I drop him to his feet, not caring if he catches himself. Because the fucked-up thing is, I believe him.

“Where’s Sheriff Barnes?” I bark.

“Gone for the night. It’s late,” he informs me as if I don’t know exactly how late at night it is. “Zoey’s probably skulking about somewhere. Or over at the funeral home with her weird friend.” Now that I don’t have him pressed up against the wall, Alver is feeling brave again.

“Call Barnes. Now.”

“I am not waking up the sheriff because you lost your little girlfriend,” he says dismissively. “Hell, you should be thanking your lucky stars you ain’t dead yet from hanging out with that one.”

I loom over him, backing him into the wall again. “Call Barnes. Tell him Zoey is missing.”

An impossibly long ten minutes later, Sheriff Barnes comes stomping into the morgue. His hair is disheveled, his untucked shirt is buttoned crookedly, and his face is thunderous.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Alver tries to answer, “This asshole came in here threatening me, demanding—”

But Sheriff Barnes isn’t looking at Alver. He’s looking at me, so I speak right over Alver’s blustering explanation.

“Zoey’s missing. I’ve been trying to track her down since we talked. She’s not home, not at Holly’s, not at the funeral home, and not with Jacob. Her phone is here and the mop bucket is spilled in the refrigerator. I think there was a struggle.” I swallow thickly. “I think somebody took her, Sheriff.”

“Took her? Who?”

My mind’s been whirling on that for the whole ten minutes since Alver made that call, and I can only come up with one answer. “Yvette Horne.”

Alver snorts out derisively. “That pretty little thing? She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

If only he knew what that ‘pretty little thing’ was capable of. I am, and so is Sheriff Barnes. Yvette Horne killed her husband and Zoey prevented her from getting the money she felt entitled to. “When Yvette left court today, she said, ‘This isn’t over.’ I thought it was an empty threat, but now . . .”

Barnes’s jaw clenches, his own keen mind processing through the information he’s been presented with. He steps around me to look in the refrigerator himself. I looked over every inch. There’s nothing else to find unless Zoey has magically appeared from an alternative universe since I last looked in there.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, and Sheriff Barnes reaches for the radio at his shoulder.