Chapter Text
The first day or two, Weevil is almost relieved when his phone stays silent. He’s not sure how to act normal about Veronica right now, not after being pulled under by that riptide of that late night surprise. Probably best they both get their feet back under them. Two days stretches into a week though, and then ten days.
He makes a start on half a dozen text messages:
Any developments? ;-)
Need a second pair of eyes?
doin ok?
Even just a simple Hey.
He backspaces out of all of them.
It’s not like he can’t take a hint. V woke up and realized what he’d already known: that she didn’t mean what she’d done. So now she’s avoiding him, and he understands that. It’s not like he expected anything else. What else was going to happen? Veronica Mars would never actually choose the likes of him. Girls like her never do, not for real (not instead of instead of in addition to) and Veronica’s not the dirty little secret on the side having type.
Still, the vanishing act feels kinda unfair. It’s not like it was his genius idea to make things awkward. And maybe if she was here, pretending like nothing happened, he’d be able to forget it quicker.
Her lips on his. Her eyes on him. He closes his eyes and he’s just pathetic enough to see himself burying his fingers in her long blonde hair, kissing her back, feeling her body against his. He opens his eyes, stares up at the cracked plaster of the ceiling, gnaws at the idea like a dog with fleas. What would she have done? Veronica’s a good girl, no matter what Neptune High thought. Maybe he should have dived in - kissed her hard and dirty enough to make her realize she didn’t actually want him. Just a little too handsy and she’d twist away and mutter about mistakes. But there’s a part of him that thinks she’s just impulsive enough - or maybe pig headed stubborn - to have gone with it. Girl never did like to back down and he can’t help wondering where it could have ended, that kiss.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter. She’s obviously not offering up any sort of second shot.
He tells himself it’s an ego boost to know that the impulse is there, under all the innuendo, even if that’s all there is to it.
The truth is it makes him a little sick, that V would toss him into the garbage just because she made a mistake. He knows better, but it still rubs the wrong way: he’s disposable. All those pretty promises about trusting him: fucking bullshit she was serving up to them both.
Course, there’s the part of him pushing back that he’s being unfair, that Veronica is dealing with a lot of shit and he can’t expect to be at the top of her goddamned priority list. He can’t stand that little voice that badgers him with damned ideas like that she might need his support and he’s the asshole for making it hard when she’s the one who was drugged and almost fucking raped.
He tells that fucker to shut up, but in the end, he can’t help himself.
Yes, he knows her damned class schedule. He almost makes it almost two weeks but in the end he tells himself he’s just checking up to make sure she’s okay and he “happens” to be in the courtyard just in the right spot to run into her.
“And here I was, starting to think you joined the witness protection program,” Veronica quips, like he’s the one who said he’d call and then didn’t.
That thought makes him roll his eyes at himself a little. What is he? Some girl with a pathetic crush? (And hell yeah he refuses to examine that further.)
“You’re the one maintaining radio silence, V,” he snaps instead, hunching his shoulders against an onslaught of he’s not sure what.
“Really, that’s how you’re going to play it?” she shoots back, words biting as she doesn’t quite roll her eyes, continuing her walk across campus as he’s forced to speed up to keep up with her, “I kiss you and two weeks go by and you don’t respond and instead you act like I’m the one avoiding you.”
Respond? She fucking bolted and he’s supposed to have some sort of response. What is V expecting some sort of fucking apology… for being jerked around by her?
“And just what the hell was I supposed to make of that, V? You show up at my place in the middle of the night, make all these grand announcements, and then kiss me and take off before I can even react? C’mon chica.” Her audacity burns in his belly, scalds him through, makes him vomit words he shouldn’t.
“C’mon what, Weevil? C’mon I should have known better. I did but I was stupid enough to-”
To what? To kiss him? To convince herself she might actually want something other than favors and innuendo from him? To forget he was just the wetback felon she had twisted around her damned pinkie when she wanted?
She doesn’t finish the sentence and that’s probably a good thing. He doesn’t want to hear about how kissing him was a mistake she never should have made and she regrets it.
““I mean - I was just going to let it slide. It had been a long fucking day for you, awful shit, you needed a warm body, but damn! Now I’m the asshole?”
“You were going to let it slide? Oh how absolutely chivalrous of you.”
But she looks - shaken. As if something he’s said has actually registered for once. She stops short, one hand still gripping her car keys between her knuckles and the other balled into a fist. It knocks him off balance enough that he doesn’t even attempt to swing back at the verbal jab. The fight goes right out of him.
“Fuck, Veronica. What do you want from me?”
He’s always thought he knew, at least for the most part, but in this moment he is stumped. He’d assumed that the last thing she would want was for him to bring up her moment of indiscretion, but here and now it’s obvious that was the wrong play.
He wishes he knew what the right one was.
“Something you obviously aren’t willing or able to provide, so let’s play it your way and forget the whole thing.”
He wishes she would just spit it out. A minute ago he was pissed, but the truth is that what he wants is to be the guy V wants him to be for her, even if that’s not the dude he wants her to want him to be. But if he says that, it makes him a sucker. If he says that, he’s saying he’s her little bitch. So he doesn’t.
“Fine by me,” he shrugs instead, despite the feeling that it is anything but.
It doesn’t matter because she doesn’t let it go.
“I guess it was too much to expect some sort of basic politeness, at least the courtesy of a refusal.”
A refusal? When the fuck has he ever refused V shit? He’s not sure who the hell she is casting him as in her little imaginary drama, so how is he supposed to know what role she even wants him to play? What do you want me to do, sugar? What’s my line supposed to be? What would dancing like a good little puppet even look like?
“To what? What exactly was I supposed to think you were offering? Being used as some tool to get back at Logan? Been there. Done that. Yeah. No thanks.”
The rage is never that far below the surface these days, and he has been trying not to take it out on Veronica but she’s really pushing that line. Yeah she’s been having a hard time lately, but that’s his whole fucking life. Boo fucking hoo that your shitty boyfriend turned out to still be shitty. Woe is you that I didn’t act however it was you wanted me to act, back at my apartment or here today. How dare I not beg on my hands and knees for more humiliation, right?
“Back at Logan?” she acts shocked, like somehow that’s not something she was thinking, like that isn’t the obvious implication of breaking things off with Logan and heading straight to Weevil’s place in the middle of the night, “Are you really accusing me of that? Of-”
For a moment he thinks she will stop herself, that she won’t dare bring Lilly back up now, like this. Back in her car she’d been vulnerable, trusting almost (at least for her), but this… this is the Veronica who flipped a middle finger to his authority, to the entirety of the PCHers, the Veronica who tased Felix who-
“I’m not Lilly, and if you’ve been laboring under the misapprehension that I was…”
“I’ve never...” he starts without a game plan as to where he’s actually going with that. The iciness of her tone that tells him just what a nerve he’s hit accidentally, and he should clear up that it isn’t what he meant, but he’s feeling raw enough himself that his temper flares at the way she’s been attacking him this whole conversation and instead he takes another shot at her, an intentional one this time as he says, “But right now, Veronica, you are acting like the self absorbed drama queen we both know she could be.”
He says it with every intention of causing pain. V isn’t Lilly, never has been. Sure, there was a time when to him she was first and foremost Lilly Kane’s best friend but that was a long ass time ago and even then it was obvious. Lilly was inviting where Veronica was guarded. Lilly focused on herself, while Veronica saw everyone else in the universe more clearly than herself. Lilly was careless and V-
His thoughts are cut off as she shakes her head, laughing in a way that is pure outrage.
“So what?” she scoffs in something like disbelief, “Does that make you want to screw me now, Weevil? Was I a little too honest before?”
“The fuck?”
She’s a ball of tension but he’s not sure how to read her now. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. It’s not just anger, no. The way she’s flushed and spitting out words. The way her voice lingers a little too long on the word screw. It’s a dare.
She’s daring him to contradict her, to tell her it wasn’t a damned rejection, to back her up against the side of the Chemistry building and press the issue.
He’s suddenly convinced he was supposed to kiss her back, to grab her ass, make good on all the lewd comments that were supposed to have been jokes.
He hates her a little for going here with this, for busting his stupid fantasies about them. Veronica Mars would fuck him. He’s certain now. She’d regret it and call it a mistake and hold it against him, but he knows now that under all that damned head tilting... yeah: she would, given the right circumstances.
Maybe that would be the best thing: pipe her and move on. They could never be… whatever it was they were before: not quite friends but something, after that. Veronica isn’t one of those girls to screw him and then act like nothing that happened. Truth is: she’s not one of those girls he could bang and then be bros with neither.
“Did you not listen to a word I said to you that night, Weevil? Or was that the problem?”
Under the bravado, he can hear he’s hurt her feelings, not that he gets why, not that she’d forgive him for realizing that any more than she would for taking her up on what she’s turned his world upside down by offering. She’s pissed he didn’t jump on the sliver of an offer he didn’t think she meant, but if he had it would have done more damage. He knows this, but he still can’t help taking a deep breath and thinking about saying what she apparently wants in this moment.
I thought you were just fucking with me, mami he imagines telling her, Let me show you just how much I’m not turning you down. Take her home, make it count so he’d have the memory of the time he nailed Veronica Mars to pull up to keep him company on lonely nights for the rest of time.
No. Something holds him back. The two of them have said ugly shit to each other before, but she always comes back round. She’s talking to him ain’t she?
“People say a lot of things, V, especially when they are upset.”
He says it soft, casual, giving her an out… hell, giving them an out. But she looks at him like he’s insulted her instead.
“Is that your excuse?” she snaps, turning it around on him, “You were upset?”
“Me? What makes you think I give a fuck?” he denies, a little too vehemently to be believable.
“You mentioned Lilly, and we never…”
She stops there, as though she might be reaching the conclusion he’s already gotten to. He knows he should be glad, that it is good for them to be able to salvage things, but part of him stupidly wants her to kiss him again, to make a different choice for them both.
“You started it,” he points out, doing his best to keep his tone even, like he’s just pointing out any other observation, “That day you brought her up.”
She looks at him like she’s just seeing him now, and some of the defensiveness, some of the provocative energy she’s been radiating, fades.
“I wasn’t trying to use you to get back at Logan,” she says quietly, “I wouldn’t.”
It’s not exactly an apology or an explanation. It is an olive branch though. It’s a promise, and he thinks it is one she means. So he offers something back in kind.
“Nobody made me play her game,” he admits, “That was on me.”
“Me either,” Veronica agrees and he feels a certain warmth at the shared understanding, “There’s a lot of ugly things I let Lilly talk me into.”
“That girl could talk just about anybody into anything,” he finds himself smiling at the memory of how it felt when she turned her attention onto you, “That’s what the newspapers and the specials could never get.”
This is what he has carried around ever since, never being able to talk to anyone about. He’d read the headlines (okay more than the headlines) and he’d wonder if these reporters actually talked to anyone who knew Lilly or they were just reciting some damned template: pretty angelic dead white girl scripts. He tried once, with Felix, but he couldn’t really explain it or maybe his boy just couldn’t get it. His grandma used to just shake her head and mutter half under her breath about how all the money in the world can’t save someone who makes a beeline straight for trouble and how that girl never seemed to want anything else.
Veronica’s voice is softer when she responds, like she feels that same comfort in saying this stuff out loud that he does, like she also has a dammed up river of things she needs to say when it comes to Lilly Kane, like she’s sharing a secret.
“Sometimes I think that’s why it’s been so hard for me and Logan to let go of each other, especially with Duncan gone. It’s like the longer she’s gone the more I need someone else who knows.”
It makes him feel less alone, less like he’s the only one still walking around like he’s got an open gunshot wound (more than one now), but also makes him wonder. If she hadn’t found out about him and Lilly, would Veronica still have given him the time of day, would she have called him when she needed a ride or a favor, climbed on the back of his bike and put her life in his hands?
“Is that what we’ve been doing these past few years, V? Dancing our way around Lilly’s ghost?”
He has to ask, hoping that this feeling that they understand each other is more than that. Maybe it started there for him, but it sure as hell isn’t that now. He is pretty sure it hasn’t been on his end for a long time, not since that business back in high school with his cousin and the stolen credit cards at least.
“She’d love that,” Veronica laughs, “But no. I didn’t even know about the two of you when we started our…”
He doesn’t dare ask what. He doesn’t think he could handle any answer she could possibly give him. Talking with V like this, it’s making him feel exposed, like he wants things. He has to shut it down and shove it away inside himself.
“You know,” he offers, voice suggestive in a way they have both always been comfortable with deciding means nada. It feels empty, sharp, wrong now. He plays it off like it isn’t anyway. “The way I remember it: it was trading favors.”
This time he’s the one putting them back in that box. It’s safer, for them both.
“Pretty sure I still owe you one,” she says, falling into their familiar rhythm.
He can’t help wondering if she is faking that breezy tone just as hard, but he knows he needs to push on past it. It’ll fade, go back to normal, he tells himself. Otherwise why pretend. Otherwise, why not actually have the conversation they have very pointedly drawn back from.
“Pretty sure you said you wanted my help with the rapist case,” he reminds them both, a sobering topic enough to command both of their full attention, or at least whatever portion of it isn’t constantly on the lookout for possible new danger no matter what else is going on.
“Do you still want to help?”
She sounds skeptical, though he’s not sure why she would be. He likes to play it cool, but she must have noticed he always drops whatever he has going on to come rushing to help her out.
“Yeah,” he takes a deep breath and shrugs, like there’s nothing to question in his motivations, “Been waiting for you to tell me your plan of attack.”
That’s not all he’s been waiting for, but it’s better that’s the official story.
“Okay,” she gives him a good look over and not for the first time he wonders what she sees, “But you aren’t allowed to go running to my dad or Logan if you don’t like it.”
That should be a red flag, but he ignores it. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last.
“The day I go to Echolls for shit is the day hell freezes over,” he points out instead.
Never mind that that day has already come and gone and they both know it. He’s lived through more than one personal apocalypse already: Lilly. Felix. Thumper and the Fitzpatricks. Less than two weeks ago when she turned his world sideways, again. Mercifully, V doesn’t point out that all too obvious lie.
Instead she proposes an idea that would be too stupid to be believable for someone with a fraction of the smarts he knows she has.
“Okay, I’m going to use myself for bait, but obviously that requires backup.”
“That,” he shakes his head, “Is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard… and I used to run with some vatos who couldn’t even pass the damned CAHSEE.”
“So you won’t help me?”
There she goes with the damned head tilt.
Baby, he doesn’t say, If you want me to watch your ass you don’t need to come up with excuses.
He can’t say it, not now, and that bugs the shit out of him. That’s always been their gig: the over the top come ons. Now… he just can’t.
“I say yes you are just going to do it anyway… without a safety net.”
She shrugs as if to say that yes, that’s exactly what she had planned.
So he shrugs back and asks, “Well then: How are we doing this?”
He can’t help it, a little suggestiveness creeps back into his voice, years of habit not so easy to snuff out with one barely there kiss.
“This guy likes to target girls who attend those frat parties, right? I figure we give him what he is looking for, another naive girl, too drunk to look after herself in the clutches of the greek system” Veronica says with a voice that’s confident, but she looks away with an embarrassed expression that makes it obvious those walls aren’t back up as much as she’d like him to think.
Good. He can’t help but feel. He doesn’t want it to be that easy for her. It sure as hell isn’t for him.
“So… you’re going to go to a frat party and get blackout drunk? A frat party, which is a place I most definitely am not going to blend in. Not seeing how this isn’t the worst idea ever, V.”
“Well then, Sherlock Holmes, do you have a better idea for catching this creep?” she sighs, hands on her hips, a different kind of dare.
Deep breath, he tells himself, You may not be school smart, but this kind of thing is pure street smarts and you used to have those.
“Well, for one thing, whoever this guy is, he knows who you are. He went after you in broad daylight, so I don’t think pretending to knock back some jungle juice is going to get him to let his guard down and expose himself.”
Point out the reasons why this plan isn’t likely to work. Resist the urge to be protective and macho about it.
“He went after me in broad daylight. Clearly I’m a target for him, and someone who has such a need to exert power and humiliation… he’s not going to take having been prevented well.”
He can’t exactly argue with her profiling of whoever this creep is, but Veronica saying it out loud makes him more worried for her and not less.
“All the more reason to be careful, V. If what he’s been doing is what he does to girls who haven’t even challenged his masculinity, what is he going to have planned for someone who has embarrassed him the way you have?”
“What did you do?” she shrugs and the nonchalance of it worries him. He’s not sure if he’s more stressed that she’s not taking this whole thing seriously enough or that she is freaked out enough to do something dumb. Veronica doesn’t like to be challenged. It makes her goddamned reckless.
“Veronica…”
“What would you have done?” she pauses and then gives him an appraising look, as if seeing him in a new light, or maybe an old one, “That night outside the Camelot, if I hadn’t had Backup and my taser.”
It’s hard to think that far back, to remember what it was like before he knew Veronica, before he trusted her, before she had him twisted like this.
“Scared you,” he admits, “Or at least tried to.”
That was how guys like him survived Neptune High, doing their best to thread the line between puffing up big enough to keep anyone else from fucking with you but just small enough to not be worth the powers that be dealing with you. Not a skillset that transfers into every arena, though prison definitely was one of the ones it did. The truth is that he’s done a lot of things he’s not exactly proud of.
“You would have wanted everyone to know about it, right?” Veronica says without malice, like some wheels are turning in her head, like she thinks this is actually useful somehow. “So what … a video of me crying and begging or reciting some platitude about how you ruled the school or whatever? Roughing me up a bit? Would I have been the next one up on that flagpole?”
It makes him uncomfortable to even think about it, to have her think about it. What had been the plan that night? Had they even had one? Or had Felix just spotted V’s car and the whole gang had gone swarming into action?
“Maybe I would have forced you to go to homecoming with me?” he jokes, a lame attempt at pulling them back into a safer past, urgently trying to get out of the direction this conversation has turned, almost wishing they were back dangerously close to talking about whether or not Veronica Mars would ever actually fuck him.
“Somehow I don’t think this guy wants a date,” she says, almost eye rolling, ignoring the attempt in her laser focus on this doomed crusade she’s on.
“V . . . are you seriously trying to use me as an example to profile this wacko? Do you actually think I-”
He really hopes she’s screwing around. He’s not sure what he would do if she wasn’t. He knows he and V don’t always see eye to eye on things, but after everything he thought she at least thought he was . . . safe? Like a damned dog maybe but still. Does she really think he would do something like this, could do something like this?
Forget the daydream he’s been holding onto these past couple of weeks that she might actually have feelings for him. He’s back to questioning if she even sees him as human.
“No,” her eyes drop to the ground like she just realized what she was saying and when they come back up they look anywhere but at him, “Of course not. Shit, Weevil. There I go totally going back on the whole not accusing you of shit you don’t deserve, and I didn’t even mean to this time.”
“Just your natural charm, Mars,” he deflects, not wanting her to know just how much that shit smarts.
“How do you think I keep getting people to attack me?” she smirks, like it is funny how many times that has happened instead of horrifying.
“With a face like yours, it’s what we’d call inevitable,” a voice Weevil really hoped he would never hear again after graduation says from behind his back.
He watches Veronica’s attention turn, sees the tension tighten in her shoulders and jaw. Yeah, V doesn’t really think he’s a threat, not compared to Madision Sinclair. Not that he blames her, he has the same reflexive tension; he can feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
“Don’t you have puppies to torture or something?” Veronica swallows, clearly more bothered by Madison's presence than she wants to let that bitch know.
“What, afraid I am going to interrupt your dumpster diving, Veronica?I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’d choose the K-Mart clearance bin over Prada.”
Translation: Madison either believes or just thinks that it will upset Veronica to imply that she broke up with Logan for Weevil. Which surprises him enough that he can’t help spinning around to try to figure out which it is. Not like the idea is not obviously laughable. But then so is Madison if you don’t care about how expensive her dye job is or those ugly ass Chanel c earrings she is wearing.
“Gee, Madison, if you want V to date you that bad, you should start with maybe trying not to be a bitch for half a second. I mean obviously negging works great on you because you hate yourself just as much as you hate everyone else and you know your personality is hideous enough to scare away all but the most desperate gold diggers, but most people respond better to compliments.”
“Veronica, do try to get your mutt under control before animal services has to put him down,”
She looks right past him like he isn’t there so he turns back towards Veronica and sees a fury in her eyes that Madison should know well enough to be afraid of as an almost manic smile spreads across her face.
“I would think you’d be celebrating the fact that I broke up with Logan, considering you always hated that we were a thing in the first place. Like really, you should be rejoicing, because we never have to talk to each other again. I know I have been. But instead you are in my face, begging me to punch yours. What? You need an excuse for another nose job?”
Weevil can’t help chuckling. He’s not sure if it is because he can imagine the face Madison is making right now without looking, because he’s imagining V actually making good on her offer to punch Madison in her smug bitch face and that is a great image, because it feels good to listen to Veronica chew her out, or because on some level V’s reaction shows that she does have his back, that Madison being her usual garden variety cuntastic self towards him put her on the offensive.
He knows Madison has walked far enough away when Veronica’s shoulders drop and she lets out a deep breath.
“You know, if a winning personality was all it took to make people try to kill you, she’d already be dead,” he comments.
Veronica keeps being in danger because she puts herself in danger, because she doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone and stop antagonizing dangerous people. She hadn’t antagonized him back in high school because she thought he was all talk and was calling his bluff, which is what he thought at the time. She did it because that is who Veronica is, someone who sees something she disagrees with and can’t stop picking at it until it crumbles into dust, someone who realizes there’s danger and dives head first into it.
“It’s a relief not to have to pretend to keep the peace with her,” Veronica admits, “I used to think I wanted to go back to how things were before, but you can’t go back, you can’t unknow what you learned about people when they decided you made a better enemy than an ally.”
What about the reverse, he wonders. It sure seems like Veronica regularly manages to forget all the things she should have realized about him when he decided she was a better ally than she was an enemy.
“Logan still hangs out with her?” he offers, even though he doesn’t actually want to talk about Echolls, but if they are supposed to be friends or some shit and that’s what a friend would say. Isn’t it?
“More like Dick still hangs out with the old Pirate Points Posse” Veronica confirms, before adding, “and Logan still hangs out with Dick.”
He remembers how it was the night of the Echolls family Christmas Party, remembers the way they whispered about her in the halls at school, remembers all the shit that was tagged on V’s locker or sprayed on her car, remembers the particularly lurid rumors Madison and Dick and all the rest of them used to spread loudly around World History or whatever other class the social classes ended up packed into together.
He remembers that no one was louder or more detailed than Logan.
“And you are supposed to what? Tag along?” he shakes his head, swallowing the indignance he feels on V’s behalf and summoning up disgust and sarcasm. “Echolls really is the dumbest motherfucker alive. “I see why you didn’t want to talk to him. Far as I’m concerned, having to share air with those two constitutes abuse. You should sue, for emotional damages.””
Weevil certainly wants to beat the shit out of him, more so than normal. But honestly, this might be the warmest and fuzziest he’s ever felt about Madison or Dick, if they’re really the reason that V is finally cutting Logan loose. Girl might accept transgressions and failure, but hurting her pride . . . he’s pretty sure that’s something they both have a hard time getting past.
“It’s not about that,” she insists, “or at least not just about that. He wants me to trust him when he won’t answer my questions and, leaving aside that I apparently don’t trust anyone ever, I couldn’t count on both hands all the shady things he’s been involved with that I already know about. So no, I don’t trust him even above and beyond my basic suspicion level about everyone, and well . . . I’m pretty sure that’s a dealbreaker ultimately, lack of trust.”
“Trust has to be earned, V,” he tells them both.
She’s earned his trust, at least when it comes to certain things. He knows she will help him out in a jam, that she will hear him out in the end, that she won’t give up on things just because it is easy. But he also knows she is going to be suspicious, going to send him these crazy ass mixed messages, is going to put herself in unnecessary dangers and accuse him of wild shit. He trusts that about her just as much.
“I’m not quite ready for that speech,” she warns him, referencing the conversation he had started to wonder if she had actually been too drugged to remember.
“Got it,” he takes a deep breath and tries to remember what they were supposed to be talking about. Right, the Hearst Rapist and how they were going to catch that bastard. “Back to business.”
“The rapist,” Veronica confirms, “and how you thought my plan was dumb. I’m not giving up trying to catch this guy, Weevil, so if that’s your angle I don’t want to hear it.”
Her voice gets tight at that last bit, and he’s pretty sure there’s a story there.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he tells her instead of asking why she thinks he’d try to talk her out of hunting down this asshole, when he’s only ever helped her ass with even the most foolhardy investigations. “ Just maybe we need to do some good old-fashioned detecting and see if there’s some clue we missed rather than just jumping into shark infested waters and hoping to get bitten. I assume you looked over the victims’ statements to try to find any more specific things they had in common.”
“I’ve really only been able to talk to one,” Veronica sighs, “Lamb isn’t exactly sharing information.”
“Let’s be smart about this,” he pauses, imagining breaking into the sheriff’s office and immediately realizing just how dumb an idea that is. “There’s got to be a way to get our hands on that info.”
“That’s it,” Veronica’s face lights up like one of them just had some genius idea, instead of him having stated the obvious, “We go to the smartest person I know.”