, very unattractive fang. “I wasn’t on that case.”

“I heard you followed it closely.”

“Who told you that?”

“Some of your buddies down at the station.”

“I don’t have any buddies down at the station.”

“Most police officers are pretty close. Why didn’t you fit in?”

“They couldn’t take that I was a better cop than they could ever dream of being.”

And his blog was proof? She didn’t think so. “Were you out to prove it—to show them?”

“I don’t remember getting your name,” he said instead of answering.

She handed him her business card. “Jasmine Stratford. I’m with a victims’

charity in California.”

There was no sign of recognition. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I’m also a freelance profiler with reason to believe Fornier might’ve shot the wrong man when he went after Moreau. Do you think that could be true?”

Black flicked his ashes onto the ground. “Don’t ask. You don’t want to start poking around in the Fornier case.”

“Suppose you tell me why.”

“What’s that old cliché? Let dead dogs lie?”

“It’s ‘sleeping dogs.’”

His grin slanted to one side. “Not in this case, right?”

Jasmine didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. “That’s not a good enough answer.”

“Try this one.” He leaned toward her, engulfing her in a cloud of smoke.

“Because you might regret it later,” he whispered. “Is that better?”

He was too close. Jasmine almost reached for her Mace. But she sensed that he was only trying to intimidate her, and she refused to let him know he’d succeeded.

“Is that a veiled threat?” she asked, standing her ground.

“Not from me.” His smile returned as he leaned back—and with it that fang.

“Why would I want to hurt you?”

“You tell me.”

“I have no personal stake in the case.” He shrugged, but the action didn’t seem careless as much as studied. “I’m just informing you that there are people who won’t be happy to have certain details brought out into the light, people who have a lot to lose.”

“Like who?”

“Like whoever really killed that little girl. Moreau was a pervert. I’ll grant you that. But he wasn’t the man who murdered Adele Fornier.”

The men outside Shooters who’d been trying to attract her attention had given up and gone back inside. The wind was kicking up, and it was starting to rain. “What about the evidence?”

She thought she had him, but he didn’t even blink. “Someone planted it. The blood on the pants, the barrettes, everything.”

Chapter 8

“How do you know?” Jasmine demanded.

Tossing away his cigarette, Black shrugged again. “Anyone who really looked at that crime scene could tell you Moreau didn’t hide those things under his house.”

“Why not?”

“They were put there from the outside. Whoever did it entered the crawl space through the cellar door.”

“So?”

“So, if you’d just killed a girl in your house, you sure wouldn’t gather up the evidence and take it outside and around the back to go in through the cellar door.

Why risk letting someone see you when you could simply lift the trapdoor in the pantry and put it down there?”

“Why would he have to walk around? Every house I know has a back door.”

“His was completely blocked off.” Black pulled a new cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and shoved it in the corner of his mouth, unlit. “There was a big freezer in front of it, piled high with boxes full of all kinds of shit. There’s no way Moreau bothered to move it and then put it back. He had too many other options.

Besides, those boxes on the freezer were dusty as hell. They hadn’t been touched in months, not even for cleaning. He lived alone at the time, and take it from me—he was a slob.”

“Maybe the trapdoor was blocked off, too.”

“Only with a sack of potatoes. It would’ve been easy to use—yet no one did.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He thumped his chest. “Unlike Huff, I did my research. It had an old wooden floor, you know? Someone had painted the pantry, even the floor, at least a year before Adele went missing.”

“And some of the paint fell into the crack along the trapdoor and created a seal,” she said, picking up on where he was going with this.

“Which wasn’t broken when we entered to perform the search,” he finished.

“How did you see that?”

“I checked it, and I tried to tell Huff. But all he could see was Moreau’s rap sheet. He’d found his pedophile. He’d found his victim’s clothing. End of story.” He cupped a hand around his cigarette as he struck a match and added, “Some detective he was.”

“Was there any evidence someone had used the cellar door?” Jasmine asked.

“Plenty. The lock had rusted so it couldn’t be opened. There were marks on the lintel indicating someone had recently forced it from the outside using a crowbar or something. There were also scuff marks in the dirt near the entrance. The bloody pants, along with the video and barrettes, were on the ground not two feet away from the entrance, as if someone had tossed them in and shut the door.”

“You pointed that out to Huff, too?”

“I tried.”

“But…”

He tossed the match away and breathed deeply, exhaling as he answered. “He said Moreau could’ve walked around and forced that door open as easily as anyone else.”

“Unlikely though you make it sound, that’s true,” Jasmine said. “They were his pants, weren’t they?”