He cut her off. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange you found a random message that ties you to a man you once dated?’

The coincidence bothered her too, but she hadn’t yet found the missing piece that would make sense of it.

‘You know what I think about coincidences,’ Sabih went on. ‘They don’t exist. There’s always a reason.’

‘What reason?’

‘To throw shade on you?’ Sabih suggested. ‘You were still on the force when you met him, right?’

‘You think he dated me to compromise some investigation months down the line? That’s crazy.’ But even as she railed against the idea, part of her couldn’t dismiss it entirely.

‘Or maybe he planned to use you as a source?’ Sabih said. ‘Find out if the police were investigating the death of his friends, feed some information that would keep us off the right trail.’

‘So why did he dump me?’ Harri asked.

‘Who knows? The only thing I do know is that I don’t believe in coincidences. Either you’re working an angle . . .’

Harri took a breath and was about to respond to the accusation when Sabih raised a calming hand.

‘Which I don’t think is what’s going on. Or he’s working an angle, and he’s been planning this since the very first day you met.’

Chapter 20

The fear was something few men would ever understand. The short walk home from the train station. The hurried march from car to front door. The dash down a gloomy footpath. Isolation and darkness stoked women’s fears of encountering the wrong man. The creep with the angry glint in his eye who could be triggered by the wrong word. The charmer who just wanted to be friends, but who would turn hostile at the politest refusal. Harri thought of them all now, as she walked from her car to her apartment building. She was never usually this anxious, but Sabih’s suggestion that Ben Elmys was playing her was unsettling.

She’d dropped Sabih off at his place and driven home, but it wasn’t until she stepped into her pin-drop quiet street that she realized how vulnerable and exposed she felt. Harri was a former police officer and could handle herself, but tonight she wished she had someone beside her.

She hurried up the path and poked her key in the lock. She opened the front door, and there was a slight delay before the motion-activated lights came on and illuminated the deserted lobby. She shut the door behind her, didn’t bother checking her mailbox, and went straight for the lift. She was halfway across the open space when she heard a noise coming from the stairwell. The door was ajar, but she couldn’t see anything in the thin monolith of darkness. Her stomach lurched when she heard another sound, a low shift, movement across concrete. She slid her key between her index and middle fingers and jammed her thumb behind it.

She pressed the call button, and shuddered when she heard another noise.