Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Interesting,” Lydia said, nodding along as he talked. “So, she’s a nurturer.”

  “Very much so.”

  “I could tell,” Lydia said, “when she spoke to me. She’s very generous with herself. Are the other agents like that as well?”

  Quentin laughed, imagining Jordan being generous with herself. “Uh, no.” He shook his head. “Not all of them. Well, no one is like Hannah. But especially not Jordan. Jordan is also very kind, in her own way, but she’s a bit …I don’t know. Harder? She likes to tell it like it is, and she doesn’t have much time for, you know, making things sound nice or gentle. But she’d fight off a whole battalion for someone she cared about.”

  “I see,” Lydia said, looking out the window. Her hand was curled tightly in her lap, her knuckles white with exertion. “And there must be others.”

  “There’s Ryan,” Quentin said, seeing the tension in her and continuing to talk in an attempt to distract her from whatever was going on in her thoughts. “He’s fun-loving and kind of a good ol’ boy. He’s very laid-back, easygoing. Whatever happens just happens, and he’ll do his best to adapt to it. He’s newly in love, so he’s even more chill than normal. And …Barrett. Barrett is in charge of the agency.” Quentin wondered what to say about his friend, given what he was going through now. “He’s a very capable and strong leader,” he said, deciding not to go into detail. He was really just talking to hear himself talk anyway. She couldn’t possibly be interested in all of the details of his friends and coworkers.

  “Leader,” Lydia said. “That’s an interesting word.”

  He probably should have used the word boss. To cover, he changed the subject. “So, how long have you been in Baton Rouge?” he asked. “Or were you and Ginny born here like me?”

  “Uh, no, we weren’t,” Lydia said. “We moved here from Idaho.”

  “Oh,” Quentin said, surprised. “That’s quite a long distance. What brought you here?”

  Lydia pointed out the window. “Here. You can turn here, and it’s a shortcut back to the apartment.”

  Quentin looked over his shoulder, flipped his blinker on, and switched lanes, taking the right turn that she was pointing to. His GPS readjusted, and he saw that they were just around the corner. He focused on following the blue line of his GPS down several different, smaller back roads, then pulled into the parking lot that Lydia pointed to.

  “Okay,” he said, gliding into a parking spot. “We’re here.”

  Chapter 4

  Lydia

  She had a plan, and she was working that plan as much as she could. They were at the furnished apartment that she had rented two days ago, and she had just enough things sitting around in the place that would make it feel personal. All she had to do was spend enough time with Quentin to form some basis of a connection—one that could exist outside of working on a case together—and then she would magically find her sister, relieving Quentin and ending the deceptive part of their relationship. By that point, they would know each other well enough that they could be friends, and she would still be able to study him and his friends.

  And, now that she had met Hannah, and Hannah was so friendly and kind, she had a backup, in case Quentin wasn’t a good subject or didn’t click with her the way she was hoping he would.

  As she walked with Quentin into the apartment building, she talked to herself, reminding herself why she was doing this and just to stay calm. He was asking her a lot of questions that she didn’t expect, and she was realizing that she didn’t have nearly the handle on her story that she needed to, but she thought fast on her feet and would figure it out as she went.

  After all, what reason did he have to doubt her?

  They went up to the third floor, where Lydia’s apartment was, and Quentin stopped at the door, looking down at her. “You’re sure you want me to get into here?” he asked, nodding towards the door. “I’m going to knock, and if no one answers, I’m going to break into the apartment. You understand that, right?”

  Lydia nodded. “I do.” She was already wondering if he would do something while he was breaking into the apartment that would display his supernatural abilities. If her research was right, dragon shifters had superhuman strength when they were in their human form, and she was excited for the chance to witness that at work.

  Quentin lifted his hand and knocked loudly on the door. “Ginny? Ginny, if you’re there, I need you to open up the door, please. My name is Quentin Pencer, and I’m an investigator at the Rockwell Agency. We’ve had a report alerting us to the possibility that you may have been harmed or possibly missing. Again, I’m asking you to please open the door and confirm that you are not in need of assistance.”

  Lydia waited with him, knowing that there was no one in the apartment and that he was waiting for nothing. But he was patient, letting a full minute pass. She could tell that he was listening intently, and she wondered if he could already hear that there were no footsteps approaching.

  But he knocked again. “Ginny, this is my second knock. If you can’t make it to the door, call out.”

  Again, they waited for a full minute. Then Quentin looked at her. “She’s not inside,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “I’m going to break in.”

  Lydia nodded, watching him breathlessly. He stood back several paces and surveyed the door. He tapped on the wood lightly, testing the sound that echoed back at him, and he gripped the door handle, testing it back and forth.

  After doing a thorough assessment, Quentin reached out and gripped the door handle with his big hand, wrapping his fingers fully around it. With one sharp twist of his wrist, he jerked the handle to the left, using all of his weight to press down on it until they both heard the mechanism snap. The door handle became loose, and Quentin was able to jiggle it back and forth until it loosened enough for him to insert a finger into the mechanism and press the release.

  The door swung open.

  It was a subtle show of strength, but an impressive one nonetheless. Lydia stared at the open door for a moment, her head wrapped up in how she would describe the casual strength displayed by a dragon shifter in human form—one who was keeping his identity under wraps but at the same time making it so obvious if anyone was paying attention.

  Quentin walked in ahead of her, probably reading her pause as hesitation because she was worried about what she would find inside.

  “Feel free to stay out here,” he said. “Really—I mean it. Whatever feels most comfortable to you.”

  He really was quite a gentleman, Lydia realized as she followed him into the furnished apartment that she had rented for a month. It had cost her a lot of money, but it was essential to her plan that there be a place that Ginny would have called home—a place that she was now, supposedly, missing from. Lydia had brought some of her own pictures of her and her sister and placed them around the apartment, giving it a home-like feel. And she had purposefully messed up the kitchen a bit, leaving some dishes out on the drying rack. She had unmade the bed and slept in it both nights she had been here, making sure that it looked well used. The trickiest part had been figuring out how to get enough clothing in the closet to make it look like someone lived here regularly. She had only brought a small carry-on with her, and there hadn’t been room for much more than the clothes she was going to need to wear while she was here. She couldn’t very well risk hanging those up as Ginny’s clothes and then have Quentin see her wearing them later. So, her own clothing was in her suitcase, stashed under the bed, and she had gone to several thrift and consignment stores, throwing together a wardrobe that she could hang up in the closet.

  Everything was ready for his inspection. Lydia was sure of it.

  “Ginny?” Quentin called out as he moved further into the apartment, giving her sister another opportunity to respond to him or warn him off if she wanted to.

  As Lydia stood near the front door, Quentin did a sweep of the apartment, briefly glancing in each room and walking in far enough to open any closets an
d peer behind the shower curtain. He quickly satisfied himself that the apartment was empty, and when he walked back towards her, he had an almost relieved expression on his face.

  “So, as you thought,” Quentin said. “She’s not here. And I know that seems like bad news, and it is, but it is better than finding her here …non-responsive.”

  “You mean it’s better than finding her dead,” Lydia said, nodding. “Of course. Yes. But you still have to help me find her, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Quentin said. “Of course, I’m going to help you. Now, tell me again, Lydia. Ginny doesn’t work anywhere, and she doesn’t have any friends here, either?”

  Lydia nodded. “That’s right. She’s really, very …secluded.”

  “What about neighbors that she might talk to? Her landlord? How does she pay rent? Or bills?”

  “Online,” Lydia said, thinking quickly. But then she realized she had made major mistake because there was no computer here in the apartment. “Oh, her computer is gone,” Lydia said, again trying to fill in details on the fly. There was so much that she’d never thought of. “Oh, dear. What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything definitively,” Quentin said, touching her arm, gently. His touch was warm and rough, and Lydia felt her stomach flip over as she realized that this was a real-life dragon shifter, touching her skin. “Come with me into the bedroom,” he said, nudging her forward. “I need you to go through her things with me and see if we can find anything unusual—anything that might indicate to us what her mindset might have been in the days before she disappeared.”

  Lydia followed Quentin into the bedroom, looking around at the muted colors of the bedspread and curtains and knowing that Ginny, in real life, would not have liked that décor at all. It was soft and subtle, and Ginny was anything but. Ginny was loud, and boisterous, and full of life, and she loved to be surrounded by things that were as bright and beautiful as she was. Ginny had never understood Lydia’s love for sitting in dimly lit rooms poring over books and going through research. She had definitely never understood Lydia’s obsession with the supernatural world, where dragon shifters were the absolute pinnacle creature. But Ginny had always been supportive of Lydia.

  Putting those thoughts out of her mind, Lydia led Quentin to the closet she had arranged, opening it up. “Everything is here.” She gestured towards the hanging clothes and the shoes on the floor.

  “Well, hang on,” Quentin said, walking over to her. “We don’t know for sure that everything is there. You’ve only just seen it. There might be some specific item missing.”

  Lydia hid her wince at her mistake. She needed to do a better job of acting like she didn’t know what was coming next all of the time. She had worked so hard on getting the closet just right that she had forgotten to pretend like she didn’t know what was in the closet.

  “Of course,” Lydia murmured. “It’s just …it looks so much like always. Like everything should be fine, and she should be here.”

  Quentin touched her arm again, his expression quietly sympathetic. “I know. It’s hard, but I need you to go through the pieces and tell me if everything is there.”

  Lydia nodded, slowly beginning to move through the clothing one piece at a time. She touched each piece, feeling the fabric. Some she stared at longer than others before moving past them. When she got through all of the hanging pieces, she sighed and turned to Quentin. “Everything is there except one outfit. I guess …the one she was wearing when she left.”

  “And what is that outfit?” Quentin asked, stooping down to inspect the shoes.

  “Well, it would have been a tracksuit-type outfit,” Lydia said, thinking on the fly again. “Yes, a maroon jumpsuit. She liked to be comfortable. You know, she never really had anyone to impress, so her clothes were all about comfort.”

  Quentin held up the high heel he was looking at. “Comfortable?”

  “Well,” Lydia said, clearing her throat. “She did have a few pieces leftover from before her back began to hurt so much.”

  Nodding, Quentin put the shoe down. “Okay, and I assume that this over here is a picture of you two?” He stood and walked over to the table beside the bed where Lydia had placed one of her favorite pictures of her and Ginny.

  “Yes, that’s us,” Lydia said. “Several years ago.”

  “She looks like a very kind person,” Quentin said, turning the frame over and opening it to take the picture out. “I need a picture of her to begin to circulate. This one will work because I can copy it where you’re mostly cropped out, but it would be better if there was a picture of just her. I didn’t see one around here …”

  Lydia felt a twinge of nerves. “Circulate?”

  He nodded. “Yes. We have to cover all of our bases. We’re going to try to track her down based on figuring out where she was when she disappeared and where she might have gone, but we also just need to get her picture out there so that other people can be looking for her, too.”

  “But …won’t the police get involved?”

  Quentin shook his head, closing the frame back up and setting it down again, the picture in his hand. “No. Not unless we file a report with them. The police have plenty of cases to work on, so they’re not generally going around looking for others to pick up. And the fact of the matter is, the police don’t always take missing persons cases very seriously, especially when the missing person is an adult. They tend to write them off as someone just skipping out on their life either for a while or indefinitely. Unless there is some evidence of foul play—which there isn’t, right now. Without that, the police are not going to be itching to help.”

  “That’s why I came to you,” Lydia said. “I knew you were the better choice—better than the police. I knew that you would be able to get me what I need.”

  Quentin walked over to her and touched her arm again, just as lightly as the other two times. “Of course, I will. I can’t promise you what the outcome will be, but I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to help you figure out what happened here.”

  Chapter 5

  Quentin

  He was being played.

  Quentin didn’t know how or why he was being played yet, but he knew he was. He had been in this business plenty long enough to know when a story rang true and when it didn’t, and he had known from the moment he sat down with Lydia that there was something that she wasn’t telling him. At first he thought it might just be some small detail she felt guilty about, but now it was clearly more than that.

  In fact, he wasn’t sure he believed her story about her sister at all. But he couldn’t tell her that. He had to continue to act like the responsible, professional, caring investigator who was determined to help her find answers. Meanwhile, he had to find his own answers.

  Because if his gut instincts were right and her story was somewhere between fifty percent and one-hundred percent fabricated, then there had to be a reason for what she was doing. He suspected that he would very much want to know what her reason was. As it stood, he couldn’t think of a good one. What would prompt a woman to hire a private investigation and security agency to investigate her sister’s disappearance if her sister had not, in fact, disappeared?

  Maybe Lydia was suffering from some sort of delusion.

  Maybe she was trying to get revenge on her sister.

  Maybe she was looking for attention.

  Maybe she’d had some other reason for wanting to get into this apartment.

  Quentin continued to walk around the bedroom, examining various things but also, out of the corner of his eye, watching Lydia and what she did. She was very familiar with the room. That was fine—if it was her sister’s bedroom and Lydia took care of her sister then she would have been here often. But she didn’t seem necessarily comfortable in the room, either. She didn’t sit on any of the furniture. She’d had to be prompted several times to go through the clothing. She had opened the closet and just announced that everything was present without takin
g the time to look through any of it.

  And she wasn’t emotional.

  In fact, she seemed pretty calm.

  People reacted to grief and crisis in a number of ways. Some people did become incredibly calm only to say later that they felt like they were walking through a fog and just kept doing the next required thing without really even understanding what they were doing.

  But that didn’t seem like her. Lydia actually spent more time looking at him and watching what he was doing than looking around her sister’s room for some indication as to what had happened to the woman.

  It was almost as though she already knew what had happened.

  “Did your sister keep a diary?” Quentin asked. “Or a calendar of some sort?”

  Lydia turned back towards him, glancing around the room. “Uh, no. No, she never did anything like that. She didn’t like to write.”

  It was funny. Lydia kept saying all of these things that her sister didn’t do. She didn’t work. She didn’t have friends. She didn’t have a habit of going anywhere. She didn’t like to write. She didn’t do a lot of things, apparently. “What did she spend her time doing?” Quentin asked, trying to get something to go off. “If she didn’t do all these things, then what did she do?”

  Again, Lydia looked around the room, as though searching for answers on the walls. “She, uh, she liked to cook. And shop online. She was always shopping online.”

  Quentin nodded. Those were both pretty common hobbies, particularly amongst people who were effectively shut in due to health issues. “Okay …” He moved towards the kitchen, leaving the bedroom behind. “Let’s get an idea of her kitchen, then. Did she go out grocery shopping on her own?”