I checked my pulse as I got to the hallway, and took a deep breath as I leaned up against the glass wall of Jake’s office. Rebecca was beautiful with her dark, wavy hair and gorgeous eyes. And, damn, the way she smelled! It was like the soft vanilla of old books, of lavender and wildflowers from the glades and parks around town. I took another deep breath and swallowed hard. It had taken me everything I had to keep my cool in there. Me. The guy who wasn’t phased by women, who never worried about having to find one.
I ran a hand through my hair, the same hand that had touched hers earlier and still felt warm and strange from her soft skin. I needed to get a grip and collect myself before I went and saw the boss. God, I couldn’t believe I’d reached out and grabbed her hand like that. Was I being too forward? Too personal? Shit, I was, wasn’t I? I wasn’t keeping a professional composure on this thing.
“You okay, Matt?”
A jolt of surprise nearly sent me screaming at Jake’s words behind me. He must have seen me nearly collapse against his office and gotten up to check to see if I was okay.
“Yeah,” I said, waving him off without looking back, “I’m fine.”
“Sure you didn’t get a little too much last night?”
“What?” I asked, straightening out. “No, I’m fine. I was pretty sober by the time we hit the sleeping bags. Go back and watch your soccer game, or whatever.”
“Whatever,” Jake said, giving me a light punch in the arm. “See if I ever ask how you’re doing again.”
I pushed off against the wall and, after gathering my thoughts, headed over to my boss’s office. He had the final say on any of the investigations we picked up, and this one was certainly not an exception, especially since we’d been previously turned down when it came to the insurance side of things.
“Peter?” I asked, knocking on my boss’s door. “Got a minute?”
My boss glanced up at me from his computer screen. “About Rebecca Stokes?”
“Yep. It’s about her Uncle Zeke, the old codger down at the hardware store.”
“Yeah,” he said, swiveling his chair around to face me a little more fully and beckon me into his office. “I remember. Heard something about Peak having to bring him in on arson. What about it?” he asked, giving me a little quirk of a smile.
“What do you think?” I asked as I dropped the file on his desk.
“I think Ms. Stokes is like me, and doesn’t believe Zeke would have burned down his own building,” he said as he took the small case file and flipped it open. “Now, she wants us to look at investigating the fire on our own end to see if we can help out his defense by throwing doubt on the court case.”
“Well, I think you’re pretty good at this job.”
“Doesn’t exactly take Sherlock to figure that one out.” He looked at one of the guest chairs in front of his desk and nodded. “Take a seat, Matt. Let’s see if we can’t figure out what our chances are here.”
“Feeling like we should take it?” I asked as I took a seat.
“Wishing it never would’ve happened, to be honest. Zeke’s a good guy, helped us out a lot when we were fixing this place up and working on the safe house.”
The safe house had been originally little more than a shack, a payment given to Peter and Richard for one of their first cases. They’d managed to renovate it together. Almost a year ago, though, it got shot up during an altercation with a biker gang that was after Richard and his client. Well, it turned out it was just Richard they wanted, but they still shot up the place and threatened to hurt her if he didn’t comply. Needless to say, we’d spent quite a bit of time up there fixing everything up. Zeke hadn’t come up to help us, exactly, but he had secured a pretty good price for all the lumber, fixtures, and wiring we’d needed.
“That why you didn’t take the case in the first place?” I asked.
Peter looked up me, his eyes soft and noncommittal under his heavy, weathered brows. “Something like that. Couldn’t feel like I was going to be splitting allegiances, even when it came to something like a fire investigation.”
“Well, it was definitely arson,” I said. “That’s all a fire inspector would have been really determining, was cause.”
“Still seemed iffy to me. Besides, what if we had been involved in putting Zeke behind bars? Old man’s loved by everyone in town, including me. Think we’d have so much goodwill afterwards.”
I shrugged. “Probably right. Water under the bridge now.”
He glanced up, locked eyes with me, and nodded. He went back to flipping through the rest of the file, and spent the next few minutes reading over every little piece of evidence and looking over the images that had been printed up and slipped in.
Peter wasn’t a certified fire investigator and hadn’t spent anytime as a fireman, like me. But he had done ground inspections of bombing sites as a member of the Navy SEALs over in Iraq. They needed to be there during the initial forensic investigation phase, so they could collect any physical evidence that might lead to human intelligence leads. In short, he knew how to look at a crime scene.
“Yep,” he said, “definitely arson. Bet the whole agency on that one.”
“Same thing I thought.”
“You didn’t work this fire, though. Did you?”
I shook my head. “Got the call, but I was down in Durango on a deposition and couldn’t get back in time. By the time I’d driven all the way back here, I would’ve just been standing around taking up space.”
“Didn’t they have a wildfire burn that same night, though?”
I raised my eyebrow and shook my head. I wasn’t sure, but Gilbert Beckett, our firehouse chief, would know the answer from all the logs we kept down at the volunteer fire station. “I don’t recall. I can check, though.”
He waved it off. “Don’t bother. Probably just my mind going on me.” He closed the file up and pushed it back over to my edge of the desk. He leaned back in his chair and, with elbows on the armrest, steepled his fingers in front of him. When he spoke, his voice was low and serious. “Now, Matt, you know we’ve already touched this case once, technically, because of the way the insurance company contacted us.”
I nodded and sighed in resignation. He was turning it down. I knew it. I’d been talking a good game in there with Rebecca, but that was only because I hadn’t wanted to dash such a beautiful woman’s hopes of getting help during such a shitty time. But it was company policy for us to not come after a case from both sides at once. We needed to remain impartial, while still being able to keep our client’s interests at heart.
“Yeah, boss, I know.”
“And you know the insurance company on this building, Centurion, is a pretty serious client. They bring in a lot of work for us, not just on arson investigations.”
I sighed and nodded. Yeah, I knew. In this line of work, you had to know who buttered which side of your bread. And this case wasn’t any different. Oh well, it had been worth a shot to see if I could get Rebecca some help during a tough time. But business was business, and Peter was responsible for keeping a roof over everyone’s head as a business owner and as a pack leader.
“So you need to make sure to document everything when you open this case.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“And make sure,” he continued, “that you’re impartial all the way through. Ideally, I’d like to be able to find who actually did this and put their asses in prison instead of Zeke’s.”
“Excuse me?” I repeated. “We’re taking the case?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What the hell did you think I was going to say, Matt? That we were going to leave Zeke high and dry?”
I gave him a little shrug. “Well, yeah. You’ve told us you don’t want to work both sides of a case.”
“Most of the time it’s a good policy and it tends to keep us out of trouble. This one, though, I think is a special case.”
“A special case?”
“Yeah, a special case,” he repeated back to me. “Literally, this is special. And it’s a case. Come on, Matt, you’re an investigator. Do I have to lay it out for you?”
“So you want to take it, then?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course, I do. Zeke’s a good man, and Rebecca Stokes is a good person desperate to get him off these charges. Shit, she’s Mary’s English teacher for God’s sake. Go in, take a look around. Just make sure you come away from it absolutely sure of what you find. I don’t want you walking into a courtroom with testimony that gets picked apart, or looks fabricated.”
“Fabricated? Whoa, you know I’d never do that.”
“I said ‘looks.’ The prosecutors can’t find anything on this that smells fishy, or they’re going to tear apart your expert witness testimony in court. They’ll be able to look at your relationship with Zeke, our time in the town, all sorts of stuff. Everything’s fair game when they start to question credibility, so you can’t give them anything. Now, tell me what we know so far. What your feelings are.”
I told him about the supposed Florentino family ties. They were a crime family out of Denver that we’d had a run-in with just a few months back. Jake Wayne had an off-the-books case he worked for his mate that involved tracking down her sister. By the end of it, a Florentino enforcer, Trigger Thomas, was lying in the snow in a pool of his own blood, the marks of a wolf bite on his throat.
Local law enforcement had been baffled. Wolves hadn’t been spotted in this part of Colorado in decades. The Florentinos had been, too, it seemed, and everything kind of blew over while the cops began to investigate the kilogram of cocaine they’d found in the trunk of Trigger’s car.
We’d all thought the Florentinos would have shifted their business out of Enchanted Rock, begun to pull back and defend their criminal territories and areas of influence while the cops began to investigate.
Guess we’d be wrong.
“This was after Jake and Elise, then?”
“Don’t have the exact dates, but from the way Rebecca was speaking, it sounds like it was more recent.”
“Definitely not Trigger, then.”
I shook my head. “He was the only one we had a name or description for. We know there were a couple others here before he arrived, though, working on deals with people that lived in the Rock.”
Lips pressed tight together, Peter gave a long, nostril-flaring sigh.
“What’s wrong?”
“Bothers me that the Florentinos might be up here pushing for protection money right under everyone’s noses. I want you to look into that as a side project. Check with Richard, see if he’s heard of anything. With his being a partial owner at the Curious Turtle, he can be your in with local business owners.”
I nodded and took the file off his desk. I got up and headed to the door, but stopped when Peter called my name.
“What’s up, boss?”
“Something about this whole thing stinks, Matt. I want you watching your back. The wedding’s coming up, but I don’t want you to think this is less important than that. You have a problem, you call for backup.”
“Got it, boss. Got a problem, I call.”
“I’ll get a quote for services typed up. Don’t tell her we’re giving her the hometown discount, though. She might think I’m just trying to buffer Mary’s grades for her senior year.”
I thanked my lucky stars that Peter had gone for the case. I hadn’t wanted to pull a Jake and go off the books on this one, but I would have in a heartbeat if Peter had turned it down. There was just something too weird, too out of place. And I’d be lying, too, if I said it had nothing to do with Rebecca Stokes. There was just something about her, about the way her skin had felt beneath my hand, about the way she’d smiled and brushed the dark hair from her eyes.
I headed back to the conference room, but before I stepped through the door, I took a deep breath as the memory of her face filled my mind. That smell of hers, of vanilla and lavender, filled my nose all over again like a phantom fragrance. I stepped inside.
“Well?” she asked anxiously.
“Good news,” I said. “Peter’s taking the case.”
She let out a deep breath. “Thank God. Do you really think you can help?”
“We’re going to try. No guarantees we’ll be able to do anything for your uncle, but I promise you we’ll give it a shot. But if we can’t do anything, no one can.”
I’d saved women and children from fires before. Had even gone in one time as a wolf and rescued two toddlers I’d found. The joy I felt at the look of relief and gratitude on their faces was nothing compared to the emotions surging in my chest as Rebecca Stokes leapt from her chair and threw her arms around my neck.
“Thank you,” she said, her body pressing against mine.
I put an arm around her and hugged her back, grinning. “No problem.”
She pulled back from our impromptu embrace. “When do we start?”
“We? Excuse me?”
“I have the keys to the store and to Zeke’s house. You’re going to need me for the investigation. Besides, I’m off for the summer. What else am I going to do?”
Oh, boy.