Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “I noticed it, too,” Izzie said, walking past Victoria to greet Mike and Xing.

  Victoria nodded to both men again, but she headed straight for the door of the house and knocked on it. A woman opened quickly, and she looked nervous and agitated. “Hi,” she said, twisting her hands together. “Are you the detective?”

  “That’s right,” Victoria said, smiling at the woman. “I hear you made a report to my fellow officers?”

  “Yes, about the body next door,” the woman said, swallowing hard. “Yes. I’ve been a nervous wreck. I didn’t know what to do …or if I’d really seen what I thought. Then all the cars started arriving, and I thought—I just have to call. What if they’re in there doing something to that dead body?”

  Victoria glanced next door. “Well, why don’t you tell me what you saw, and then I can go check out what’s happening next door? Tell me exactly what happened this morning.”

  The woman swallowed hard. “Well, I tend my garden in the mornings, and I was looking over into Barrett’s window. You see …he often walks around in the early morning without a shirt on. Does push-ups and whatnot. It’s …well …”

  Victoria cleared her throat, nodding that she understood. “Yes. Okay.” Inwardly, she took stock of the woman. Mid-forties. Gray hair. Wrinkles starting to appear. A bit heavyset around the middle. Sad-looking jeans and a baggy T-shirt. It made sense that she’d been paying attention to her neighbor, hoping to get a glimpse of him for a little excitement in the morning.

  “Anyway, he wasn’t walking around this morning,” the woman said. “I looked in a little closer, and then I saw that she was just lying there! On the ground! Naked! A body! It didn’t move, either. She just looked …dead. I know she’s dead.”

  Victoria was starting to wonder if there wasn’t something to this after all. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, and it clicked all of a sudden. Her eyes went wide, and she darted them towards the house next door. “What did you say your neighbor’s name was?” she asked.

  “Barrett,” the woman said. “Barrett Rockwell.”

  Victoria was walking down the porch steps almost before the woman finished her answer. Her heart was pounding hard, adrenaline pulsing through her—better than any coffee. She had never met Barrett Rockwell face-to-face, but boy did she know his name. And boy was she eager to have a word with him—several words, in fact. He didn’t even have to have a dead body in his house for her to have a reason to speak to him, but the chances that there was a dead body in the house had just skyrocketed. Barrett Rockwell was a troublemaker, and he thought the rules didn’t apply to him. Maybe he was working some case, and it had gotten out of hand. It probably wasn’t Annie, the woman they were looking for. It was probably some other poor woman who had been caught up in Barrett’s questionable lifestyle.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Izzie asked as Victoria hurried past her.

  “This is Barrett Rockwell’s house,” Victoria called back to her over her shoulder. “I’m knocking.”

  Izzie called something after her, but Victoria didn’t hear it. She was already ascending the porch steps, and then she knocked loudly on the door, rapping her knuckles against it.

  There was a long, still silence on the other end, and Victoria shook her head, sure that Barrett wouldn’t open the door and actually face her. But then she heard footsteps, and the doorknob started to turn. She held her breath as the door opened, ready to launch into a full statement that she’d been preparing for several years now in her head.

  But when the door opened, Victoria found herself looking straight at a broad chest, and she had to tilt her head back slowly, her eyes traveling upward to land on Barrett Rockwell’s face. Victoria gulped. He was the absolute epitome of masculinity, standing there with broad shoulders and a chest that looked ripped and defined under his t-shirt, several days of stubble on his jaw, thick brows, and dark hair that was just long enough to be lightly tousled.

  Victoria sucked in a breath and licked her lips, berating herself inwardly for having such an instinctive, feminine reaction to him when she had been ready to read him the Riot Act and demand answers to her questions.

  He was looking at her with an unreadable expression on his face, and his eyes traveled slowly over her, down, and then back up. “Officer?” he said, both deference and wariness in his voice. “What can I help you with?”

  “Mr. Rockwell …,” Victoria said, forcing herself to sound normal and official. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask you. Some reports in the area that I’m following up on. Is this a good time?”

  Chapter 5

  Barrett

  Barrett had known that a police officer was standing on his porch before opening the door. He’d seen the police car parked next door, and he’d heard snippets of the conversation that had been going on in the driveway. There was no doubt in his mind that he’d heard them discussing a body, and he didn’t know how they knew about the woman lying on the floor of his living room, but it appeared that they did. So, it was no shock for him to open his door to the sight of a police officer standing there.

  But it had been a shock that the police officer waiting for him was a remarkably beautiful woman with a slim, but curvy figure that was poured into a tight police uniform; gorgeous, sleek red hair that was tied back from her face; and the sweetest dusting of freckles over her cheeks and nose that he had ever seen. Her freckles did not seem fit to be confined to just her cheekbones and her nose, and they wandered over her face, dotting the spot just above her full top lip and curving around the arch of one brow.

  She was beautiful and fascinating to look at, and he knew that he was staring at her.

  Perhaps that was a good thing, though, because she must surely be used to that reaction, and maybe it would cover up the fact that he was anxious about her being there in the first place.

  “Mr. Rockwell,” the woman said again, looking pointedly at him. “My name is Detective Victoria Crenshaw, and I’m with the Baton Rouge police force. I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions.”

  Barrett pulled himself together and stepped out on the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. “I have some friends over, actually.” He crossed his arms over his chest. He knew his rights, and he didn’t have to let her in. There was nothing she could do without a search warrant, so there was no way she was going to find the body that was lying on the floor of his living room. “But we can talk out here if you’d like. I’m happy to answer any questions you have.”

  Victoria Crenshaw’s eyes flicked towards the front door, which was almost completely closed. “Fine, we’ll talk here. Why don’t we start with why you have friends over at just after 9:00 in the morning on a weekday?”

  “Is that a criminal offense?”

  “Did you just assume that I’m here to discuss a crime that’s been committed?”

  “I was under the impression that your job was somewhat …crime-related.”

  Victoria smiled coldly at him. “It is.”

  “Then it’s not so unlikely that I would assume that your questions are, in some way, connected to a crime,” Barrett said. He was on edge, there was no doubt. He was clenching his hands beneath his arms, the tension in his body radiating from him. But at the same time, he rather liked the give-and- take with this pretty detective. She clearly did not like him, and that in and of itself was interesting. Women typically did.

  “Answer the question,” Victoria said, crossing her arms over her chest, as she narrowed her eyes at him. “Why do you have a group of friends over at your house during work hours on a workday?”

  “They’re my work colleagues,” Barrett said, lightly, deciding to continue to indulge her for another moment before turning her away. “We’re having a meeting of sorts—a casual meeting.”

  “A casual meeting,” Victoria said. “Why not have that downtown, at the Rockwell Agency?”

  Barrett shrugged a shoulder. “We’re informal. But clearly you know who I am.”

&
nbsp; “I do,” Victoria said. “I happen to know that you’re Barrett Rockwell, head of the Rockwell Agency. You’re the man who calls your little friends at my precinct at least once a week, asking for some favor, but then expecting the police force to just look the other way while you handle your ‘cases’ however you want, breaking any rules that you want.”

  Now Barrett was no longer so intrigued by the woman’s combative nature. It had been interesting, and it had added to her charm—at first. But he found that her attitude quickly got old, especially when he was dealing with the fact that someone was trying to frame him for murder, and that someone might also have already turned the Baton Rouge police on him. He did have a few friends on the force, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep him from facing the consequences if they decided that he’d murdered a woman.

  “You know, Detective Crenshaw,” Barrett said, turning on his businesslike demeanor that he rarely leaned on. “I’m not sure that I appreciate your attitude or your questions. You showed up here on my porch without explanation and began to accuse me—of what, I couldn’t possibly know. But I don’t care for it, and I don’t think I’ll cooperate any longer.”

  “Isn’t that convenient?” Victoria said, pinching her lips together. Then she stepped towards him and put her finger in his face. “Just so you know, Barrett Rockwell, I’m on to you and to your friends, too. I know that you get away with murder, even though I don’t know how or why. Do you realize how many people make the mistake of trusting you with their problems instead of coming to the police? And you encourage it, with your marketing and your—.”

  “My success rate?” Barrett asked. “Yes, people are so unreasonable to be interested in hiring an agency with a ninety-seven percent success rate instead of going to the police whose cold case files are miles deep.”

  Victoria’s fists clenched. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s no well-kept secret that the police are overwhelmed,” he said, putting a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. “We’re just doing our part to ease your burden.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” Barrett said, walking back to the front door and pulling it open. “Good day, Detective Crenshaw.”

  He turned around and walked back into his house, closing the door behind him and firmly locking it. When he looked up, all four of his friends were standing there, arms crossed over their chests, with worried looks on their faces.

  “That’s not good,” Ryan said. “That’s really not good.”

  Jordan rolled her eyes. “Well, that much is obvious. Someone’s tipped off the police. They’re already sniffing around here, which means we can’t get the body out.”

  “We can’t take the body out anyway,” Hannah said. “We still have to do right by this dead body. We can’t just dump it to save our own asses.”

  “It’s going to start to smell very, very soon,” Quentin said, “and there’s no telling if the person who put the body here is going to reveal even more than that person has already revealed. Assuming that person has revealed it, and this wasn’t a coincidence.”

  Barrett raised his eyebrows. “Somehow, I don’t think this was a coincidence. We don’t have much time before the police come back, this time with a search warrant. We need to get the body frozen, and then I want to find out who this woman is. Given that the police just showed up, I’m guessing that we might get a good lead by looking at their recent missing person cases. Hannah, can you get on that?”

  “I’m on it,” Hannah said, glancing back over her shoulder at the dead woman and shaking her head with a sigh. “God. So awful.”

  Jordan stepped in. “How about we get these windows closed, huh? And then I’ll take one end of her and someone else grab the other. We can put her out in the freezer in the garage.”

  “I’ll clear it out,” Ryan said, heading for the garage.

  “That leaves me,” Quentin said, positioning himself at the dead woman’s feet, as he stood behind her head, ready to grab her under her arms.

  “Hold on,” Barrett said, and both of them stepped away from the woman. “We need to be responsible and preserve the crime scene a little better than we have. Just because Detective Crenshaw isn’t a terribly nice person doesn’t mean that we don’t have some duty to the police.”

  He pulled out his phone and took more pictures, from every angle. Then he walked into the kitchen and got some oversized plastic bags and brought them back out. “Put these on your hands,” he said, handing Quentin and Jordan two bags each. “To keep your fingerprints from interfering with others.” He glanced towards the door to the garage. “Ryan, are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan called out. “There’s room. You didn’t have a ton of stuff in here, Barrett. You need to do more bulk meat shopping.”

  “Somehow I don’t think I’ll be using that freezer again,” Barrett muttered as his friends picked up the dead woman and carted her towards the garage where they would be able to put her in ice to keep her body from decaying any further. Barrett hated what he was seeing, and he hated knowing that this woman had lost her life probably solely because of someone else’s vendetta against him. He had never seen her before, and she was probably an entirely innocent party caught up in something that she didn’t know anything about. He wasn’t sure even he knew anything about it—other than the fact that someone was trying to take his life from him.

  More than that, someone was trying to mess with him. This was psychological as much as anything else, and he wasn’t going to let it work.

  Swiping his phone open, he called his grandfather, pacing the room as the phone rang in his ear. When Norman picked up, Barrett’s voice was firm and calm. “We need to talk. Privately. Somewhere alone—where we won’t be seen by anyone. Can I trust you?”

  Chapter 6

  Victoria

  God, he was gorgeous up close. Victoria had seen pictures of Barrett Rockwell before, and she’d even seen him once from afar, at an event. But to be standing on his porch with him so near had been an entirely different story. He was the kind of man who could suck all the air out of the room with his masculinity alone. He was rugged and chiseled all at once, and there was so much breadth and width across his shoulders. His arms were strong and ripped, and his t-shirt clung to a chest that looked like sculptors from long ago had used Barrett as a model for their work. And, not to mention, those eyes.

  Victoria was almost upset at him for being so gorgeous when she was now investigating him on suspicion of murder. Or kidnapping. Or interfering with a crime scene. Or aiding and abetting. She didn’t know exactly what he had done, but it was something, and she wasn’t going to let up on him until she had answers. The whole Rockwell family and their agency friends took way too many liberties with the law, and that was about to come to a grinding halt if she had anything to do with it.

  There was something going on in that house. She was sure of it, and she needed a warrant to follow up. She needed one quickly, because Barrett wasn’t just a pretty face—he was sharp. If there was something for her to find, he would get rid of it quickly.

  Victoria walked over and updated Izzie on what was going on, and then she went back to the neighbor’s house and knocked on the door again. The woman opened immediately, her eyes wide with intrigue.

  “Did you get him?”

  “No,” Victoria said, shaking her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I need to know if you can give me any sort of definitive statement or proof of what you saw that would let me request a search warrant. I can take your official statement, and that will be helpful, but it would be much better if you could give me something that would corroborate your statement.”

  The woman bit her lip, her eyes darting around. “Well …”

  “Well?” Victoria asked.

  “It’s not great,” the woman said, pulling her phone out and swiping it open. “But look …”

  Victoria did look, and when she peered down at the gr
ungy phone screen, she could see, even though the angle was bad, most of a woman’s arm splayed out on a floor. The picture was taken through two windows, and when Victoria stepped back and looked at the side of Barrett’s house that was facing the neighbor’s house, she knew that the picture was looking into Barrett’s house.

  “This is excellent,” Victoria said. “Thank you.”

  It was true that the picture itself was not definitive evidence of anything other than the fact that there had been someone on the floor of Barrett’s house. The hand could just as easily have belonged to a willing woman being taken on the carpet as to a dead or a trapped woman. But it was enough, along with the neighbor’s statement, to at least open the door to a search warrant. And she knew just which DA to make the request to.

  Victoria and Izzie spent the next hour talking with their witness, taking pictures of the window, which was now drawn shut so that they couldn’t see into Barrett’s house. Victoria talked to a few of the other neighbors as quietly as possible, but nobody had seen or heard anything suspicious. Nothing that would indicate that there had been a kidnapping or a murder in the area the night before. Victoria didn’t specifically identify Barrett’s house—not yet. She didn’t want to do anything to put him on his guard anymore than he already was. Not until she got a search warrant.

  Izzie walked over to her, crossing the street and slipping her phone back into her pocket as she did. “Search warrant in the works.” She high-fived Victoria. “Won’t be long.”

  “I’m staying in the area until we get the word,” Victoria said, glancing towards Barrett’s house. “I don’t want to give him any opportunity to dispose of anything outside of that house. Nobody has come or gone in the hour that we’ve been here. By the car count, it looks like there are at least four other people in there with him …or there were.” She snapped her fingers. “Run the plates on those cars. One of them could be the victim’s. None of them match what we have down for her car, but she could have rented one or been in a different vehicle. One that we can trace to her.”