the door frame would’ve splintered that way unless the dead bolt was thrown. The part on the frame literally came away still attached to a chunk of wood.” He paused. “Girl’s strong.”
“Hmm.” Garnet went over how Eloise had seemed the day before, added that to what she knew about young female pride. “Damn it.” It was a growl. “Even if she didn’t break anything, girl has to have bruises to hell and back.”
Kenji pulled out his phone, made a call to Lorenzo asking him to check up on Eloise. “I seem to recall a certain pint-sized Sheridan refusing to go to the infirmary after fracturing her ribs falling from the climbing frame.”
“Shuddup.” Shooting him a glare that did nothing to dim the wattage of that troublemaker smile she adored, Garnet went back to staring at the lock. “What the fuck are we missing?”
Kenji walked backward until he was standing not far from the spot where they’d found Shane. “Let’s run this through. You be Shane. I’ll be Russ.”
“Okay, I come in.” Garnet considered the personalities involved. “We’re polite at first, but then the wrong words get spoken and we fight.”
The two of them pretend-grappled all the way to the bedroom and back.
“I pull out my knife from—” She paused. “He wasn’t wearing a jacket and it wouldn’t have fit in his jeans pocket, so it would’ve had to have been in his boot.” At Kenji’s nod of agreement, she continued their reenactment of the murder. “I pull out my knife from my boot and stab you.” Garnet made a stabbing motion. “Right to the heart.”
Kenji clutched at his chest, then frowned and stood up straight instead of falling down. “Wait. When did Shane take the hit to the back of his head?”
That was what had been bothering her. “Let’s figure out the how, then maybe we can figure out the timing.”
Kenji nodded. “Any ideas?”
“It has to be something heavy and portable,” she murmured. “Lorenzo’s pretty sure it wasn’t the edge of the coffee table and we didn’t find any blood or hair on it.”
The two of them began to search. It was Kenji who finally found it—a heavy metal flashlight that had rolled under the display cabinet and ended up hidden in a deep pool of shadow. They stopped long enough for Garnet to get an evidence kit, then pulled it out. The blood and hair on the end erased all doubt about whether or not it had been the weapon used to incapacitate Shane.
“Okay, Russ hits Shane with the flashlight,” Garnet said as she bagged the flashlight so they could confirm DNA and check for fingerprints. “That begs the question of why Russ would be holding a flashlight in the first place. We didn’t have any power outages that morning.”
“It could’ve been lying on top of the display cabinet,” Kenji suggested. “He picks it up to defend himself when he sees the knife. Shane stabs him, turns away for some reason, and Russ still has enough strength to whack him over the head?”
“I guess.” Garnet frowned. “He was just so fastidious. Nothing out of place.”
Kenji glanced around. “You’re right. But you saw how dark it was under that cabinet—he could’ve lost something down there, been looking for it when Shane arrived.”
It made sense but the sick, wrong feeling in Garnet’s gut wouldn’t subside. “I want to take another look at Russ’s body.”
• • •
Once in the small, isolated morgue at the far end of the infirmary suite, she, Kenji, and Lorenzo examined Russ’s body with care, found nothing other than the marks of the autopsy and the killing wound, along with the light bruises and scraped knuckles Lorenzo had already noted.
Shoulder muscles bunched after Lorenzo returned the body to the temporary storage unit, Garnet paced the room. “Can we see his clothes as well as Shane’s?” They were the only things left that might offer some kind of an answer. Garnet was not going to condemn Shane when an ever-expanding sense of wrongness continued to chill her blood.
“Here.” The healer pulled out the evidence bags in which he’d stored the clothing, one bag for each item.
Taking one set after pulling on surgical gloves, Kenji went to the steel autopsy table and—after Lorenzo disinfected it to prevent contamination—laid out the clothes as Russ would’ve been wearing them, while she did the same with Shane’s clothing on a neighboring table. Then they stood side by side between the two, their bodies touching in a line of warmth as they stared at