“Which books?”
She thought.
“The boring brown ones.”
Mercer sat across from her.
“Could you show us where if you went back?”
Vicky’s face changed.
“I don’t want to go there.”
I took her hand.
“You don’t have to.”
Mercer looked at me.
“We can tell police.”
We did.
Detective Ruiz obtained a search warrant that evening.
The second phone was no longer behind the books.
Howard had moved it.
But Vicky remembered something else.
“He put stuff in the lion.”
Ruiz blinked.
“The lion?”
“Big gold lion.”
Denise and Howard had a brass lion statue in their office.
Police opened the hollow base.
Inside they found a key.
The key opened a locked cabinet in Howard’s garage.
Inside the cabinet were two phones.
A stack of cash.
Three passports.
And a folder labeled:
M.P.
Michael Peterson.
Me.
The folder contained photographs of my job.
My apartment.
Vicky’s school.
