[3: THE ONE YOU ALWAYS CHOOSE]

LESS PLEASANT WAS WALKING BACK into this hospital that Malcolm had barely left hours ago, with another body and another girl’s life on the line.

Only this time, from the medical report…

There was little hope for a positive outcome.

He let Seong-Jae lead the way this time, when just couldn’t seem to move his leaden body more than one slow step at a time—trudging grimly in his partner’s wake as they took the stairs up to the CCU. The lights were still dimmed, sunrise still an hour or so off, and he paced his tread quietly as he headed toward the nurses’ desk—only to stop as Seong-Jae caught his sleeve, tugging back gently.

“Malcolm. Look.”

Malcolm paused. Seong-Jae had paused outside a familiar room—Trae Rogers’. Only his single-occupant room had been converted into a double…and in another bed occupying the other half of the room, Tisha Jones slept soundly, an IV in her arm, bandages covering her body. Her mother slept just as deeply, curled up in a chair next to Tisha’s bedside and clutching hard at her hand in her sleep. In another chair, next to Trae’s bed, his father sat sentinel, a tense and silent guardian who glanced up, watching them through the blinds, only to lift his chin toward them in a nod of grudging recognition and respect.

Malcolm returned that nod, and reached for Seong-Jae’s hand, squeezing as tight as the constrictions in his chest; Seong-Jae squeezed back just as hard, lacing their fingers together.

“I needed to see that right now,” Malcolm whispered.

And how even in their sleep, both teenagers had managed to turn slightly toward each other, heads turned on their pillows until they must have fallen asleep looking at each other.

Fuck. Those two kids were alive because of their own bravery, and Malcolm and Seong-Jae had gotten to be a part of that.

He couldn’t forget that, to carry him through on days when the exhaustion became too much.

Though the sound of a quiet, irritated voice broke that reverie, sighing at their backs. “You two again?” Nurse Diaz said. “Didn’t I just chase you out of here?”

Malcolm glanced over his shoulder. Diaz stood with her hands on her hips, watching them with arched brows, her short, curving frame planted like she would sack him past the yard line if he took one step in the wrong direction.

“Different case,” Seong-Jae murmured. “Keri Anne Newton.”

“The floater?”

Malcolm flinched, while Seong-Jae scowled. “Do not call her that.”

“Sensitive.” She peaked her brows mockingly, then let out a disgusted sigh that seemed more directed at herself than at them; she looked away, fixing her gaze on Rogers and Jones’ room, while she reached up to pull her streaked brown hair down from its messy tail and run her fingers through it before binding it back up quickly. “Sorry. Seriously. We use a lot of shorthand around here to save time so we’re not explaining when we could be saving someone’s life, but I get it sounds pretty callous if you’re not used to it.” Her sharp gaze suddenly dropped to their clasped hands. “That standard police protocol?”

As one, Malcolm and Seong-Jae broke apart, putting a few inches of distance between them. “Can we see her?” Malcolm asked, clearing her throat.

“She’s a minor,” Diaz countered.

Seong-Jae frowned. “Where are her parents?”

“Waiting room.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Down the hall. We had to get them out of the CCU. They were about to break, and getting in the way.”

Malcolm stepped closer, meeting her eyes. “They called for BPD,” he entreated softly. “We’ve already got consent. We’ll go talk to them right after, just…let us see her.”

Diaz gave him that once-over that said she was on to his shit, but then sighed and jerked her head down the hall. “This way,” she said, turning to bustle off.

Before Malcolm could follow, Seong-Jae curled a hand against his arm, giving him a strange look. “Why are you so adamant about seeing her before seeing her parents?”

“I don’t want my perceptions of them to influence what I see when I look at her.”

Seong-Jae continued to regard him oddly, before nodding. “Understood.”

They followed Diaz down the hall, to a room around the corner from Trae and Tisha’s. The blinds on this room were closed, the door drawn, and Diaz gave them a silent warning glance before easing the door open and peering inside. After a moment of scrutiny, though, she sighed, shook her head, and pushed it open all the way.

“You can’t really disturb her,” she said, stepping aside to allow them inside. “But try not to anyway.”

Seong-Jae nodded tightly. Malcolm kept his own counsel, following his partner into the room—where a small frame nearly vanished into the bed around her, this tiny thing enshrined in a darkened hospital room that, with its deep blue walls and sick smell of lingering death, made him think of a mausoleum with the grim reaper haunting its corners and eaves. The room was filled with the sounds of machinery, gasping and wheezing and pumping her chest to rise and fall in mechanical rhythm, the mask over her face fogged with breathy condensation, an IV pumping nutrients through her inner elbow and into her veins.

And her eyes were open.

Her eyes were open, staring blankly up at the ceiling, glassy and empty blue shells. Marbles, see-through with nothing behind them, large and pretty and long-lashed against a fragile face that had that particular undeveloped look of a girl who hadn’t quite pulled fully away from childhood and into womanhood. She was thin, thin as a willow, but it seemed natural rather than a result of starvation, and her hair was a mess of pale brown waves pouring over the pillow, tangling around her limbs.

Like weeds reaching up from the bottom of the river to drag her back down into the watery embrace she’d been pulled from once, but had never truly escaped.

At first glance one might almost think she was conscious, but in a state of shock—but her waxy pallor made a lie of that, her skin the color of skim milk with the same blue tinges about the edges, the heart monitor barely a whisper away from flatlining. The only thing keeping her here was those machines; cut the power, and she would go dark like they’d pulled her batteries.

It was grotesque. Macabre, watching this girl be reduced to a doll of herself, a flesh facsimile kept from degrading into nothing by the artificial pump and wheeze of the respirator, the blood pump.

And when her lips moved, when her voice emerged in a breathy, sonorous whisper like wind through the reeds…

It seemed more like a doll with her string pulled, spooling down over and over again while she repeated the same single phrase.

“He pushed me. He pushed me. He pushed me.”

He stepped closer to the bed, making himself look at her—making himself stare down into those haunting, heartwrenchingly vacant eyes, when they couldn’t look back at him.

“Anne,” he tried. “Anne, can you tell us who pushed you?”

“She can’t hear you,” Diaz said softly, moving to lean just inside the door, folding her arms over her chest. “We need to run a few more scans to confirm, but her brain was deprived of oxygen for so long it’s a miracle we could jumpstart her. Best we could tell, she was under for a lot longer than a few minutes. Cold didn’t help, either. It’s mid-October and that water’s like frozen razor blades. Her brain stem’s probably the only part that survived cell death.” She pursed her lips. “And whatever bit’s holding on to that fragment.”

Malcolm frowned, watching the ghostly shapes of her lips moving past the fogged mask. He pushed me. He pushed me. He pushed me. “Is there any chance she’ll come out of it?”

“Probably not.” Diaz pushed away from the wall and gestured toward one of the devices surrounding the bed, a number of jagged lines and what looked like heat graphs in rainbow colors moving slowly across two joined screens, both leading to plastic nodes against the girl’s temples. “Brain function monitor. The only movement we’re getting is when her brain fires to respond to the oxygen pumps, and little bits in motor control for her lips. Nothing else is going. Not even language processing. She’s not aware she’s speaking, Detective. Those flatlines don’t lie.”

Seong-Jae curled his knuckles against his mouth, drifting to the foot of the bed, his brows set into a brooding line as he stared down at the girl. She was barely a rise of narrow limbs under the blankets, like she was already melting away.

“So all we have to go on,” he said, “is “he pushed me.”

Diaz shook her head. “You need to understand that may not even mean anything. We have no idea what portion of her brain or stored memories is being accessed right now, or how bad those few functioning cells are degraded. She could be remembering a playground fight when she was three, or a hallucination as she passed out.”

That wasn’t much to go on, Malcolm thought. This was starting to sound like a case where there only job here was to rule out any prospect of homicide, then sign off on it and leave the family to grieve, helpless for anything else.

“So you definitely think it was a suicide?” he asked.

“It’s the most likely answer,” Diaz answered grimly. “But if you want to pursue it as a potential homicide, we’ll give you what we can as far as medical evidence. We can have our folks do a medical workup for anything significant, or we can call in your people.”

“Let me think about it,” Malcolm said, biting at his thumb, letting his gaze drift over her again.

Those wounds, dotting arms laid atop the sheets, thin sticks protruding out of the hospital gown…they looked almost like burn marks. Light, surface…they made him think of a few domestic abuse cases he’d seen. Men who liked to burn women with irons and hot hair curlers; they left a rather distinctive pattern of shallow surface level burns with an almost gravelly consistency, fried and crinkled. With the waterlogging and skin flaking, many of the wounds were exposed, unscabbed, not even bleeding; there was just something wrong about them, something he couldn’t quite place but he didn’t want to let go.

But he stopped as his gaze ran across her head again, and he noticed a bit of white that didn’t belong to the nodes stuck to her temples.

A flower.

A daisy, its stem tangled and nearly knotted in her hair, its white petals bruised and browned and crumpled, many torn away…but bravely holding on.

“What’s with the flower?” he asked.

“Dunno,” she answered. “It was there when they pulled her out of the water. Her parents said to leave it because she loved flowers.”

Malcolm lifted his head to regard Seong-Jae. “Odds that her parents are the ones who pushed her?”

“Slim,” Seong-Jae said tightly. “But I would need to meet them.”

“I doubt it,” Diaz countered, leaning her hip against the edge of the bed. “Look, I’ve seen a lot of people through here. Grieving, hopeful, scared…and then those people who don’t give a damn and are going through the motions because they don’t want to look callous, or because they’re just waiting for somebody to kick off. The Newtons…unless they’re Jekyll and Hydeing this, their grief is real. Too real for them to be the ones who did it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Watson,” Seong-Jae muttered, and she shot him a scathing look.

“I know my shit.”

“Hey,” Malcolm interrupted. “Can we not—”

Anne’s next sharp, deep wheeze cut them all off short, every eye jerking to her. Her eyes widened further, her lashes trembling, her constant background litany of he pushed me falling silent.

Only to be replaced by a solitary, chilling whisper.

“Eve,” she breathed tonelessly. “My name is Eve.”

Before she fell still, not saying another word…while those subtle hitches and jumps in the lines scrolling across the brain activity monitor slowed, smoothing out even further. She didn’t make another sound, only the hoarse, gasping respirator speaking for her, her eyes still so very empty, so void.

Diaz broke the tense, shaky silence with a strained murmur. “…that’s new.”

“Is she conscious?” Malcolm asked. “Is she coming around?”

“I don’t…” She scanned the monitors quickly—heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, more things Malcolm couldn’t recognize but they were all so quiet, the numbers so low. She pressed her lips together and pressed her fingers to the underside of the girl’s wrist, and leaned over to look into her dilated, unmoving eyes before shaking her head.

“I don’t think so,” she finished. “Not a single one of her vitals spiked like they would if she was transitioning to consciousness. I don’t want to be crude, but…” She pulled her hand away from Anne’s wrist. “Her brain’s like a failing hard drive. It’s a lot of bad sectors and a few little bits of data that make sense to us, but aren’t connected to anything else to make a functioning device. It’s never gonna boot up and run again.”

Seong-Jae let a few soft curse words slip out, then asked, “You are one hundred percent certain of that?”

“Ninety-five,” Diaz answered uneasily. “Right now, keeping her on life support is just cruel. Whatever bit of her is left in there probably isn’t conscious enough to suffer, but we can’t know that. This might be excruciating for her.”

Darker and darker, more and more hopeless. Malcolm made himself look away from the girl and caught Seong-Jae’s eye. “So what happens?”

Diaz considered. “Her parents decide if and when to pull it.”

Malcolm growled. “You better be one hundred percent sure before you recommend that.”

“I know how to do my job,” she bit off, dark eyes snapping. “We’ll take her through every test we can for brain function, as long as we’ve got the parents’ consent.”

“Thank you,” Malcolm said grudgingly, then sighed, tugging at his beard, tangling his fingers in it. “I’m sorry. I get testy. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“I’m used to it. People around here are rude as shit.” She eyed Malcolm, before with a huff she looked away. “I’ll give you one free pass since you’re just being an asshole ‘cause you’re worried about the girl.”

Seong-Jae arched a brow. “That is not why he is being an asshole. It is simply his natural state.”

Diaz smiled wanly. “I like your partner,” she said, then glanced toward the door. “You need anything else in here, or you want to meet her parents?”

“I can’t stay in here anymore.” The sterile air was cold, choking, and he felt like he breathed in particles of the death emanating off the girl with every breath. “Let’s get a look at the parents.”

^

MALCOLM HADN’T QUITE REALIZED HOW much he’d come to depend on Seong-Jae’s steadying presence until he had to forcibly restrain himself from reaching for his hand in full view of the people huddled in miserable little clusters in the waiting room. Malcolm really shouldn’t be feeling this so hard, but right now he had no defenses left, no time to build them back up.

At least, even when he was trying to remember professional lines in public…

Having Seong-Jae close helped, especially when he could see his own exhaustion and sorrow reflected in black eyes and know that Seong-Jae understood.

And they lingered for a few moments, nudging arm to arm, exchanging quiet sidelong glances before Malcolm leaned around the door, knocking lightly as his gaze landed on the couple Diaz had pointed out before bustling back to her rounds.

“Patricia and Scott Newton?” he asked, pitching his voice low out of respect for the other tearful, anxious groups of people who watched curiously.

The Newtons glanced up; both were as thin and reedy as their daughter, narrow people with bookish, not unkind faces, Mr. Newton balding and his glasses slipping down his reddened nose, Mrs. Newton clutching at her red and white polka-dotted cardigan with thin and clawlike hands, her neat little bob of black hair sticking to her wet cheeks. They eyed him and Seong-Jae almost fearfully, clearly wary of strangers who weren’t dressed like doctors or nurses.

Malcolm felt like it would be disrespectful to smile when nothing, right now, was worth smiling about, but he tried to keep his tone gentle as he asked, “Could we speak with you outside, please?”

The two glanced at each other, some wordless communication passing between them as they clutched each other’s hands, before they rose, helping each other up and straggling through the clustered chairs and tables to the door. Malcolm retreated to give them room, while Seong-Jae shifted to lean against the wall at his side, a watchful, silent reminder that he wasn’t alone.

The Newtons positioned themselves on the other side of the door like it was an unspoken boundary between them, and both eyed him and Seong-Jae before Mrs. Newton sniffled, speaking up, her voice ragged and weary. “You aren’t doctors.”

“No, ma’am,” Seong-Jae said gently. “We are with the BPD—” and Malcolm couldn’t miss that he tactfully left off homicide division, “—and we are investigating what happened to your daughter. Detective Yoon.” He tapped his own chest, then gestured toward Malcolm. “Detective Khalaji.”

Relief transformed Mr. Newton’s face, while Mrs. Newton remained closed, watching them doubtfully; it was Mr. Newton Malcolm was most interested in, when he was the first potential he in Anne’s proximity. But his eager hope seemed genuine, none of those tiny tics that gave away when someone was swapping the mask of one emotion for another after selecting the one that seemed most appropriate and fastening it in place.

“Can you find him?” Mr. Newton asked breathlessly. “She kept saying—”

“‘He pushed me,’” Malcolm finished. “That’s what we need to talk to you about. We know she ran away from home a few months ago, before she was found tonight. Can you tell us about her friends? A boyfriend, girlfriend, partner? Anyone she might have been staying with? Anyone who might have been the reason she ran away, or even someone who may have kidnapped her?”

After an uncertain moment, Mrs. Newton shook her head. “No…she didn’t really have any friends. She never seemed to want or need them.”

“She was always happy by herself,” Mr. Newton added. Thick, rough words, warm with both fondness and pain. “Just off in her daydreams, sweet and smiling, her nose in her sketchbooks.”

“There was her prayer group,” Mrs. Newton added. “She spent time with them. They were the only people she really saw, unless she had friends at school we didn’t know about.”

“You’re religious?” Seong-Jae asked.

Mr. Newton shrugged. “As much as anyone is these days. We’re Methodist. We go to holiday services, the occasional Sunday. It’s not really a big thing.” He frowned, wrinkles appearing in his pale brow. “Except for Anne. About three or four months ago, she started really getting into it. Going to the youth fellowship prayer group, doing service weekends with them.” His gaze darted between Malcolm and Seong-Jae, puzzled, questioning. “We didn’t see any harm in it. It was a safe environment, and she was helping people.”

“Did her behavior start to change around that time?” Malcolm asked. “Did she grow more secretive? Defensive?”

“A little,” Mrs. Newton said, frowning deeply. “It’s hard to explain. She wasn’t rude or ugly. She was still our sweet, bright girl. She didn’t reject us, and she was still so happy.” She shook her head. “But she was suddenly just…inaccessible. Like we were reaching for her through glass. And she started covering herself up in layers from head to toe. Turtlenecks, sweaters, jeans. Even when it was hot.”

That was telling. Malcolm subsided, turning that over, while Seong-Jae stepped in smoothly.

“Mrs. and Mr. Newton,” he said. “Would you mind if we looked at Anne’s bedroom in your home? It might help us understand her psyche before she left, and give us insight into the events that led to this point.”

The two hesitated, seeming to act as extensions of each other, as if they were joined on some quiet wavelength built over time and familiarity. Malcolm wondered if that hesitation was hiding something, something they didn’t want to be found at their home…but after a moment, Mr. Newton nodded.

“I’ll drive,” he said. “I can lead you there, if you’ll follow me.”

“Scott…” Mrs. Newton looked up at her husband with pleading eyes, resting her hand to his arm.

He patted her hand with a tremulous, tearful smile. “You’ll be all right,” he said, low and heartfelt. “Stay with her. Stay with our girl.”

^

MALCOLM AND SEONG-JAE KEPT THEIR own counsel, as they followed the red squares of Newton’s tail lights through the rising early morning gloom, tailing his Toyota away from Mercy Medical; Seong-Jae’s quiet, though, was strange, oddly bristling, and Malcolm watched him sidelong, keeping one eye on the beginnings of morning traffic.

“Hey,” he asked softly. “You okay?”

“I do not know.” Seong-Jae answered, never taking his pensive gaze from the window. “Something about this case sits uncomfortably with me. That girl in that bed, left there like that…”

“Yeah. Me too.” He sighed deeply. “She started covering herself.”

“Because someone was hurting her. Repeatedly, and leaving those marks. And she did not want her parents to see.”

“Exactly,” Malcolm said. “If this was suicide, I doubt it was voluntary.”

“That raises many complications.”

“Yeah…yeah, it does.”

But then Newton was pulling up outside a tidy little two-story frame house on Rolling Avenue, its small patch of fenced-in lawn well-manicured, its siding a plain and inoffensive beige. This felt like a somber processional, as they all exited their vehicles and Newton led them up the walk to the house. He fumbled with his keys for a moment, then let them into an airy space with light-filled windows contrasting dark hardwood. Up the stairs, through a narrow hallway…and then Newton stopped outside an open door, gesturing limply inside.

“This is her,” he said weakly.

Malcolm stepped inside, turning slowly, taking it in. Teal walls, boldly different from the neutral colors of the rest of the house; pink sakura branch decals scrawling over the walls. Drawings tacked up everywhere, pencil and charcoal-sketched stills, studies of light falling in shafts through rooms and creating interplays of shadows in an increasingly skilled hands. The bed was unmade, rumpled sheets and duvet in teals and florals, the desk a mess of battered notebooks and schoolbooks, clothing draped over chairs and the windowsill, a bookshelf full of manga and odds and ends and old toys. The entire room smelled of faint traces of candy-flavored lip gloss, creamy and sweet.

Girlish, in that way girls so often were when they were taught their youth was something to be prized, commoditized, sexualized, sold.

Clean and wholesome on the surface, innocent pastels…

But something about it left a sour taste in Malcolm’s mouth.

Seong-Jae stepped into the room after him. “You have not disturbed anything since she left?”

“Only to see what she took with her,” Newton said. He had a way of rubbing and fretting his hands together, as if he was dry-washing them, and he did it incessantly as he spoke. “Mostly underthings, not much real clothing. Her phone, a few little personal things like her sketchbook. She only took a few, though. She left most of them.” He shook his head, his voice trembling. “I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t…I…”

“Mr. Newton…?” Seong-Jae prompted, and Mr. Newton smiled, his eyes welling wetly, gleaming in the rising sunlight streaming through the gauzy white curtains over the window.

“She loved drawing,” he said. “If you look in her class notebooks, she drew more than she took notes. Flowers pouring all down the margins.” He took a shaky breath. “If she left because she wanted to…wouldn’t she have taken all her sketchbooks? The things she loved the most?”

“You think she was kidnapped,” Malcolm said.

“Kidnapped, coerced, something,” Newton said bitterly. “This wasn’t like her.”

Malcolm hummed thoughtfully in the back of his throat, turning to take the room in again, sweeping for more details. “Could we look at the room alone, please?”

“Of course.” Newton bobbed his head quickly. “Of course, yes. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Malcolm waited until Newton had excused himself to speak, turning back to Seong-Jae. “I’m getting really bad feelings about this,” he growled. “Either we have parents who don’t understand their daughter at all and it’s a suicide, and they missed the signs…”

“…or she was influenced somehow.” Seong-Jae drifted closer to the desk, skimming his splayed fingertips over the surface of a worn World History textbook without quite touching. “She may even have been influenced to jump.”

“Yeah. That’s a problem.”

“You cannot prosecute someone for a suggestion or provocation if the person appeared to act of their own free will.”

“There’ve been precedents, people charged with bullying others into suicide or provable intent with adults grooming or soliciting minors, but…” Malcolm shook his head. “It’s hard to prove, harder to sell to a jury, and a major gray area when it comes to what should be prosecutable and what shouldn’t. Even if there’s legal standing to press charges, actually making them solid is…”

“Not easy.”

“Yeah.”

“Before we worry about that point…”

Seong-Jae dipped his hand into his jacket pocket—then frowned, rummaging before letting out an exasperated sigh. Malcolm dipped into his own pocket with a weary smirk and retrieved a crumpled handful of vinyl gloves, and tossed a pair to Seong-Jae before snapping on a pair himself.

Seong-Jae caught the gloves and shook them out, before slipping his long, ridge-knuckled hands into them and finishing, “We should try to find out who was influencing her.”

“Let’s see if this room can tell us anything, then.”

They split up, each circling the room in opposite directions, overlapping each other; Malcolm started with the bookshelves, flipping through manga that mostly seemed to be stories of delicate girls falling for icy, distant boys with attitude problems. Nothing out of the ordinary, typical romantic fantasies trying to explain away the cruel behavior of boys their age, with a few hardcovers straight off high school recommended reading lists stuffed to one side. A worn leather-bound copy of the King James bible. Textbooks with pages creased in place of bookmarks; no folded notes hidden between the pages, more strange than if they’d found any handwritten bits of lined paper. Just as her father had said, her notebooks were half notes, half cascading pen-drawn murals of flowers occupying every space.

But in later pages in each notebook, daisies grew more and more conspicuous among the flourishing gardens of ink.

Hm.

Nothing in the closet but jeans and t-shirts, half on hangers, half tossed on the floor in ordinary careless disarray. Malcolm leaned out, then lifted his head as Seong-Jae called his name from the bookshelf.

“Malcolm,” he said, frowning at the open bible in his hand, flipping through the pages in quiet whispers of pages.

Malcolm crossed the room and leaned over Seong-Jae’s shoulder, watching as he paged through rapidly, stopping every time he ran across markings in the book.

Names.

Circled in blue ink.

“Adam,” Malcolm realized. “And Eve. She’s circled every instance.”

Seong-Jae paused on one page, lifting his head, watching Malcolm sidelong. “She said her name was Eve.”

“So there must be an Adam.”

“The church group?”

“It’s a place to start.”

Seong-Jae flipped a few more pages. Malcolm turned away, then stopped as he caught a glimpse of brighter color, a dash of highlighter across an entire passage; Seong-Jae paused as well, frowning, lips moving soundlessly as his eyes darted across the page.

“What is that?” Malcolm asked.

“Exodus 33:20. ‘You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.’”

“Huh,” Malcolm said. “That’s ominous.”

“Entirely. But even worse…” Seong-Jae frowned. “It implies motive.”

^

THEY FOUND NOTHING ELSE THAT might point them toward an Adam—no love notes, no initials encircled in hearts, nothing but the accumulated debris of childhood in broken bits of plastic jewelry and a battered teddy bear that had seen better days. After another thorough canvas of the room, they headed downstairs and found Mr. Newton in the kitchen, gaze fixed on his hands as he wiped down the spotless counter.

Whatever comforted him. Some people fell back on routine tasks.

He looked up, though, as Malcolm and Seong-Jae stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Anything?”

“We might have a lead,” Malcolm said carefully. He wouldn’t even really call it a lead so much as a nagging thought, and he didn’t want Newton to take any definitive promises from that. “Is her phone line still active?”

Newton nodded, pulling the wad of paper towels between his hands. “Yes. We kept paying the bill in case she wanted to call home. We’ve sent so many text messages, and called and called and called.” His face fell. “The voicemail box has been full for a month now.”

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said softly. “Can you give us the number? If she made any other calls, we may be able to follow her tracks back over the last few months. We’d also like to check out the church and her youth group.”

“I…yes.” Again that quick, almost too-eager head bob, and Malcolm was starting to think they’d need to trust Diaz’s instincts on this. Newton didn’t have the body language of a man who could kill his own daughter and compartmentalize it to experience grief. “Let me find you a sticky note.”

They left with Anne’s number and the address of New Revival Methodist Church scribbled on a folded pink Post-It, and a sense of unease haunting Malcolm. He couldn’t help feeling like he was overlooking something; his brain felt like he was trying to force it through the tiny holes of a sieve to get every word out, every thought struggling through cotton, and a headache was building at the base of his skull. He glanced at Seong-Jae, though, as they slid into the Camaro, Seong-Jae taking the driver’s seat once more.

Malcolm slumped in the passenger’s seat and tucked the Post-It into his inner breast pocket. “We’ll get the phone number to Sade. Anne’s parents have been paying the bill, so it should still be active. If she made any calls they might be able to at least contact her carrier for GPS coordinates at the time of each call. We can narrow down common locations to track her locations within a geographical radius over the last few month.” He frowned, rubbing his temples. “We’ll stop by the church, see who the prayer group coordinator is. Then we can check her school, see how many boys in her class are named Adam, build a potential suspect list—”

“Malcolm.” Seong-Jae cut him off—and then warm hands curled against his cheeks, tangling in his beard, drawing him around firmly to face Seong-Jae and a stern, troubled gaze, black eyes stormy. “No.”

Malcolm blinked. “No?”

“You have not slept in two days while under extreme duress,” Seong-Jae said. “You will begin to make mistakes in your current condition. Possibly extremely grievous ones.”

“But the case—”

“Can wait.” The hard edge to Seong-Jae’s voice softened, and he stroked a thumb along Malcolm’s cheek. “I know it is not ideal, but it is a matter of choosing your losses. We could lose far more time recovering from mistakes made while exhausted.” Those dark eyes pleaded. “Four hours. Just four hours. Text the number to Mx. Marcus, and then go home and rest. Please.”

Malcolm’s pride rebelled, internally snarling that he didn’t need to rest, that he wasn’t that weak…but his head was throbbing and his eyes were sandy and hot and Seong-Jae was fucking right. He sighed, sagging with a tired smile.

“All right. Only because you’re the one asking.” He leaned into one of those long-fingered, rough hands, pressing his cheek into Seong-Jae’s palm. “Will you stay with me?”

He expected a deflection; a refusal, when this thing was still so new between them and asking seemed like such a fraught and worrisome thing.

But Seong-Jae hesitated only briefly…then leaned in and kissed Malcolm, soft and light but all he ever needed.

“Yes,” he said, and that was simply that.

^

MALCOLM HARDLY LASTED THE DRIVE back to his apartment with his eyes trying to close of their own volition. It was like the moment Seong-Jae suggested sleep, his body took it less as a recommendation and more a demand, and was determined to get him there as quickly as possible.

The sooner he slept, at least, the sooner he could be back on the case.

Upstairs, in the open terraced loft space of his apartment, Seong-Jae shrugged out of his jacket and kicked off his motorcycle boots, then dropped down on Malcolm’s rumpled bed as if he belonged there, leaning against the headboard and crossed his legs at the ankles, patting his lap. It was a sign of just how tired Malcolm was, that that enticing image of Seong-Jae sprawled so rakishly in those leather pants could barely spark a ghost of heat. He only managed to drop his suit coat, shed his holsters, slog over to the bed, and drop down onto it heavily enough to make it groan.

“Here,” Seong-Jae said, tugging at Malcolm’s shirt sleeve. “Lie down.”

Malcolm let himself be drawn down, tumbling tiredly to pillow his head on Seong-Jae’s thighs. His eyes sank closed immediately, and a groan escaped him that felt like he was deflating. “Better than a pillow.”

“Shh.” He felt a soft tugging on his hair, and then Seong-Jae’s fingers working his elastic free. “Sleep.”

“You’re not giving me much choice,” Malcolm sighed, as that touch stroked through his hair; he rubbed his cheek to slick leather. “Ah…Seong-Jae.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing,” Malcolm murmured, and tried not to practically purr as Seong-Jae threaded his fingers deeper into his hair. “Nothing at all.”

Silence, then, was comfortable and comforting…and yet Malcolm couldn’t quiet his racing thoughts, even as that steady stroke of warm fingers relaxed him into a puddle. Seong-Jae was his only comfort, right now…but he kept picturing that girl, dead save for a technicality and yet her voice still calling, demanding something be done to give her death closure; to find and expose the culprit to the light.

He groaned, turning his face into Seong-Jae’s thigh. “…I can’t sleep.”

“You are impossible,” Seong-Jae said with a fond sigh. “Be still.”

His stroking hand fell still, curling warm against the back of Malcolm’s neck; Malcolm opened one eye. “Seong-Jae?”

“Shh,” Seong-Jae insisted.

And then began to sing.

Soft, lilting, not a lullaby but soothing nonetheless, a bewitching and husky softness that coaxed Malcolm to relax, to surrender, to fall under its spell and slip away. He closed his eyes, listening to lyrics he didn’t know but that promised maybe it’ll last this time and you never have to ask, a song he vaguely recognized from the radio but that Seong-Jae made all his own.

All his own…and Malcolm’s, teasing at terrifying and wonderful things in his heart as the song came back to the same line over and over again, quiet words chasing him into a deep and unbroken sleep.

And I’m gonna love you…

…I’m gonna love you.