GLASS HOUSES

Chapter Two

Elena caught up to him at the edge of the driveway.

"Julian."

He didn't stop walking, phone still pressed to his ear, but he lifted a finger, the universal signal for one second. Whatever Richard Ashworth was saying on the other end had drained the color from his face.

"I understand," Julian said into the phone. "Don't say anything else until I get there." He ended the call and stood still for a moment, staring at nothing.

"What was that?"

"Nothing that concerns you." He said it too fast, which told her it concerned her plenty.

"A girl is dead in that pool house, Julian. Everything concerns me right now."

He looked at her, and for a second she saw something raw underneath the composed lawyer face, something that looked almost like fear. Then it was gone, folded back beneath the calm the way he probably folded everything back beneath the calm.

"I have to go," he said. "Richard needs me downtown."

"Downtown where?"

"That's privileged, Detective." But his voice had lost its edge. He sounded tired instead of careful. "I'll call you."

"You said that this morning too."

"I meant it this morning too." He held her gaze for a beat longer than necessary, then turned and walked to a black sedan parked crooked at the curb, the kind of parking job that belonged to a man who hadn't been thinking about parking at all.

Elena watched him go and didn't like the feeling sitting in her chest. Not suspicion, exactly. Something closer to worry, which was worse, because worry meant she'd already started caring what happened to him.

She filed that thought away to deal with later. Preferably never.

---

Back at the field office, Elena spent the afternoon pulling everything she could on Mia Ashworth. Phone records first, requested through a warrant that came back fast, the kind of speed that only happened when a senator's daughter was the victim. Nothing unusual on the surface. Good student. Decent friend group. The kind of profile that read like every other seventeen-year-old girl in Atlanta.

Then she found the charger.

It had been logged in the initial scene sweep, sitting in a drawer in the pool house changing room. A charging cable that didn't match any device on the official inventory. Elena pulled the crime scene photos and stared at it for a long moment before picking up her phone.

"Priya, it's Cole. That cable from the pool house. Any luck tracing what it was for?"

"Funny you should ask." Priya's voice had the particular brightness of someone who'd found something good. "We swept the property again this morning. Found a phone taped under the pool house bench. Prepaid, no name attached, activated four months ago."

Elena sat up straight. "Where exactly?"

"Underside of the bench, past the tile edge. You'd have to know to look for it."

Four months. Around the same time Caroline said Mia had gotten distant.

"Get me the call log," Elena said. "Everything on that phone."

"Already pulling it. I'll have something for you within the hour."

Elena hung up and sat back, staring at the ceiling of her cramped little office space, feeling the particular clarity that came right before a case cracked open. Somebody had been calling Mia Ashworth in secret for four months. And that same somebody had gone quiet three days before she died.

She thought about the fear on Caroline's face. She thought about Julian's voice cracking on the phone. She thought, against her better judgment, about the way he'd looked at her right before Richard Ashworth's call cut him off.

Whatever he'd been about to say, it had scared him enough to run.

---

The call log came through forty minutes later. Elena scrolled through it at her desk, feeling something cold settle low in her stomach as the pattern took shape. Dozens of calls a week to a single number, also prepaid, also untraceable through the department's usual channels. Some late at night. One call that lasted almost two hours, three weeks before Mia died.

And then, three days before her death, the calls stopped completely. No warning. No gradual tapering off. Just silence.

Elena pulled up everything she had on the timeline so far and laid it out on a legal pad the old way, the way she'd learned before she trusted computers to do the thinking for her. Four months ago: the calls start. Some time before that, according to Julian: a sealed settlement agreement buried in his firm's archives, tied to two other families her firm represented alongside the Ashworths.

Something had happened. Something that connected an old secret to a scared seventeen-year-old girl calling someone in the middle of the night, and then, three days before she died, stopped calling at all.

Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn't recognize.

*This is Julian. New phone. Don't call the old number again.*

Elena stared at the screen. A cold feeling crawled up the back of her neck.

*Why do you need a new phone?* she typed back.

The reply came fast, faster than a man being careful should type.

*Because someone went through my office an hour ago. Nothing's missing that I can tell yet. But the settlement file I told you about — it's gone.*

Elena's stomach dropped.

*Who knew you had it?*

*Nobody. That's what scares me.*

She read the message twice, feeling the shape of the case shift under her, the ground she'd thought she was standing on turning out to be something else entirely. Somebody had known exactly what Julian found, exactly where he kept it, and exactly when to take it. That kind of knowledge didn't come from guessing.

It came from watching.

Her phone buzzed again.

*I think whoever's behind this knows I've been talking to you. I think that's why they took it before I could hand it over.*

*Where are you right now?*

There was a pause before his reply came through, long enough that Elena's pulse ticked up waiting for it.

*I don't know if I should tell you that over text.*

*Julian.*

Another pause. Then:

*I'm not safe going home tonight. I don't know who else has access to information they shouldn't have.*

Elena stared at the screen, her mind already moving through the options, the protocols, the part of her job that knew exactly what to do when a witness felt threatened. But underneath the procedure was something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with the fact that her hands weren't quite steady as she typed her next message.

*Come to my apartment. It's the last place anyone would think to look for you.*

She hit send before she could talk herself out of it, before the part of her brain that had spent ten years building careful walls could remind her exactly how bad an idea this was.

His reply came through a moment later.

*Are you sure?*

Elena looked at the message for a long time before she answered, aware of exactly what she was agreeing to and doing it anyway.

*I'm sure. Just get here safe.*

She grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair, already moving toward the door, already trying not to think too hard about what it meant that the first thing she felt, underneath the fear for his safety, was something that felt dangerously close to relief that she wouldn't be spending the night alone.