“Do what you want, but remember—whatever I’m up against, Caitlin’s dealing with worse, and she wouldn’t have been involved if you hadn’t asked her for help.”

He switched the phone to speaker, placed it on a table, and opened the door to the female detective who had given him the cigarette.

“Mike Roman,” she said, “you’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

She held out a photo of his face going up Branford’s stairway. “Breaking and entering and grand theft auto.”

Mike held back a smile. She didn’t mention the pink plastic bags, but someone must have noticed.

“Greenwood said I could use his father-in-law’s truck.”

Maverick shook her head. “That old son of a bitch saw his parking spot empty and called it in. Hands on the wall, please.”

Mike assumed the position so the detective could frisk him. “Greenwood know about this?”

“Pretty sure that’s why Chief Renton suspended him.”

Chapter 79

CHAPTER

79

THE STATEMENTS STOLE hours from Embower. First with the officers who came to the Branford house, then the trip to the station to off-load his security footage, then back to the house—but the attention paid off. Both Greenwood and Roman would be out of his world. Embower didn’t understand what had stopped Greenwood’s involvement—something about the red and white truck—but Roman’s face in Branford’s house would be enough to file for a restraining order once they released him from custody.

He watched the last two officers pack up in the shelter of his dry garage. “As far as you can tell, the only thing missing is the hard drive?”

The older of the two nodded. “If you hadn’t noticed the drive missing—”

The other one closed the trunk. “Or had the video.”

“Right, if you hadn’t noticed the missing drive, then checked your footage, we wouldn’t have been able to tell he’d been inside. What was on the drive?”

Branford shook his head. “Stuff for my classes. I’d only bought it a month ago. Don’t know what he’d want with it.”

Mike Roman hadn’t found anything. After Embower’s own wall-to-wall search, he’d tucked his work hard drive under the passenger seat of his SUV, then set its padded carrying case in the upstairs bedroom amid a pile of random financial papers pulled from his filing cabinet and thrown on the floor. Anyone watching Roman climb the stairs on the video would assume he’d found the pile important.

“Sounds like he thought you knew something about that reporter. Don’t worry—he won’t bother you again.”

The officers turned their car around, drove away.

Embower went to the kitchen, opened his laptop, and shuttled through the three-and-a-half hours the house had been full of police. Convinced they’d found nothing, he switched to the farmhouse network.