Just Keep Breathing by GS Rhodes (good books to read for 12 year olds .txt) 📕

DS Sanchez shrugged. “Fair enough.”

“Carry on,” he said, already sick of the mollycoddling. It really wasn’t Zoe’s usual style. Maybe the state of him at the riverside had scared her, it was hard to say.

“They tried to frame him because they thought it was the only way they could get out of it,” Zoe said eventually. “But Caleb figured it out. He didn’t go to his grandparents’ house after he left us, he came here. And when he got here he realised his mum wasn’t working. When he got home, there she was with Chris and he put two and two together I think. Or they thought he did. It gets a little fuzzy around that point.”

“So they locked him up in that house?”

Zoe nodded. “That’s where they’d kept Sarah. She’d been there the whole time and we had no idea. They sedated her, tied her up, just like they’d done with Caleb.” She shook her head. “When we search Alex’s house we’ll probably find receipts for some kind of heavy sedative.”

“Or evidence she stole it from here.”

“Possibly,” Zoe said.  “What got you there?”

“Huh?”

“We were in the interview with Norman and suddenly it clicked in your head,” she said. “What happened?”

“I finally put it together,” Kidd said. “The ‘D’ that Sarah had been talking about on her website was her dad. It was his secrets she was sick of keeping, not Dexter’s, his yelling that was frustrating her. And it was the mention of the houses. Suddenly, it all fell into place. I just wish I’d gotten there sooner.”

Zoe nodded. “It makes it hard to have faith in humanity when you do this job, doesn’t it?”

“How so?”

“You constantly see the worst of people,” she said, taking a sip of her tea, wincing again, and putting it down. It really must have been as awful as it looked. “And even when you think you’ve seen people being utterly despicable, someone else comes along and is like, ‘I can do worse than that, watch me lock up my own daughter and then strangle her at a riverside.’” She took another sip. “Fucking hell, this is dire.”

“The tea or the world?”

“Horrible combination,” she said with a wink. “I don’t know if I want to live in a world this bad, with tea this bad.”

“There will always be bad tea, Zoe,” Kidd said. “We just have to find the better cups.”

“You really did get your head hit quite hard, didn’t you?” she said with a smile, which made Kidd laugh. He winced a little at the pain as he did but it was worth it.

“What about Laura?” he asked.

“That’s a little more complicated,” Zoe said.

“How so?”

Zoe looked down at her cup of tea and shook her head. “She got off.”

“What?”

Zoe shrugged. “She claimed not to know anything about it,” Zoe said. “Didn’t know that he was in the house, or that he had Caitlyn upstairs, didn’t know that he had anything to do with what happened with Sarah, didn’t know a damn thing.”

“And they bought it?”

Zoe shook her head. “Weaver didn’t. I didn’t. Caitlyn definitely fucking didn’t. The team didn’t, based on what you told them. DC Powell was livid. Never seen him show any emotion apart from panic so to have him actually react to something was exciting.”

“How is Caitlyn?”

“Shaken, but okay,” Zoe replied. “But she thinks that Laura was in on it too. We’ve got all the phones for evidence, going to download the messages and see what we can come up with but—”

“She’s smarter than that,” Kidd said. “If she wants to get away with it, she’ll get away with it. Everything will have been done verbally if at all.” He sighed and took another sip of water. Never in his life had he enjoyed a glass of water so much. He downed the rest of it and leaned over to pour another. His body ached, but it was his face that hurt more than anything else. Chris Harper had really done a number on him.

“Anything else to report?” Kidd asked as the door to the ward opened. He looked to see John McAdams walking in, looking a little bit lost. He was carrying a bunch of flowers and had a little brown paper bag in his other hand. He scanned the room, looking from bed to bed until he clocked Benjamin, a smile spreading across his face.

“Just this guy,” she said.

“What about him?”

“He called the station this morning because he’d shown up at your house, apparently you were meant to have a date—”

“Shit.”

“He got worried something had happened and when you weren’t answering your phone, he spoke to Diane.”

“Diane!”

“She’s a very lovely woman,” John said as he got to the foot of Ben’s bed. He smiled at him, his eyebrows knitted together in concern. Kidd didn’t want to know how banged up his face looked, but based on the way that John was looking at him, all puppy dog eyes and worry, he imagined it didn’t look good. Hey, at least he still wanted to look at him. “She told me that you’d been taken into hospital. I didn’t know if I should come.”

“I told him it was the right thing to do,” Zoe said. “Which it was, right?”

“Oh God, absolutely,” Kidd said. He smiled at John. “Are those for me?”

“I know we’ve not done gifts or anything like that yet, but flowers felt like the right thing,” he said seeming so unsure of himself. It wasn’t exactly a romantic milestone that he was coming to visit Ben in hospital after he’d had his head kicked in, but there was something romantic in the fact that he was there at all.

“No, it’s great,” Kidd said. “I’m sure the nurse can get a vase or—”

“I’ll go check,” Zoe said.

“Zoe, you don’t have to—” John began.

“No, no, you two talk,” she said, a knowing smile on her face. “I’ll find a vase and then head back to the station. There’s paperwork to do, all sorts. I can keep