We enter the store and I spot Mindy right away. She’s got the kind of curly hair that explodes out around her pretty square face. She’s the same age as Cassandra would be and I can’t help but feel a twinge of resentment toward her. The old question of why Cassandra and not someone else swirls and I try to not pin too much hope on what Mindy might say and how it could help Beau.

Leo waits to catch her eye until she’s finished with her customer. She does a double take, then saunters over toward us. Over toward Leo, really. I doubt if she’s noticed me yet.

“Hi, Mindy?” he says. “I’m Leo and this is Cora.”

She glances at me for the briefest second. “You didn’t say you’d be bringing her.”

Great. She’s not going to talk with me here. “I think I’ll go get a smoothie,” I say.

Leo looks down at me with a crease between his brows. We’d discussed this possibility. It would now be on him to pull what he can from Mindy.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” he says, running his worried gaze over me.

I give him a jaunty wave to let him know that it’s okay, even though it’s not. I’m dying to know what Mindy has to say. Glancing back at them as I exit the store, I can tell that Leo already has her wrapped in his charm. Having just been the recipient of that charm, I know how she’s feeling.

It’s the second time today that I have uncharitable thoughts toward Mindy.

Chapter 8 Leo

Mindy leads me to her office at the back of the store and closes the door. It’s no bigger than a closet. She clears some stuff off a chair so I can sit down. I can hardly concentrate on what she’s saying—something about her office being a mess—let alone what I’m supposed to say. My head is full of Cora. She doesn’t even know she does it when she twists me up in knots. It’s like she doesn’t even have to try. Just her being her is enough to knock me back a step.

Like this morning with the tea. It’s the same every time. She takes the lid off, grips it in both hands, closes her eyes, and inhales. I don’t know what she thinks of when she smells that tea, but the look on her face…I can’t breathe. It’s indescribable. All I know is that look has me bringing her tea every morning just to witness it. I discovered what Earl Grey does to her by accident. We stopped at my favorite coffee place one afternoon when I was dragging ass so I could get a double-shot pick-me-up. While we waited Cora opened the tester tins of tea on the shelf behind us and started smelling them. When she came to the Earl Grey she got that look.

I stood there and watched her, fascinated by her reaction. She held the tin, taking periodic sniffs of it until they called my name, then she reluctantly replaced the lid and put it back on the shelf. That was when I started adding Earl Grey to my morning order.

And then just now, out there in the mall, when she checked out my ass. Until that moment I was beginning to think that she’d parked me permanently in the friend zone. She liked my ass. And my hair. And the way I looked overall. It took a tremendous amount of restraint not to grab her and kiss her the way I’ve wanted to from practically the first moment I saw her. For the barest of seconds she looked like she might want to be kissed and then some asshole bumped her and she shook it off, becoming determined Cora again.

I don’t know what I did to suddenly earn her notice, but now that I have it I feel like a junkie looking for his next fix. I want it again. No, I need it again.

“I don’t know how I can help you,” Mindy says, drawing me back to the here and now. “I told the police everything I know. Besides, I’m not looking to help free Cassandra’s murderer. He can rot in jail forever, for all I care.”

“I understand that. You want someone to pay for what was done to her.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“But what if it’s the wrong someone? You seem like an honest person, the kind of person who wouldn’t want an innocent man to pay for a crime he didn’t commit. It happens, you know. I work for Nash Security and Investigation. We recently helped to overturn the conviction of a man who sat in prison for thirty-nine years, paying for a crime he didn’t commit. Can you imagine that?” She shakes her head. “Me either. That’s why I’m here. Cassandra’s killer is still out there and we’re trying to find him. Anything you can tell me—no matter how trivial or insignificant—will help.”

My scare tactic worked. Mindy looks horrified at the possibility that Cassandra’s killer is still out there.

“I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

“Thank you.” I gentle my voice. “It must’ve been difficult to lose your friend. Tell me what she was like.”

Mindy launches into her stories about Cassandra and I add them to the others that Cora told me. The more I learn about Cassandra, the more I like her. Sure, people tend to talk nice about the dead even if they weren’t such nice people, but I have a feeling that Cassandra genuinely was one of the nice ones.

“Did you ever hang out with Cassandra outside of work?” I ask.

“A couple times.”

“Did she mention a new boyfriend?”

“No, no new boyfriend. She broke up with that Beau a few months before she was…killed, and I don’t know of anyone new.”

“Did she ever talk about Beau with you? Do you know why they broke up?”

“Yeah. She talked about him all the time, but I got the feeling there were some real problems toward the end. She cried a lot and then just sort of got into a funk. We didn’t go out after work anymore.”

“Did she miss any work or have to leave early or come in late?”

“A couple of times. Hey, that’s right.” She snapped her fingers. “That’s when she first brought up some trouble she’d been having.”

“What trouble?”

“She complained a couple of times about some weird stuff happening around her apartment complex—vandalism, things missing—that sort of thing. Nothing sinister. Probably just kids. But I wondered if maybe it wasn’t Beau who was doing it just to get a rise out of her. It was just little things, annoying things. Like as if he was trying to get her attention or something.”

“Do you know if she ever called the police?”

“Probably.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I would’ve. A couple of the things she mentioned were just so weird.”

“Like what?”

“Someone took her cat, then suddenly he reappeared a couple of days later in a box on her doorstep with a bow around his neck. She was just so happy to have him back I don’t think she thought about someone taking the cat just to mess with her. That’s kind of a sick thing to do, don’t you think?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a neighbor returning her cat?”

“Could’ve been, I suppose, but why not just ring the doorbell? And why the bow?”

I made a mental note to check to see if Cassandra had filed a police report or if there was any record of her making calls to the police.

“Can you think of anything else you might not have told the police?”

“Oh, I told them about the weird stuff.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. They didn’t seem to think as much of it as you do.”

“Huh. Well, thanks for your time, Mindy.” I gave her one of the blank agency cards that I’d written my name on. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.” I opened the door, needing to get out of that claustrophobic office before the walls really did close in on me.

Looking down at it, she flicked the card with a finger. “Did your agency really free a wrongfully convicted man?”

“Yes.”

“Do you really think that Beau was wrongfully convicted?”

“Absolutely.”

“I have to tell you. I met him a couple of times—you know, before they broke up? I couldn’t see him snapping like that and doing what they say happened to her. He loved her. That was as plain as anything. Even after the breakup I don’t think he was the type to hurt anybody, especially Cassandra.”