I tightly set my jaw as annoyance over his sly move flits through me.

“Uh, Noelle?” Carlton appears in the doorway a second after Drake straightens.

“Yes.” I hurriedly turn to him, swallowing my frustration at Drake’s antics. “What’s up?”

He holds a USB stick up. “I found the videos.”

“I think I’m scarred for life.”

“Huh? It’s just kinky porn. And not sexy at all.”

I frown at Drake. “I’m so glad you added that last part. If you were turned on right now, we’d be breaking up.”

“Oh, we can break up?”

I kick him. “Inappropriate,” I mutter. “In all seriousness, I can see why this would be deterimental to the mayor’s image.”

“Aside from the fact that he’s fucking someone who ain’t his wife?”

“You’re Captain fucking Obvious, aren’t you?”

“Just saying.” He grins.

I roll my eyes and bite my thumbnail. The video is actually seven videos linked together in a compliation, but when I texted Carlton and asked him, he said that anyone who knew what they were doing would be able to split them at the end of each. Thus giving the beholder seven instances of potential blackmail, I guess.

Each video had a different form of erotic asphyxiation in them, leaving me with absolutely no doubt that that was Natalie and the mayor’s thing. Since all the videos have been taped outside D.O.M., seemingly in hotels, you don’t need a brain to figure out how Vince got them.

“You look confused, cupcake.”

“Not...confused.” I stand and grab my whiteboard pen before going over to it. I wipe everything off it and scribble my thoughts as I say them out loud. Sometimes, retracing your steps until your feet are blistered and painful is the only way to find what you’ve lost. “Natalie sleeps with Vince but stops when she dates Nick. A year or so in, she revisits the club and her sexual relationship with Vince, still dating Nick. Nick starts sleeping around.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Shh.” I draw a line under that on the board. “Natalie breaks the agreement she has with Nick—”

“According to him.”

“And that’s all I have,” I reply. “Natalie breaks the agreement she has with Nick, which, thanks to the files Carlton found, corresponds approximately with the beginning of her relationship with the mayor. She’s still sleeping with Vince. But around this time, Nick sleeps with Madison McDougall for the first time. Then, somewhere around here, Mayor Randy McDougall stops telling his wife about his trysts, which leads to her peeking. Alyssa McDougall pays Vince to get evidence of Natalie and Randy together, which, luckily for her, leads in with Natalie’s obscure plan of gathering evidence to blackmail the mayor with, especially when she finds out she’s pregnant and the baby is his.”

Drake opens his mouth, but I hold my finger up, on a roll.

“Vince agrees with Natalie to video, which works doubly well for Alyssa. In the middle of this, unbeknownst to everyone, Madison and Nick spend a weekend together when both the mayor and Natalie are out of town. Together, they make plans to be in a real relationship. When Natalie comes back, Nick breaks up with Natalie.” I draw another line under that. “Almost immediately after, Natalie is stalked. Two weeks later, she hires me. Twenty-four hours after that, her home is almost broken into. And not even twelve hours later, she’s dead.”

“Her stalker and killer are two different people.”

I point my pen at him. “Possibly. In fact, I’d say it’s likely. Her stalker didn’t want to hurt her. They wanted to scare her. Shake her up. Make her think she was in danger. The mayor knew she was pregnant. I’d bet anything he was behind the stalking.”

“With what purpose?” Drake’s eyes follow me as I walk to the window. “Make her leave town? Scare her into keeping quiet?”

“Either. Both.” I perch on the windowsill and bite the end of my pen. “He wouldn’t have wanted to pay her off. She was different than the other people he messed with. She was his daughter’s best friend, although paying her a large sum probably would have avoided this mess. Then again...”

“Say you’re right. Say we are looking at two different people—now what? Who attempted to break into her house? Her stalker or her killer?”

“Her stalker,” I say certainly. “Think about it, Drake. If you’re breaking into someone’s house to kill them, would you really try to break a window? In a quiet neighborhood? No. You’d pick their lock or knock out the whole pane. You wouldn’t throw a brick at their house.”

“Let’s work of the assumption that the mayor did hire someone to shake her up.” He stands, but then he paces back and forth. “They wanted her to think they were trying to break in. That makes me think he was trying to get her to leave town. Face it—she wouldn’t have known that he was behind it. What if it was both? What if he was trying to get her to leave town then give her the financial aid to do it? He could have promised to pay her a monthly child support fee under the guise of her working for him and his whole problem—the baby—would have been eliminated.”

“Yes!” I cry a little too excitedly. “That makes perfect sense. I asked Bek to get Carlton to look into his bank accounts more in depth, and it turns out that more payments have been made to Nick since the first one. I thought it was simply part of the initial agreement to be paid in installments the longer he stayed quiet, but what if Nick agreed to do it? And those payments were what he was owed for stalking her?”

“How much were they?”

“Ten to fifteen thousand a time.”

“That has to be it.” Drake stops, looks at me, and grins. “He paid him to stalk her and wired money as soon as Nick reported back with each threat. He was never to hurt her, only scare her so badly she left Holly Woods. And it worked in two ways, because the longer and more Nick was paid, the more likely he was to stay quiet. You!” He crosses my office in seconds, frames my face with his hands, and plants a huge kiss on me. “You’re fuckin’ brilliant, Noelle.”

A flame rises in my cheeks. “Well, it’s simple logic, really.”

“Let’s go.” He grabs my hand and pulls his phone out of his pocket.

“Where to?” I barely have time to grab my phone and purse before he pulls me out of the room and toward the staircase.

“I’m calling in backup. Then we’re going to pick him up.”

Oh, well. Okay, then.

The more I think about it, the more I’m glad that I’m not still a cop. I’m essentially acting as a cop now, and I’m realizing more and more that I like the freedom that owning my own investigative company brings me. For example, I don’t have to sit suspects in a ten-by-ten room with nothing more than a table, four chairs, and a voice recorder inside it.

Interviews are suffocating. I hate the stiff, formal way they need to be conducted. I hate the way questions are twisted and manipulated to catch the other person up. I hate how my eyes skim the suspect’s body like they’re a puzzle that has one piece you can’t locate out of place. I hate how every part of their reaction to every single question is an open book to me.

Like right now—Nick is sitting in his chair next to his lawyer, stone-faced. His shoulders are pulled back in defiance, and his eyes are dead set on Drake, his jaw tight. Yet this isn’t because he’s hiding something. He’s angry, pure and simple. He’s angry that, after the conversations he and I have had, he’s been brought in for questioning.

And that’s something that needs to be stressed. He hasn’t be arrested.

Yet.

Although it’s only a matter of time with the way Drake is tearing him apart.

“Where were you on the night of the eighth?”

“I already told you,” Nick snaps, “I was tattooing a client.”