You Can't Run Hope Davis (free ebook reader .txt) 📖

early night myself. I’ve spent entirely too much time in this building this week. And that’s saying a lot for me.”

“It is.” Naya smiled as she turned and headed to clock out. “See you tomorrow!” She called over her shoulder as she exited the door and walked towards her car. She felt relieved, she finally felt like they were getting somewhere with this case besides chasing their tails.

The drive home was quicker than she expected for five on a Friday, and when she pulled up in front of her house she noticed there were quite a few cars out front. It made her wonder if her family was having a party.

When she walked in the door, she heard voices in the living room and decided to poke her head in really quick before going to change for her date. She noticed that her parents were actually not there for once, but Vance was on the couch watching as Trevor, Kevin, and Sebastian played some sort of shooting game. It was early, so Derek was still there as well, a controller in his hands. There was also another man she had never seen before, but he was dressed in scrubs, so she assumed it was Elliot. It was a bit weird that both aides were there at the same time.

“Is there some sort of party I missed the invite for?”

Vance looked over his shoulder to see her, his face eerily pale like it usually was after a day of chemotherapy. “Oh, you’re here, now we can start.” He joked feebly. Naya could tell he felt weak.

The man she didn’t recognize quickly crossed the room and held out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Elliot from Home Health Care. I don’t believe we’ve met, but I assume you’re Naya, Vance’s sister?”

“You are correct.” She replied as she shook his hand. Elliot looked to be quite a bit younger than the rest of them, but like Derek, clearly had the muscles required to lift a full-grown man if needed. “Nice to meet you.”

 He quickly volunteered the information she had wondered about. “Derek had me come in today to learn the chemotherapy routine, so that way if we ever needed to switch days, or if Vance had his appointments switched, we would both be trained.”

“That’s smart.” She smiled, glancing over her shoulder to see Kevin looking at her. “Well, if you men don’t need me for anything, I’m going to go change.”

 The entire group smiled, giving ‘no thank you’s over their shoulders while focused on their game and Elliot went and sat back down.

Naya went up the stairs and changed into an oversized sweater with leggings. She wished she had something a little dressier, but she simply didn’t. Besides, he knew it had been a long week, cute and comfortable would have to do.

She was about to walk down the stairs when she noticed a new urgent email had come through on her phone. She opened it up to find the report on the house fire for Dave Smith’s home. She skimmed through it, being thoroughly disappointed by how short it was. And she was more disappointed still when she reached the end to read that the fire chief was pretty sure it had just been a shorted wire. Crazy timing for a wire to short out, but there were no signs of an accelerant to lead them to consider it as arson.

Naya checked to see that Atlas received the same email, laughing when a text came in from him just as she did so. Apparently he had been reading the email too.

Atlas: Back to square one I guess

The text also had a shrugging emoji which made Naya giggle. For some reason she hadn’t figured Atlas as the emoji type of person. She quickly sent an emoji she thought looked annoyed back to him and slid her phone into her pocket.

With a small sigh and a last check in her mirror, she walked back down the stairs to find Kevin standing by the door dangling her keys.

“Shall we?”

“We shall.” She responded with a smile.

CHAPTER 20

MARK

He was in the detective’s house. Well, not that this was a new thing, after all, he’d been here before. But it seemed more special now that he had decided that she would be perfect for his project.

He wanted to go and look at her room, but he wasn’t sure how to do that without drawing attention to himself. He looked around the room, all the other men seemed to be involved in the Call of Duty bracket they had going on, but he couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t afford to have any suspicion on him at this point in his plan.

He would just have to come back another time and do some snooping then.

The doorbell rang as the pizza they had ordered was delivered.

“I got it.” Smiling as he headed for the door.

He found a pimple faced teenager on the stoop with the pizzas. “Thanks.” He said politely as he took the pizzas from him and closed the door. He hadn’t done the ordering, but he was surprised to feel how heavy the four pizzas were.

“What did you get on these things?” He asked as he walked back in, lifting them up and down a couple times.

Vance laughed weakly. “I think I got extra meat on all of them.”

All the men in the room started laughing. It was quite funny that Vance had been the one to order such heavy pizzas when he barely ate.

Mark headed for the kitchen, setting the pizzas down on the counter and grabbing the paper plates from the cupboard where he knew they would be. He had already had time to snoop around down here. But of course, that was much less suspicious than snooping in Detective Largusa’s bedroom.

He loaded up two of