Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  It was a longshot, but Victoria was more eager than she liked to admit to pin Barrett down.

  As Victoria lingered around the neighborhood, waiting, the front door of Barrett’s house opened and he came walking back out. He stood on his porch, his arms crossed over his chest, and he looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “Detective Crenshaw?”

  Victoria strode over to him, looking more confident—she hoped—than she felt. “Mr. Rockwell. Or should I say, Agent Rockwell.”

  “Barrett is fine,” he said, glancing her up and down. “I was wondering if there was a problem. It seems that you’ve been here for some time, talking to a number of people in the neighborhood. I’m starting to get concerned about our general safety.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Rockwell, that I’m no threat to anyone’s safety.”

  The corner of Barrett’s mouth twitched upward with slight amusement. “I wasn’t worried that you were going to harm anyone. But I can only assume that you have some good cause to think that a crime happened here, and that makes me concerned for the safety of myself and my neighbors. Are we in danger, Officer?”

  Victoria could see that he was testing her. He knew she was after him, and she knew she was after him. But neither of them would actually ever acknowledge it. At least—she wasn’t going to. Not first, anyway. “I don’t think you need to worry about danger from any of your neighbors, Mr. Rockwell,” Victoria said, tilting her head as she studied him. “If I was concerned about that, I would be sure to let you know.”

  “That’s so diligent of you,” Barrett said. “Tell me, have you successfully gotten your search warrant yet?”

  She was surprised that he dropped their game and just went for it, and she had to think for a moment, narrowing her eyes at him as she tried to decide how to react to him. “Not yet. It’s a matter of time.”

  “I know those things can take a while to process,” he said, sounding sympathetic. “I can only assume it’s my house that you’d like to look at. Why don’t you just come on in?”

  She had to hand it to him—he certainly had the upper hand now. It had been firmly in her grasp, but in just seconds he had wrested control from her, and now she wasn’t sure how to approach his offer. Surely it had to be a trap. If this had been some random man off the street, she would have assumed that he was just too cocky or too unintelligent to understand the dangers of inviting an officer into a home where he had probably just committed a crime.

  Barrett was neither unintelligent nor cocky—at least not cocky without a reason.

  Which meant that he had a plan.

  And she was interested in his plan. Because it was clearly one that was so good that he thought that it would fool her. Or trap her. And she didn’t think that was the case. He was smart, but so was she. Maybe she needed to prove that to him. Maybe he did what he did because he thought that cops weren’t up to the job of protecting the public and achieving justice.

  “You understand that by inviting me into your house, I will be able to make note of anything that is in plain sight or reasonably discoverable, right?” Victoria asked, her hands sitting on her hips. “And that will be evidence that I can use against you.”

  “Then you admit that you are in fact out to get me.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes.

  Barrett just smiled slightly. “Get in line, Detective Crenshaw. And it’s a long line.” He nodded back towards his house. “Come in, then.”

  Izzie had drawn close and was listening, and Victoria looked over at her partner, the silent communication flowing between them quickly. They nodded, and when Barrett turned to walk back towards his house, Victoria and Izzie both followed, walking up the steps to the porch and in through the front door.

  Immediately, Victoria began looking around, though she stood perfectly still. She noted the masculine décor, her eyes scanning over the couch with straight, strong lines and a rich brown color. The rug was rust-red with gold rectangles and squares placed randomly around it, and the coffee table that sat on top of the rug had the same strong, clean lines as the rest of the room. There was a large mirror over the fireplace, and across from the fireplace, taking up most of one wall, was a large painting that intrigued her.

  Victoria walked over to the painting slowly, drinking in every detail of the beautiful bayou landscape and the blue sky dotted with clouds. It was such a well-done, classic Louisiana scene that the presence of the green dragon on the far right-hand side of the panting was almost jarring. It was an elegant creature, flying over the bayou with its wings spread out, and its long neck curved so that the eyes were directed downward, watching over the trees below.

  Without realizing what she was doing, Victoria lifted a hand to the painting, her fingers brushing over the ridges of the dragon’s wing.

  “Is that what you came in here looking for, Detective?”

  Barrett’s voice was low and quiet, right behind her, and Victoria turned, looking up at the man. Her eyes narrowed, and she put her hands on her hips, making sure that she maintained a stance that suggested control. “It isn’t. But it’s a very unique painting.”

  “So, it is.”

  “A family heirloom?”

  “Something like that,” Barrett said, his eyes flicking towards the painting. “It’s a blending of fantasy and reality. Like life.”

  “How philosophical,” Victoria said. But as she stared up at the gorgeous man with the powerful shoulders and the commanding presence, her mind was working overtime. She had lived in Baton Rouge all of her life, and there had always been whispers of supernatural things floating beneath the surface of the daily grind. Nothing had ever been substantiated, and she wasn’t one for listening to rumors, anyway. But she was aware of them, and she knew that many people said that Louisiana had been home to dragons way back when. And that those dragons had left their presence. Their mark.

  Victoria turned away from Barrett and from the painting, slightly disconcerted and more than a little on edge. “Mr. Rockwell, I’m confirming again that you’ve given us permission to search your home,” Victoria said, walking towards Izzie. “Is that correct?”

  “By all means,” Barrett said, gesturing openly. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Chapter 7

  Barrett

  Barrett stood back as Victoria and her partner searched his house. Outwardly, he was the perfect picture of calmness, but inwardly, his gut was twisted into a knot. They had waited and waited for the police to leave, but it had become clear that Victoria wasn’t going anywhere. That wasn’t going to work for Barrett. He needed her out of the way, so that he could deal with the body in his living room and go meet his grandfather. There was no way he was bringing Norman to the house with Victoria and the rest of the police there, and he couldn’t very well leave the premises knowing that she was lurking, waiting for any excuse to get inside his property.

  He’d had to go big or go home, and now he was in the uncomfortable position of waiting to see if his gamble was going to pay off.

  “Where are your friends?” Victoria asked, walking back into the living room where Barrett was waiting, seemingly casually leaning against a wall. “Didn’t you say you had friends over? I didn’t see anyone leave.”

  “They did leave,” Barrett said. “Perhaps you were busy interviewing one of my neighbors about my activities and didn’t notice.”

  “I would have noticed,” Victoria said, crossing her arms over her chest and emphasizing the curve of her breasts even more than her shirt already did.

  Barrett refused to look down appreciatively. “Well, they’re gone.” He wasn’t about to get his friends involved with the police if he didn’t have to. It had been much better for them to hide beneath the floorboards of the crawlspace, along with the body. They were all there now, crouched, listening to the footsteps around them, and waiting. Holding their breath, just like he was.

  “Let’s look in the garage,” Victoria said, motioning to the other officer that had come in as backup. She gl
anced over her shoulder at Barrett as she pulled open the door to the garage, and he smiled at her, nodding as the door swung open to reveal the large freezer that the dead body had been in for a short while, before they realized they were going to have to throw Victoria off the scent.

  Victoria immediately went to the freezer and opened it, but all that was in there was the meat that Ryan had previously pulled out. They had placed it all back in, half burying it in the ice so that it looked like it had been there for some time. They had even cleaned up any of the water that had dripped on the floor from all the movement in and out of the freezer.

  Barrett breathed a sigh of relief when Victoria frowned into the freezer, then closed it to continue looking around the garage. Once she’d moved away from the freezer, Barrett stopped watching her. He pretended to be looking at his phone, perhaps checking email or reading the news. But in reality, he was listening to the shuffles of his friends’ feet in the area below the crawlspace, hardly any distance away.

  When Victoria walked back in, she looked perturbed, her hands resting on her hips. Her lips were pressed tightly together, and she scanned the living room again, as though looking for something she might have missed. She had no idea what she was missing by failing to notice the door in the hallway that looked like an ordinary closet but was anything but.

  Then Victoria walked back down the hall and Barrett held his breath, closing his eyes. He only allowed himself a brief moment of reaction though, quickly opening his eyes again and resuming his casual stance.

  He heard the crawl-space door open, and he froze, every sense attuned to what Victoria was doing. He heard her walk into the space, and he heard her feet creaking against the boards that covered where his friends crouched. He heard her touching the walls of the crawlspace, testing the walls, and he heard her turn around and walk swiftly out, clearly having decided that there was nothing more there to see.

  When the door closed, and she walked back out to the living room, her strides firm and frustrated, Barrett met her eyes and gave her another one of his calm smiles.

  “Well?” he asked, giving no indication how close she had just come to uncovering everything. “Satisfied?”

  “No,” Victoria said, moving towards him. She held one finger up, pointing it at him. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but I know you’ve done something.”

  “Oh? Where is that in the admissible evidence list?” Barrett asked, his eyes flashing with frustration as he momentarily lost his calm. “I wasn’t aware that your gut was a reliable source of police information.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes further. “I have a witness who says that there was a body in here. A woman’s body. As it happens, I have a missing person’s case involving a woman from this area.”

  “Aren’t there always missing person’s cases?” Barrett asked. “That hardly seems unusual.”

  “And the eyewitness who saw a body lying here on the ground?”

  Barrett shrugged a shoulder, not allowing his face to show his reaction to her words. “Seems a bit farfetched. I’m not sure what kind of eyewitness could know what is or isn’t going in my house. But as you can very clearly see …there’s no body here.”

  Victoria glanced over as Izzie walked back in the front door, having done a search of the backyard. “All clear,” Izzie said, holding up her hands.

  Again, Barrett could have sworn that Victoria was almost angry at not finding anything, and he couldn’t help but wonder why she would want so badly to find something on him. For the first time, he considered the possibility that she was somehow involved in the whole thing—that she was working with someone who was sabotaging him at work, and now she had helped arrange a body to be planted in his house only to mysteriously show up that same morning with a mysterious eyewitness account.

  Anger burned through Barrett as all of the pieces started to fit together, but Victoria was walking away. She headed to the front door to join Izzie, her uniformed officers following her. When she got to the door, she turned back and looked at Barrett. “Thank you for cooperating with this investigation. We’ll be in touch.”

  Barrett almost retorted, but he bit his lip, as she walked out of his house and closed the door behind her. It was only the knowledge that his friends wanted out of their hiding place and that Norman was waiting to meet him that kept him from taking on the antagonistic police officer and telling her what he thought of her ethics and her investigation techniques.

  The moment that the police cars pulled away, the crawl-space door opened. Barrett hurried to meet his friends, who were coming up out of the hideaway and into the crawlspace, and then out into the hallway, moving as fast as possible to get free.

  “Shit, that was close,” Quentin said, shaking his head and dusting himself off as he straightened up once he was in the hallway. “I wasn’t sure we were going to pull that off.”

  “We haven’t pulled off anything yet,” Jordan said, coming out of the small, dark space as well. “All we’ve done is buy ourselves a little time. Barrett—go meet with Norman. We’ll get the body back in the freezer and look into things here. You need to talk to him.”

  Barrett nodded, knowing she was right. But he looked at each of his friends first. “Everyone all right?”

  “Go,” Hannah said, waving him away. “We’ve got this.”

  And he trusted that they did. It was comforting, having friends he could rely on.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m done talking to my grandfather,” he said. Then he was out of the door, scanning the entire street for any sign that Victoria or one of her minions was still there, watching him. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t someone watching. If they were watching, all they would see was that he was getting in his car. If they started following him, he’d pick up on it and lose them on the way to meet Norman.

  He texted his grandfather that he was leaving, and he hurried out of the driveway and down his street. Still, he didn’t see anyone following him, and by the time that he got to the interstate, he was confident that he was on his own.

  Barrett sped up, weaving in and out of cars in order to get to his grandfather faster. Even still, it seemed like it took him forever to get to the edge of the bayou, where he and his friends often met to go flying. It was an out-of-the-way place, and there would be no one to observe him there as he and Norman talked.

  Norman was already waiting there, and Barrett took a deep breath, as he walked towards his grandfather, whose eyes were still soft despite his age and all that he had seen.

  “I can’t undo the elders’ decision,” Norman said, as Barrett approached. “As much as I would like to, Barrett. And I can’t help you sabotage them. But I am on your side, and that’s what I’m here to prove to you.”

  “I hope that you mean that,” Barrett said, “because I’m not here about the elders. Whatever is happening has escalated—significantly. There was a dead body in my house this morning, and I had nothing to do with it. It just appeared.” He held up his hands, shaking his head. “I swear.”

  Norman didn’t react immediately, crossing his arms over his chest and pursing his lips thoughtfully. “A body … Was it a woman?”

  Barrett nodded. “The police have also been tipped off. I think, actually, that the officer who came around might be involved in the entire scheme. She was determined to find something in my house, and she knew she was looking for a woman’s dead body. There is something trying to take me down, Grandpa. You have to believe me on that.”

  “I do,” Norman said, nodding thoughtfully, as he continued to ponder calmly. “Yes. I do. I think there must be. And I think that it’s time that we put an end to that.”

  Chapter 8

  Victoria

  She knew that he was hiding something. She just didn’t know what that was, and it was driving her crazy. Victoria paced up and down the aisle adjacent to her desk at the precinct, tapping a finger against her chin and going over and over the morning in her mind.
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br />   She believed that the neighbor had seen something. She really did. And she believed that Barrett had not wanted her in the house the first time she’d knocked on his door because there was something in the house that he didn’t want her to find. There was no other reason why he would keep her outside one time and then randomly let her in to search his entire house, with permission and without a warrant.

  And why had he done that? What had changed in the hour and a half between the time she knocked on his door and when he let her inside? That was going to be the question—or rather, the answer—that would blow whole case open.

  “Tori …”

  Victoria heard Izzie call her, and she knew that Izzie’s use of her nickname was an attempt to reach out and connect with Victoria, so that she would get out of her head and back into reality. But she wasn’t done being in her head yet.

  “Tori.”

  More firmly now. But Victoria still paced, thinking about Barrett and trying to remember every look and every hand gesture in case any of it gave her the one piece of information that she needed.

  “Tori!”

  “What?” Victoria asked, stopping her pacing and turning to Izzie, hands on her hips. “I need to focus on this while it’s fresh in my mind, Iz.”

  “You’re obsessing,” Izzie said. “I agree that there are some questions we need to answer about Barrett Rockwell, but you have it in your head that he killed the woman we’re looking for and somehow hid the body from us before inviting us into his house, and I’m just not sure that’s on the right track for this case.”