Close To The Heart (Westen Series Book 5)

by Suzanne Ferrell

  “Surprisingly well,” Melissa said. “Since school was out from the blizzard, they hustled in for lunch before I’d managed to get Lexie into a bath. They took one look at her and accepted her immediately. I think it took another day before they started calling her shrimp. Might have been when Trent and Colt were teaching her how to play a video game.”

  “Ah, bonding over Mario Kart?” Chloe said, picking up her pen.

  “Something like that. Ever since, they’ve treated her like their little sister. It’s helped. Daniel’s been a big help, too.”

  “Oh? How?” Chloe jotted down notes from the conversation to help her paint a picture of the environment at the Westen House and how Lexie was faring in it.

  “That first afternoon, he stopped by with some clothes.” Melissa’s lips lifted in a half-smile. “He had boys’ jeans in the smallest size he could buy, a sweatshirt and black tennis shoes. And a big puffy jacket and black gloves. I didn’t have the heart to ask where he’d gotten them, but Lorna filled me in when she stopped by with some hand-me-downs from the school district’s music teacher Holly’s step-daughter. Apparently, the doctor’s twin step-sons had outgrown the clothes Daniel brought and Emma hadn’t given them to the consignment shop.”

  Chloe jotted that information down. “That’s something I’m getting used to now that I’m living in a small town. News and gossip move faster than Wi-Fi.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?”

  “Miss Davis!” a worried teenage sounding voice called from the front of the house.

  She exchanged looks with Chloe and they both hurried to the front door, only to find all four of the boys standing on the sidewalk a good four feet from the bottom step. All four were eyeing the huge animal sitting up beside Lexie at the top of the porch.

  “His name is Wöden,” Lexie said. “He’s my friend and he won’t hurt you.”

  The young men all exchanged looks like there was no way they were going to believe that.

  “Hold very still,” Chloe instructed them, stepping out onto the porch. “Wöden, sniff.”

  He loped down the stairs in that half-wolf, half-dog manner of his. Beginning to his right, he circled each boy, sniffing their shoes, jeans and hands. Satisfied they meant no harm, he loped back onto the porch by Lexie.

  “See?” the little girl said brightly. “Now he’s your friend, too.”

  Even though they’d been accepted by Wöden, the teens climbed the stairs single file and giving the animal a wide berth until they were safely inside.

  “Boys are silly,” Lexie said, skipping inside, Wöden on her heels.

  “I think she plans to use your dog to put some fear in those boys,” Melissa said.

  “As long as they treat her right while he’s around, they should be safe,” Chloe said then winked at Melissa. “Just don’t tell them that.”

  8

  Daniel stood at the main checkout counter of the Knobs & Knockers, talking with Joe Hillis, the owner, when two of the young men from the Westen House entered.

  “Hey Geoff, Colt. How was school today?” Joe greeted them.

  “Same as always, Joe. Boring,” Colt said with roll of his eyes.

  “It’s not that bad,” Geoff said, giving his friend a shove.

  “Yeah, well you’re a senior and don’t have to take Ms. Kitwell’s English class. She assigned us a paper to write about our future.” Colt slipped behind the counter and stowed his backpack under the counter, then tied on his work apron.

  Ah, Daniel understood the young man’s disgruntlement. The day after he settled Lexie in the house, he’d read all the residents’ files. He wanted to be sure she was safe. Their lives hadn’t been perfect or squeaky clean—actually sucked when it came to parents and the system—but none of them had any history of violence.

  Colt’s father was in prison for life after murdering his mother, which thrust Colt into the foster system at the age of nine. For the next five years he’d run away from every foster home he’d been settled in and had finally popped up on the streets of Cleveland. When he was arrested for shoplifting, the judge had laid down the law. Come to Westen House and straighten up or find himself in jail. Kid had stayed put, was doing okay in school and seemed to like his job here at the hardware store.

  “Well, I can predict your future for the next few hours,” Joe said. “It’s gonna be stacking wood. Got a shipment in to fill the two-by-four and the four-by-six bins.”

  Colt actually grinned. “Now that’s an assignment I can get into.”

  “As for you, Geoff,” Joe said taking out a file folder and handed it to the tall, gangly teen. “Mrs. Turner was in today and gave us the final decision on paint colors for her newest house flip. She wants these colors mixed and then Saturday afternoon you and I are going to be starting the paint job on the living and family rooms.”

  “We can get started tomorrow,” Geoff said, clearly enthusiastic about the paint job.

  “No, you’re going to be busy tomorrow and Saturday morning,” Joe said with a grin. “Trying out for the baseball team.”

  “Really?” Geoff said with a hopeful expression.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Daniel said. “Came by to talk with Joe about your schedule for the next two days. Tryouts are tomorrow and Saturday morning. He’s agreed to give you the time off to try out. You too, Colt, if you want.”

  “I’ve never played ball,” Colt muttered.

  “Neither did I until I tried out for the team back in high school,” Joe said. “Sat the bench most of the first year, but kept trying and learning, made varsity my junior and senior years.”

  “Yeah, but you’re tall. I’m too short to play sports.” Colt sounded a little less disgruntled.

  Joe reached out and squeezed Colt’s shoulder briefly. “I wasn’t this tall back in my freshman year. Grew three inches between then and my sophomore year. You could, too.”

  “You don’t need to be tall to be a good baseball player,” Daniel said. He’d come prepared for this conversation. “Joe Morgan, Yogi Berra, and Kirby Puckett were all around five-feet seven or five-feet eight. All excellent baseball players. All in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

  “See. You don’t have an excuse,” Geoff said giving him a little shove.

  “Ain’t got a glove.” Colt shoved back, but not hard.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Daniel said, before they got into a heated battle. His phone buzzed a text. He hit the button to retrieve it.

  Gage: Heading to the old Sutter place. Meet me.

  “I need to go. I’ll see you both back at the Westen House after your shifts,” he said and headed out of the store, changing from baseball coach to hunter. The moment he saw Lexie in that house, under all those covers, he’d been on a mission to keep her safe. In order to do that, he had to find the woman who’d put her in danger.

  The old Sutter place, an abandoned farm left to go fallow when Josiah Sutter died about ten years earlier, sat on the southernmost border of the county. The rest of the Sutter family, uninterested in the hard work of running a farm, had moved on to live in various cities around the state. With the recent influx of new residents wanting the charm of a small town but also wishing to live within an hour’s drive on the new highway into Columbus, Sutter’s heirs had started selling off sections of the land at a high price to developers. The old homestead was still standing on the last few unsold acres and was on the list of places the sheriff and fire department were checking for drug dealers or drug user squat houses.

  Gage—head down, legs crossed in front of him at the ankles, fingers flying across the keyboard of his phone—leaned back against his truck when Daniel pulled in behind him. Anyone would think the sheriff was distracted as he casually waited on a friend. They’d be mistaken.

  Since the news came out that heroin had inched its way into their county, Gage had been a man on a mission, keeping all his staff, except Bobby, focused on finding any source of it in their jurisdiction.

  “You get you
r errands finished, Coach?” Gage said, without looking up from his phone.

  “Yep. Thanks for giving me the day off. Talked to all the boys’ bosses. Everyone said the guys are hard workers, polite and they’d be happy to make time for them to try out for the team.” Daniel leaned back against the truck beside his boss. “Picked up gloves for them, as well as balls and bats for the team over at the sports store in Columbus.”

  “Good. I’ve heard good reports on those boys from the school, the business owners and psychologist since Ms. Davis took over. When Todd Banyon was running the place, I’d wondered why we were bothering. He made them sound like a bunch of gangbangers waiting to terrorize the town.”

  “Yeah, well considering he was a psychotic pyromaniac, I’m guessing his opinions weren’t worth the paper he wrote them on.”

  Gage looked up and gave that smart-assed grin of his. “Ya think?”

  “I’ve read all the residents’ files. None of them are as dangerous as old Todd made them out to be. Melissa—er, Miss Davis, has a way with them and with Lexie, too. I think the Westen House is in good hands now.”

  “Melissa, huh?”

  Damn. Why had he said that? “We’re friends. I stop by every few days to check on things since Lexie went to stay. You know, to make sure no one is looking for her.” Damn. Now he was babbling.

  Gage laughed and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Dan. Just giving you a little grief is all. What say we get busy and knock this place off our list of possible drug houses?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Right now, any change of topic sounded good to him.

  Gage reached into the bed of his truck and pulled out what looked like a plastic fisherman’s box. After their meeting with Doc Clint yesterday, the sheriff and fire chief decided the team members would have full-fledged safety gear with them to use upon entering any possible drug lair, not just the latex-free gloves they usually wore. Inside the box were hospital masks and sample vials to put samples of anything suspicious, like powders or rocks. Even though the heroin they found at Rose’s place wasn’t laced with fentanyl, no one was taking any chances they’d continue to be so lucky. The tackle box also had evidence bags and the naloxone inhalers the doc had instructed them in using. Sort of like a one man forensic and emergency kit.

  At the front door of the Sutter house, Gage opened the box and handed Daniel a mask and two gloves.

  “Don’t know what we’ll find inside. Best to go in prepared for the worst.”

  They slipped on their gloves and masks, then both pulled out their weapons. Daniel took up a defensive position opposite the door, while Gage wrapped on the front door with his free hand.

  “This is the sheriff. Open up!”

  They both listened.

  No movement or voices came from the other side.

  “Eyes on a swivel. Don’t know what we’ll find inside,” Gage said, reaching to test the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.

  The place reminded him of Rose’s house the day he found Lexie. He moved in behind his boss as the weaved their way through the trash, the mattresses on the floors and the tables covered with drug paraphernalia. They didn’t stop to inspect any of it. Priority first was to look for anyone alive and hiding in the house. Moving room to room, they swept each one for possible users or predators in hiding. Finally, having scoured the house from attic to basement, they returned to the main living room and then out onto the porch.

  “Shit,” Daniel muttered pulling off his mask and holstering his weapon. “I was hoping we’d get through all the abandoned spots without finding anymore heroin. Wishfully naïve thinking on my part.”

  “It’s not naïve. Being hopeful is what keeps this job from becoming unbearable sometimes.”

  “Suddenly turning philosophical, boss?”

  “No, it’s something I’m learning from my wife. After I nearly died from being shot in a drug raid gone bad during my undercover job in Columbus, I’d come back to Westen to lick my wounds and wallow in the darkness I’d been existing in, both at work and in my very dysfunctional first marriage. Bobby’s optimistic look on the world and her belief in the general goodness in people helped me balance the bad with the good.” Gage pulled out his phone. “Perspective can make all the difference, Dan. Don’t lose yours.”

  Daniel wondered if Gage was talking about perspective in the world in general, or the difference in the two women he’d married.

  “Hey, sweetheart, I’m gonna be out here a while,” Gage said, talking to Bobby. “Yeah, we found drugs but no users and thankfully no dead bodies. Yeah, never know when we walk into one of these places. I need you to coordinate. You already called forensics from Columbus?...Why Frank Watson?...” He looked at Daniel, his face tightening and his eyes going bleak. “Deke found a similar spot in a trailer home near the interstate and asked you to call both? Shit. Okay. Let Wes know we’ll be doing overtime tonight and have him meet me there.” He listened, but his face grew stonier and the muscle in his jaw twitched. “No, I don’t want you coming out here with dinner… No. I’m not being overprotective… Yes, I know our sample didn’t have fentanyl in it, doesn’t mean what we or Deke found today doesn’t.”

  Bobby must’ve agreed, because Gage’s shoulders relaxed a bit as he listened to his wife. “I’d like to keep any of the teens away from this, so let’s get someone other than Rachel or Kyle to deliver food to both sites. Why not ask André Danner and Nick Fisher to do the food runs? They both stopped by today to ask if they could help.” He laughed. “Yeah, there aren’t any secrets in a small town, and yet…we didn’t know about Rose or others slipping through the cracks.”

  Daniel bristled at the compassion in Gage’s voice for Rose Cochran. He didn’t have sympathy for someone who would knowingly endanger their child for their own needs. It was the parent’s responsibility to protect their children even from themselves. Rose Cochran exposed Lexie to the dangers of drugs, some of which could have killed her if she’d innocently touched them, much less accidentally inhaled them. She’d exposed her to the type of people who profited from getting easily susceptible people like Rose hooked on drugs, dangerous people who had no qualms about using kids for profits, too. On top of that she’d abandoned the little girl alone in a house with no heat or electricity in a blizzard.

  Yeah, Gage could have all the compassion for the woman he wanted, Daniel wasn’t as forgiving.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed Melissa’s. “Hi, it’s Daniel,” he said when she answered. “I was going to stop by with baseball equipment for the guys after they all got home from their jobs, but something’s come up and I don’t know how late I’ll be.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, disappointment in her voice. He tried not to think about the little thrill that went through him knowing she’d been looking forward to him stopping by. “They’ll be up until ten. It’s a school night, so unless they’re doing homework they get to bed by then.”

  “I don’t know if I can make it by ten.” He looked over at Gage, who’d already pocketed his phone.

  “If the techs get here by then, you can leave,” he said, stepping off the porch and headed for his truck. “I’m going to need you to stay here while I go check out what Deke’s people found. André or Nick can stay with you when they bring out the food. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Daniel nodded. Message clear. His first priority was the safety of the town, baseball coach came second.

  He watched the sheriff drive down the gravel road as the sun dipped behind the newly budding trees, then he leaned against the porch railing to talk with Melissa. “I’d promised Geoff and Colt, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

  “I completely understand,” she said. “They’ve had a lot of promises to them broken over the years.”

  “I figured as much. I don’t want to be one more adult who let them down. I’d hoped to get a little catching and batting practice in, but won’t do them much good in the dark. I’ll try to come by ten, if not I may stop by
on my way home and drop the stuff off.”

  “I’ll let them know what’s going on, but that you do have equipment for them. Just knock when you get here. I’ll leave the porch light on.”

  He smiled, then had a sobering thought. “Keep the doors locked. And make sure you know who’s at the door before answering.”

  “Why?” she asked, and he hated the concern he’d just given her, but he wanted them to be safe.

  “We found more drugs and I want to be sure no one bothers you or Lexie.”

  “Locked doors it is. Just be careful out there,” she said.

  “I will.” As he hung up, he tried to remember the last time someone had cared about his wellbeing enough to remind him to be careful. Suddenly, the world didn’t feel as dark and bleak as it had when they’d entered the house. Maybe Gage was right. Everyone needed someone to balance things out.

  It’s bad,” Deke said, meeting Gage at the drive into the lot where the nearly dilapidated mobile home sat.

  He’d passed the place a number of times driving around the county. He’d never thought to drive in and check if anyone was squatting here. Dad had told him that Chester Wilks, the owner, had died a few years back. Like the Sutter place, the land was being sold off by family members who’d moved on to more lucrative places. Now he was going to make it a priority that all areas of the county were checked on a regular basis.

  “How bad?”

  “Two dead.”

  “Damn. How long?”

  Deke shook his head. “My best guess is a few days. Frank Watson is on his way. As county coroner, he’s going to have to give us his take on it.”

  “ODs?”

  “Be my guess, considering what we found inside.” He led the way up to the porch where the young paramedic, Aisha stood.

  “Aisha,” Gage said with a nod. “Sorry you had to see this, but we knew we might find casualties. Your thoughts on what happened?”

  She blinked, like she was surprised he wanted her opinion. “I’d say they both overdosed. Whether it’s from too much use, or highly concentrated smack, or someone laced it with fentanyl, that I can’t say.”