Baby: A Linear Tactical Romantic Suspense Standalone

by Janie Crouch

  If it had been kids coming from town, they hadn’t used some of the normal paths. That didn’t prove anything one way or the other, though.

  “Let’s go back and look at the house. There’s a couple of things I need to show you.” Gavin’s voice was grim.

  “I saw the damage last night.”

  Gavin nodded. “I know, but there’s a couple of things you might have missed. Things you should know and think about.”

  When it came to Quinn’s safety, Baby wanted to know everything. “Show me.”

  They walked back into the house. “It’s fine for Quinn to clean up whenever she wants to. I know you want to help. I can come help too, if needed. Hell, all the guys will come, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m more interested in making sure she’s safe than I am worried about getting this place straightened up. We’ll make that happen.”

  Gavin looked around, walking over to where her pile of books had been thrown all over the floor. “Her safety. Right.”

  Baby’s eyes narrowed. Gavin was acting weird.

  “You got something to say, Redwood? Just say it. Do you think this wasn’t kids? Do you think she might be in more trouble than we figure?”

  “Tell me why you think this is kids.”

  Baby walked around. “Well, whoever was here was obviously out to cause trouble. Make a mess. There wasn’t anything of value to take. It’s not like thieves would target this house on its own. It’s too far back from the main section of town to catch anyone’s attention.”

  “Those are all fair points.”

  “The graffiti on the wall suggests kids...or someone not terribly smart. Graffiti in general is vindictive and juvenile.”

  Gavin nodded.

  Baby looked closely at the words written on the wall.

  Your stupid.

  Baby definitely wouldn’t have caught the lack of the apostrophe or the missing e, like Quinn had. “Your stupid. Not an overly mature or threatening phrase. And then, not spelled right? Points to teens for me.”

  “There’s something you should know.” Gavin opened the folder he’d had in his hand the whole time. “There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and what happened at Quinn’s office in Harvard.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like books being destroyed. A lot of random damage without there being anything that would make law enforcement look too closely. Enough destruction to garner some attention, but not send anyone into overdrive.”

  Gavin handed Baby some photos of Quinn’s office at Harvard. An entire bookshelf had been dumped all over the floor, many of the books deliberately ripped apart—very similar to the scene inside her house. The way the furniture in the office had been trashed was also eerily similar.

  “Gavin, are you saying that whoever vandalized her office in Boston came all the way here to vandalize her house?”

  Gavin rubbed his forehead. “No. It doesn’t make sense that someone would follow her that far merely to do this. What I’m saying is...”

  Gavin trailed off but Baby knew exactly what point he was trying to make.

  “What you’re saying is that you think Quinn did this herself.”

  Gavin shrugged. “Look, I know you like her, and I know—”

  “This has nothing to do with liking her. Look at this place. Jesus, Gavin, look at the wall. Whoever did this didn’t spell ‘your’ correctly. Definitely not a Harvard professor.”

  “Or...” Gavin countered, “maybe this person is very smart. Realizing that a misspelling like this would help suggest a certain caliber of culprit.”

  Baby couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “There is no way Quinn did this.”

  “I don’t want to jump to that conclusion either, but you need to know that’s what they accused her of in Cambridge.”

  “Like hell they did.” There was no way.

  Gavin’s face was sympathetic. “She had some sort of breakdown, Baby. She was accused of deliberately destroying school property. Not just her office. She “accidentally” lost an entire semester’s worth of grades for more than one hundred fifty students on her computer.”

  “All of that could possibly be expl—”

  “And then when she was confronted about stealing from the department’s petty funds–they caught her on video—she lost her temper and screamed at her ex-husband, one of the deans, to the point where two different people called security, and she had to be escorted from the building.”

  Holy shit. He’d known she’d lost her job, but he couldn’t believe all of this. “No. There’s something we don’t know.”

  “Why do you think she’s all the way out here? She couldn’t find an academic position anywhere else. Honestly, I’m surprised she got a job at TSC. And that one is only part-time which is why she’s waiting tables.”

  Baby scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “This can’t be right.”

  “Everything Gavin said is accurate.”

  Baby spun around as he heard Quinn’s voice from the front door, “I got fired from Harvard and blacklisted academically. It’s why I’m here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They spent the entire day cleaning her house. Or more like salvaging what they could and dumping what they couldn’t.

  Quinn had woken up that morning and found Baby’s note. How long had it been since someone had been willing to look out for her well-being to the point of doing something unpleasant so she could sleep?

  If it hadn’t been for her brother Riley’s call—who asked how she was doing, which led to her subsequent breakdown and admission of what had happened—she wouldn’t have been here in her house to have heard Gavin’s theory that she was behind her own break-in. Riley had driven her over so she could see what Gavin had to say about the vandalism.

  And boy, did he have something to say.

  She was logical enough to know that his theory made sense. After what had happened at Harvard, she couldn’t blame anyone for concluding that she’d done the same thing here.

  “I think you and I need to have a talk, sis,” Riley had said after they’d both heard the evidence Gavin put forth against her.

  Baby hadn’t responded to Gavin or her. He hadn’t asked her if the accusations were true—maybe he was afraid to know the answer. Maybe he figured if she was guilty, she’d lie about her innocence anyway.

  Instead, he turned to her and said, “We’re cleared to get this place cleaned up. Let’s do it.”

  Riley and Gavin stayed to help. It wasn’t long before some of the other Linear Tactical guys and their significant others showed up.

  Girl Riley was the last, but she came bearing paint and supplies. “I got Mrs. Mazille’s approval for this color. I hope it’s okay with you.”

  Quinn nodded. Anything was better than looking at graffiti or the wallpaper.

  By the time dinner rolled around, all signs of the break-in had been erased, and Quinn had a much more aesthetically pleasing house than she’d had yesterday.

  Gavin must not have mentioned his theories to anyone else, because no one gave her any side-eyed looks or questioned what had happened. The opposite, actually. When she explained she’d been using her textbooks as an end table, Finn and Charlie went and grabbed one that had been sitting in their garage. Anne brought over an extra comforter to replace the one that had been destroyed, Violet brought some curtains.

  Most of her clothes hadn’t actually been damaged—a fact that hadn’t been lost on Gavin, she noticed. And she had to admit, it was pretty incriminating that most of the damage had been done to items that didn’t necessarily belong to her.

  She didn’t have a chance to talk to Baby until everyone had left, and he looked over at her. “Why don’t we go by the Frontier and grab a bite to eat?”

  She stood staring at him. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?”

  “Do you really think I think you did this to your own place?” If that was true, then why did he seem so distant?

 
“Gavin certainly made some compelling points.”

  “Do I think you did this?” He held his hand out toward her clean and newly decorated house. “No. I think it’s Gavin’s job to look at all the angles, and I can understand why he has concerns, but no, I don’t think you did this.”

  “I didn’t do it in Cambridge, either,” she said softly. “At least, not the break-in at my office.”

  “But the other stuff?”

  Shame colored her cheeks, and she didn’t want to look him in the eyes. “The part about me screaming at my ex and being hauled out by security is true.”

  “I’ve been screamed at by a couple of exes in my time.” He smiled at her with a boyish grin before crossing to her and pulling her into his arms. She sighed and snuggled into him. He really did believe her. But she needed to tell him the whole story. Yeah, Peter had been to blame for a lot of what had happened, but that didn’t mean she was completely innocent.

  “I need to tell you everything that happened in—”

  “Tell me over dinner.”

  Baby ordered at the Frontier without looking at the menu. He seemed to always be able to do that, which made Quinn wish she was able to make him some home-cooked meals to surprise him a little. But she wasn’t much of a cook. Maybe she would take him someplace he’d never been to.

  “There’s not too much to tell about Peter and the divorce. Honestly, there was surprisingly little drama surrounding the whole thing. People made it sound like I lost my mind when he started dating Nancy, but honestly, we’d been divorced for nearly eighteen months by then. Peter dating her wasn’t a problem for me.” She took a bite of the burger that Baby’s sister, Wavy, had brought over.

  “But something about him with her bothered you?”

  She studied him for a moment as she chewed. For someone who worked with cars, he was amazingly good at reading people.

  “Yes, you’re right. But it wasn’t Nancy per se that bothered me. It’s all so tied together. Last year was the worst year in my career. Everything that could go wrong did. You should know that some of what Gavin said is the truth.”

  “Which parts?” He took a bite of his chicken sandwich.

  “I did lose the grades of one hundred fifty students. Or, my computer did. I can’t blame the university for thinking it was my fault. When the IT department looked at my computer, everything seemed to be fine. Their best tech told the university police that the only way the information could have been deleted was if it had been done on purpose.”

  “So they thought you’d deleted the grades of one hundred fifty students out of the blue?”

  Her heart warmed at the utter disbelief in his voice.

  “Well, it gets worse. Peter had gone public with Nancy a few months before. Then I lost details on some other research projects, because of a different computer issue. After that, I finally bought myself a new one.”

  “But by then more damage had been done.”

  “It was my fault. I didn’t lose the grades or projects on purpose, but they were all still my mistakes. Even I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Some people said it was because I wanted more attention like I’d had with that scholarship bust. Others said I was being petty because I’d lost the funding for a research project I thought I would have.”

  He waited patiently as she took a bite of her meal, not rushing her. She appreciated it. She had never actually tried to tell anyone exactly what had happened in its entirety.

  But she’d certainly thought about it. Had spent hours of her life trying to figure out how she might have changed things. Where had the fulcrum actually tipped to the point of no return?

  If it all hadn’t happened in one semester, certainly that would’ve made a difference. But when she’d lost the research data a few days after her project wasn’t funded, that had been suspicious.

  When she sat back and looked at it objectively, she could understand everyone’s skepticism. How much bad luck could one person have in a few short months?

  She understood how it might be construed that she’d been acting out or self-sabotaging, and Peter’s relationship with Nancy was as good a reason as any.

  “So that was strike one and strike two, so to speak,” she finally said. “Then, a couple of weeks later, as everything was finally starting to die down, and I thought it had all blown over, somebody broke in and vandalized my office.”

  Baby let out a low curse.

  “Yeah, and in Gavin’s defense, it did look similar to what we saw in the house this morning.”

  Baby shook his head. “But don’t all vandalisms look somewhat the same? Destruction is destruction.”

  She took another bite. “All my books were thrown all over the place. Furniture tipped over. Nothing of value taken. I called campus security, and they did the expected stuff–looked through security footage on campus for anyone suspicious, tried to get any fingerprints. They ended up with nothing.”

  “Surely, nobody tried to say any of it was your fault.”

  She shook her head and ate a fry. “No, or if they did, they didn’t say it to my face...at least at first. It was written off as a burglary that escalated when the thief couldn’t find anything of value.”

  “That seems logical. Did you demand they do something more to find out who had destroyed your office? Is that when security escorted you off campus?”

  She hadn’t gotten to the worst of her story. She swallowed her bite of food.

  “So, it hadn’t been my best half a year.” She let out a sigh. “I should also say that financially, the divorce hit me a little harder than it should have. I have a lot of student debt between undergrad and grad school. Peter was older and already well established when we got married, and I didn’t want to feel like I was a financial burden on him, so we agreed to split all our expenses fifty-fifty. That meant I was not paying off as much on the student loans as I should have been over the course of our marriage.”

  She tried to take another bite of her burger but found she couldn’t. This wasn’t easy to talk about. “And status was important to me, and to him, so we had a very nice house with a very nice mortgage, and I had a lease on a BMW. Anyway, when we split up, we lost money on the sale of the house, and all of a sudden, I had a lot more debt on top of my student loans.”

  “Not an easy place to find yourself.”

  “Even worse, it took me a while to realize how desperate my financial situation really was. I had to do damage control quickly. I moved into a much smaller and more remote apartment and, well, you’ve met the car I traded in for my BMW.”

  Baby smiled softly. “Yes, I have.”

  “I had one account I had been putting money in for years. My sabbatical account. Once you become a tenured professor, they give you a semester off from everything to do research.”

  He nodded. “I know the concept.”

  She took a fry and twirled it around in the ketchup on her plate. “My sabbatical was something I’d been looking forward to my entire career. I was going to travel around Europe to gather info for an academic paper on comparative literature. After I lost my job, I tried not to dip into that account, hoping to still use it for its intended purpose one day when I worked at a different university. But things finally got dire enough that I knew I would have to use it. No point going hungry while you had money in a vacation account.”

  She would never forget the feeling when she’d walked into that bank to close the account. She left the fries in the puddle of ketchup and looked up into Baby’s green eyes.

  “I’d forgotten that Peter was a co-signer on the account. He’d taken all the money out, leaving a couple hundred dollars, enough that I wouldn’t get a notification.”

  Baby’s beautiful mouth turned down in a sneer. “What a prick.”

  She was relieved to find she could actually smile. “That’s what Boy Riley and Girl Riley call him, Peter the prick.”

  “Rightfully so. What did you do?”

  “I went and confronted him and
ended up being escorted off campus by security.”

  “Security escorted you out because your bastard of an ex had stolen from you and you decided to let him know how you felt about that?”

  Now her smile was authentic. “You’re amazing, do you know that?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Right now, I’m being logical. He stole your money.”

  “Technically, some of it was his, although if you pressed him—”

  “I’d like to press him,” he snarled.

  “—Peter knows what he did was wrong, but he had pretty firmly justified his actions in his own mind, so it was difficult to convince him of that.”

  “So you found out he’d taken the money, and then you went to confront him...”

  “I probably shouldn’t have done that at work, but at that point, I was hoping he’d be able to write me a check for the money he’d withdrawn.”

  Baby shook his head slowly. “But the bastard had already spent it.”

  “Yes.” She stabbed the fry in the ketchup. “I walked into his office, and he smiled at me. Said he was glad I’d come in because he’d been asked to talk with me about my situation. Evidently there had been some money stolen from the petty cash can.”

  “Is that what it sounds like?” he asked.

  “Exactly what it sounds like. A literal can that contains money that the department uses for non-official activities and parties—fancy coffee, birthday cake, get well soon cards, etc.”

  He shook his head. “I’m terribly afraid I already know where this is going.”

  “Harvard loves its traditions. In today’s world of Venmo and PayPal, why would an office need something like a literal can with money in it? But no, they had to keep it because it was tradition. At the beginning of every month, faculty members dropped a few dollars into the can. We had a couple hundred dollars in there.”

  “He accused you of stealing from the can right after he had stolen out of your account. Unfuckingbelievable.”

  She set down what was left of the fry. “There was a video. He seemed so proud to show it to me on his computer. And granted, the person in the footage did look a little like me—same basic size and hair color, face conveniently not shown. I pointed that out to him.”