are dry, itching and burning. Adrenaline, however, still pumps in my veins, so much so the very thought of sleep is nauseating.
“I’m going after your badge.” Detective Skov’s voice is barely heard as the details of what happened before my arrest play back in my mind. The phone call when everything was all right and then her chilling scream before the clatter of the phone dropping. The line went dead after that. She was there, then she was gone.
The detective continues even in my silence. As I rise, the legs of the chair scrape against the floor carelessly. “That reporter was onto something,” he starts, and I vaguely recall Jill Brown and her accusations. “And I don’t care if I spend the rest of my career getting to the bottom of it.”
“Can I go?”
Skov’s dark gaze narrows with his jaw clenched tight. It’s Gallinger who answers, “Yes.”
Thud, thud, thud, my heart races, the adrenaline in my veins somehow increasing and forcing an anxiousness to overwhelm me. I need to find her.
“There’s not enough evidence.” Gallinger continues to talk although I’m barely listening as I gather my coat and walk out. His black boot finds the painted cream brick of the wall behind him as he leans against it. “If you have any intel,” he says, raising his voice so I can hear more easily, as if I haven’t been listening all the while like they intended, “you’ll fill us in, won’t you?” His thick eyebrows lift in question.
“I don’t trust you, I don’t like you, and I’m going to destroy you,” the detective I’ve left behind mutters beneath his breath, but it’s loud enough to be heard.
“Fuck both of you.” My response is as dull as the fucks I give when it comes to these two. The glares from each of them burn into my skin as I walk as casually as I can down the hallway.
“This way, Agent—”
“I know where to go,” I say, brushing aside the officer in charge of escorting me to the front to collect my belongings.
“This is the last time I let you walk out of here,” the prick of a detective calls out after me. There’s an audience of sorts at the end of the hallway: three officers, one with a cuffed man who appears homeless sitting on the bench against the back wall, and the other two pushing papers around.
Blinking away the pain in my sore eyes, I barely read that it’s nine in the morning. Too many hours have already passed, and it’ll take another twenty minutes to fill out paperwork and get the hell out of here.
The process is painfully slow, and the entire time my conscience is plagued by sounds of that phone call. One minute she was there, the next she was gone.
The bastards took their time. An hour of waiting, followed by the thirty minutes it took to hail a cab and be taken back to my car. All the while my mind was screaming. They know the same as I do: the first seventy-two hours are crucial. And yet they chose to spend the better part of the first twenty-four hours interrogating me.
Anger consumes me as I face the cold hard truth: either they don’t believe she was taken, or they think I’ve murdered her.
There is no other explanation.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, the sight of my reddened gaze brings my fatigue front and center. I rub my eyes with the heel of my palms to no avail. I can’t blink away the last day and a half, let alone the last two decades.
It’s all my fault. With every slow blink, I picture Delilah and all the times we had where nothing else mattered. It all melted away when I was with her. She was an escape and I lost myself in her company. I think about the last time we were together, imagining the sight of her pouty lips with her top teeth digging into her bottom lip as she moaned. The feel of her silky ebony hair as her neck arched in ecstasy, allowing the stray strands to brush against my bare skin. With a deep inhale I let the memories take me away. Even something as simple as the smell of her caramel skin allowed me to slip away from the chaos and into her bed.
The honk of cars behind me is the only reason I come back to reality, forced to stare back at a now green light. Forced to move forward, but