Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Stumbling, Barrett grabbed onto the wall and caught himself, jerking his head over his shoulder as he stared at the naked, bloodied, bruised woman that was lying on his living room floor. His heart plummeted, and his hands grew clammy. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his breathing became fast and shallow. It wasn’t that Barrett had never seen a dead body before—he’d seen them any number of times. But this woman was dead on the floor of his living room. In his house. Naked. Abused.

  “Fuck,” Barrett whispered, walking over to the woman and staring down into her face. It was difficult to tell what she really looked like. Her face was bruised and scratched, and her hair was matted and falling over one side of her face. One arm was draped over her torso, and the other was splayed out to the left, her fingertips brushing up against the baseboard.

  Shocked as Barrett was, he almost immediately recovered enough to start taking stock of the situation. There was no blood pooled around her. There was no obvious one killing blow. She had clearly been beaten, but it would take a much more thorough investigation to determine which injury had actually killed her. She was not freshly dead, either. There was a smell that reached his nostrils now, but it was a faint smell—fainter than it should have been once he started looking at the signs of rigor mortis and lividity. There was blood discoloration along the back of her body, showing that she had been lying on her back, dead, for quite some time. It was possible that it was just for the nine hours he’d been asleep, but he didn’t think so.

  If he had to guess, he’d say she’d been dead for at least a day, and she’d been preserved somehow. Frozen, perhaps. There was a slight dampness to her hair that could have been the result of it having been frozen, then thawed.

  Barrett took a deep breath, as he circled the body, not touching it. Obviously someone had put the body there, but he had no idea who that someone was. Or why that someone had left a body in Barrett’s living room. But he did know what the intended result was. Someone was trying to frame him, and he was willing to bet that whoever it was, also was connected to what had been going on at the agency.

  Someone had it out for him. Someone who knew his secret dragon shifter status, who knew his position within the Rockwell Clan, and who knew how to play the right cards to get him ejected. Now it looked like they also wanted him in jail.

  Barrett dragged a hand over his hair, then down along his jaw, thick with hair growth now. He stared at the body for a long moment, then walked back into the bedroom and picked up his phone. He dialed Quentin first.

  “Hey!” Quentin asked, picking up on the first ring. “Good morning. How are you?”

  “Come over,” Barrett said. He didn’t say anything about the dead body, and he wouldn’t—not over the phone. “Get everyone—Jordan, Hannah, Ryan. Not the partners. Just the five of us. Over here at my place. Now.”

  Quentin sounded alert and eager. “Yeah? Now? Okay. Are we fighting back? We’re ready—everyone was over at Ryan’s last night, and we’ve been talking about it. It’s bullshit what they’re doing to you, Barrett. It’s total bullshit.”

  “I agree,” Barrett said, “but there’s new information. Get here as fast as you can.”

  “I’m on it,” Quentin said. “See you in thirty.”

  They hung up, and Barrett went back out to the living room, taking his phone with him. He quickly documented the entire scene, then he took a video of himself circling the body and talking in the background.

  “It’s April fourteenth. It’s 8:13 in the morning. I woke up just before eight o’clock. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Then I left my bedroom to walk to the kitchen, where I intended to start a pot of coffee. As I walked, I tripped over this body. I haven’t altered the body’s position, touched it, or otherwise interfered with it anyway. As far as I can tell, I don’t know this woman. She was not in my apartment last night when I went to sleep around eleven o’clock. I took a sleeping pill last night, and I didn’t hear anyone enter the apartment. I slept straight through the night. I have no knowledge of who she is, how she got here, why she’s here, or what happened to her.”

  He turned off the video function and took a few more pictures, then he stepped back. Barrett knew that he’d made a big decision the moment that he’d decided to call his friends instead of calling the police. Policy dictated that when you found a dead body in your house, you called the police.

  But Barrett knew that whatever was going on was connected to his dragon shifter identity, and he didn’t want the police anywhere near that. He had no idea what they were going to uncover, as they searched for answers, but he trusted himself and his friends to solve this murder just as much, if not more than he would have trusted the police to do it. Barrett didn’t take breaking the law lightly, but when it was necessary, he would do it to protect his people. It would be bad for everyone he knew if the police started poking around in dragon shifter affairs.

  Besides, if he was honest, he wanted revenge on whoever was doing this to him. He wanted it badly.

  Barrett was a practical man at heart, so when he’d finished documenting the scene and situation to offer himself some protection if the police did end up involved, he went and took a quick shower, dressed, and then went back to start that pot of coffee. He had just poured the first cup and was buttering a piece of toast when there was a knock at his front door.

  Walking out of the kitchen, he passed the body once more as he went to open the door. When he did pull the door open, Hannah walked in first, throwing her arms around him and squeezing. “Oh my God. I’ve just been beside myself. What are we—oh my God!”

  She’d spotted the body, and she let go of Barrett, staring past him with her mouth open.

  “Come in,” Barrett said, nudging her further into the house and gesturing for the others, still unaware, to follow her. “Don’t get too close to her.”

  “Don’t get too close to who?” Quentin asked as he followed Hannah inside. Then his mouth dropped open. “Oh my God.”

  Jordan peered around Quentin, letting out a whistle. “Whoa.”

  Ryan was the last to enter, and as he did, he looked over at Barrett, closing the door. “Self-defense …?”

  “No idea,” Barrett said, walking over to the body and standing beside it as his friends slowly gathered. “I took a sleeping pill last night and went to bed pretty early. Just before eleven o’clock. Slept straight through. When I got up this morning, this body was here.”

  “She’s been dead a while,” Jordan said. “At least twenty-four hours.”

  “Agreed,” Quentin said, stooping down to take a better look. “I don’t want to touch her, but her skin looks colder than it should be. My guess is that she was in a freezer for at least a few hours before being dumped here.”

  Barrett had known that his friends would believe him without question, but seeing the way that they all jumped on board so completely without even a moment of wondering whether or not he was telling them the truth warmed his heart. He couldn’t help it. He loved each of them, and he trusted them with his life. “Her hair is slightly damp,” he added, sticking to the facts instead of getting emotional with them. “I thought the same thing about a freezer. It looks like she was left to lie for a while before that, though. Look at the lividity.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, swallowing hard, her hand pressed to her chest. “Poor thing was beaten to death and left to lie on her back, it looks like. Then transported to a freezer to keep her from rotting.”

  “Then dumped here,” Ryan said, walking around the body to stand on the other side. “Good God. Why?”

  “It has to be connected to what’s happening at the agency,” Barrett said, causing all four of his friends to look up at him. “There’s no other explanation that makes any sense. Someone wanted me out of the agency, so they kept working away at making it look like I was inept and corrupt. Now that I’ve been kicked out of the agency, they’re upping their game. They don’t just want me out of my job. They want me out altogether.”


  Hannah straightened, frowning. “What, they want you in jail? Then they don’t understand there’s no jail that could hold you.”

  “Maybe they do,” Quentin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “If there’s someone systematically framing you, then they know you’re a dragon shifter. They know that if you had to, you could get yourself out of a prison—any prison. It’s more likely they want you out of Baton Rouge.”

  Barrett nodded. “Or out of the United States, altogether. If I’m wanted for murder, my only choice is to run and not come back.”

  “So, someone wants you out,” Jordan said. “Is it because they just hate you, or because they want what you have?”

  “Only a shifter could want what Barrett has,” Ryan said. “Only a shifter can be in charge of the agency. Only a shifter can step into Barrett’s shoes.”

  “You think it’s a coup?” Hannah asked. “What, by one of the other families in the Rockwell Clan?” She narrowed her eyes, angry just at the thought. “Is that why the elders are so against you?”

  Barrett dragged a hand down his chest, settling it on his hip and staring down at the dead body. “It’s a possibility. The Rockwell’s have led for generations—tens of generations. But just because that’s been the status quo doesn’t mean that another family within the clan doesn’t want to try and change that. It could very well be someone under our very noses, looking to wrest control from the Rockwell’s. In that case, undermining me is only the start. They want to get me out of town before I have a kid—not that that’s happening anytime soon. Then they just have my father and grandfather to deal with …”

  “Why not just kill you?” Jordan asked. “If that’s really the goal, then they’d just take you out, wouldn’t they? Why go to all this trouble of orchestrating running you out of town?”

  Blunt as always, Jordan was right. Barrett stared down at the dead body on his floor, and he knew that there had to be more than just a desire to get him out of the way. Whoever was doing this was also purposely messing with him. It was a psychological form of torture that might have the additional result of running him out of town.

  It was personal.

  Chapter 4

  Victoria

  It had been a long night. Victoria had gone home the night before to have dinner with Olivia, and then she’d come back to work once Olivia had started on her homework. The only thing that she didn’t like about her job was that it often left her daughter alone overnight, but Olivia was sixteen now, and she was a responsible girl. Victoria trusted that Olivia was being smart, although it helped that they lived in an apartment, and their neighbor was a grandmotherly woman named Nola who looked in on Olivia whenever Victoria was gone.

  Victoria was running on close to thirty-six hours without sleep, but that was something she was used to in her line of work. She’d come back to the precinct just as Izzie had finished doing the intake forms and information with the husband whose wife was missing, and she’d gotten caught up quickly. The missing woman was named Annie, and she was an overnight worker at a factory. She went to work, and she often didn’t get home until after her husband, Ben, had left for his day job. The last time that Ben had seen Annie, she’d said goodbye, as she headed off for her shift that began at 11:00 at night. When he’d left at 8:00 the next morning for his own job, she hadn’t been home. That night he had meetings that ran late, and he hadn’t gotten home until after 7:00. Annie hadn’t been home, but she often did her errands at that time of day, because she slept until about 4:00 in the afternoon. He hadn’t thought much of it, and then he’d had a few too many beers and fallen asleep on the couch. When he woke up, it was almost midnight, and he figured that Annie had come home, been irritated that he was asleep, and left without waking him. He went to bed, got up the next day, and went to work. Annie wasn’t home.

  It wasn’t until that night that he’d started to worry. He’d gotten home around 6:00 at night, and Annie wasn’t there. Worried that she was angry with him for being drunk and passed out the night before, he started calling her over and over. Ben thought there was no way that she would go straight to work without coming home or at least calling, so when the clock struck 11:00 and he still hadn’t heard from her, he called her factory supervisor to learn that Annie hadn’t shown up either of the past two nights, and they’d let her go, effective immediately.

  Ben had been stunned. By that time, Annie had been missing for forty-eight hours, and he’d spent the next twelve trying to track her down on his own, calling all of her friends and family and looking at their bank account online and their phone records to see if she was using her card or her phone anywhere.

  She hadn’t been.

  He’d considered going to the Rockwell Agency, he’d said, because he’d heard that they were great with missing person’s cases, but in the end, he’d finally decided to come to the police.

  Victoria knew the woman was dead. She wouldn’t say as much to Ben until they had proof, of course, but she knew that a woman didn’t disappear without warning or with no activity on her phone or her credit cards. That was only possible if, perhaps, her husband was abusive, and she was trying to escape. But nothing about Ben gave her that vibe, and there was nothing about an abusive relationship in the notes.

  No, the woman was dead. All of her police instincts told her that much. And that was why she had worked all night, trying to piece together the bits of this woman’s life into a picture full enough for them to try to find a lead on what had happened to her. It was the right thing to do, both for Ben and for Annie herself. She needed justice, and her killer needed to be found—soon.

  “You don’t know that she was killed,” Izzie said, not looking up from her notes as she sat across from Victoria at the large desk that they shared.

  Victoria looked up in surprise. “What?”

  “You’re muttering to yourself,” Izzie said. “I agree that she’s probably dead. But murdered? She could have had an accident.”

  “It’s possible,” Victoria said, leaning back in her chair and stifling her yawn with the back of her hand. It was almost 9:00 in the morning, and as soon as the clock struck the hour, she was getting another cup of coffee. Timing out her cups was the only way to moderate herself when she pulled an all-nighter. “But when someone has an accident—like a car crash, or a medical issue, or a fall—usually someone comes across them pretty quickly, and we get a report. Say she had a crash on the way to work, for instance. Probably someone would have found her car by now.”

  “Unless it’s not visible from the road,” Izzie said. “I’m just saying, we need to keep it in mind. Accidental death isn’t off the table.”

  “Yeah, but it’s more likely that there’s a killer out there that we need to be focusing on,” Victoria said. “I’m about ready to start putting together a canvas of the area between her house and her workplace. Ben said that she often went for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee before work. I want to go there first and see if she stopped there that first night she was missing.”

  Izzie nodded. “Agreed. That’s the first step. Ben said ‘goodbye’ to her, as normal. She got in her car and left, as normal. And she never made it to work. So …yes. Coffee shop first.”

  Victoria checked the time. Three minutes until 9:00. “I’ll get a cup of coffee there.” She stood up and grabbed her phone and her wallet. “Let’s not wait around to get the coffee here.”

  “Or you could just get a cup of coffee three minutes early,” Izzie said, even as she followed Victoria towards the front of the precinct.

  “That would be anarchy,” Victoria said, pushing the door open and letting Izzie walk out into the morning sun first.

  “You and your rules,” Izzie said, reaching for her keys and unlocking their police car as they drew nearer to it. “Hold on.” She reached for her phone. “It’s Mason.” Izzie answered, then stopped, her hand on her hip as she listened. “No shit?” She paused. “Wow. Okay. Yeah—we’re on it.”

  When Izzi
e hung up, Victoria looked at her and held her hand out. “Well?”

  “We’ve got a lead,” Izzie said. “Mike and Xing are out on patrol right now, and apparently a woman came up to them and said that she was out in her garden this morning and saw a naked, dead woman in her neighbor’s house.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes skeptically. “No way.”

  “That’s the report,” Izzie said. “Probably isn’t true, but we still have to follow up on it.”

  “Well, yeah,” Victoria said, getting into the cop car. “Obviously, but what are the chances that, first of all, she saw anything and second of all, that it’s our woman?”

  “Slim to none,” Izzie said, getting in the driver’s seat and turning the car on. “But we can’t ignore it. It’s a better lead, theoretically, than going to a coffee shop.”

  Izzie started to drive, plugging an address into her GPS, and Victoria tapped her fingers on her legs, restless and eager to find something more productive. “This woman called in just now?”

  “Yeah, a few minutes ago,” Izzie said, “but she saw the body early this morning. Just before 7:00.”

  “Who gardens before 7:00?”

  Izzie shrugged a shoulder. “Every farmer ever, I think.”

  “I doubt this woman is a farmer.”

  “Well people often garden before 7:00 in the morning,” Izzie said. “She says she looked up, and then through her neighbor’s window, and bam—dead body on the ground.”

  Victoria shook her head, still not believing it. “No way.”

  The drive to the address Izzie had plugged into her GPS wasn’t long. The neighborhood they ended up in was nice, with big brick houses that lined well-maintained streets dotted with full trees. They pulled up to the address, and Mike and Xing were there, hanging out in the driveway. They nodded to Victoria as she got out of the car, both cops holding cups of coffee. Victoria groaned, inwardly, realizing that she should have gotten one at the precinct before they’d left. She glanced next door and wondered if the woman had seen the dead body inside the house that had all the cars parked out front of it. There were three cars on the street and two in the driveway, and it was very early in the day for anyone to be having a gathering.