“I don’t buy that,” I say immediately, and everyone in the room looks up at me at once.
They’re surprised by how quick I am to second-guess Breaker’s judgment, and so is Breaker, but I have a personal stake in this, and I’m taking charge. Nobody knows Lauren like I know Lauren—not here in Pine Haven, at least.
“Then who else have we got?” Breaker says.
“Let’s think about who’s a problem for everyone in that picture right now,” I say, spreading the news article out in the middle of the table so everyone can see it clearly. “First, we got Brandon. Local war hero people like because his daddy covers up his messes for him. Next, we got the mayor. Think we can rule him out, he was too civil to try some shit like this, and it’s not personal for him, so fighting dirty doesn’t make sense. Then there’s Murray Smyth, who’s still behind bars, and this Kevin Cranston guy clearly doesn’t believe that Murray is guilty. This is a fuckin’ tabloid, this shit must have some kind of personal vendetta against her.”
“Jesus,” Big Daddy groans as Ironsides chuckles at the list.
“But I got one more, because we’re assuming that Lauren is the prime target here,” I say, frowning.”
“Diesel,” Breaker finishes for me.
“You agree?” I ask, arching an eyebrow at our prez.
“I’m not convinced,” he says, shaking his head but stroking his chin at the paper. “It doesn’t fit Diesel’s M.O.”
“Lauren saw a rider outside her house who looked like Chainlink,” I say.
“Did you get a good look at him?” he retorts, and I open and close my mouth, but it’s too late, Breaker is already shaking his head.
“We can’t rule it out though, Prez,” I counter, “you know he wouldn’t be above taking one of our girls from us.”
“And look at your face,” Breaker counters, narrowing his eyes. “If that had been Diesel and Chainlink at that party, not only would you have seen one of them, but they would have done much worse to you, if you had been the target.”
“Could’ve killed you right there and saved themselves the trouble with Lauren,” Ironsides agrees.
“But they knew Lauren is my girl,” I insist, looking around at each of them. “They know that would hurt a hell of a lot worse than anything they could do to me.”
“Do they, though?” Ironsides says to my surprise, getting my attention. “If they followed the newspaper to town to find either of you, how would they have proof that you two were anything more than a one night stand? How would they give a shit that you just happened to be there together?”
“Because if it’s Diesel, he’s watching us, and I think he had one of his men watching me at Lauren’s house!” I nearly shout.
“Calm down, you two!” Breaker intercedes like a referee, jabbing an arm between us and glaring at us both. “There’s a lot flying around, but if we can’t keep our cool, we may as well pack up and leave state now, because this is not how a club acts.”
I glare at Ironsides, then back at Breaker, who’s face softens a little.
“Alright Bones,” Breaker says, “your devotion to this girl is real, I’ll give you that. But don’t let it cloud your judgment. We need to bring in all expertise we can here. That’s how we’re going to find Lauren, not with bravado. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” I growl, seeing the reason in his words despite my impatience.
“Ironsides, give us your insight on Brandon,” Breaker says. “How does a soldier act when he wants to cause trouble?”
“Brandon’s a spoiled kid who probably got his first taste of hardship in basic,” Ironsides scoffs. “He probably has a chip on his shoulder while he’s on leave, and he probably has a fragile ego. It makes sense that he’s pushing to sue the bar, when Bones ruined his fun.”
“That was the only way I could have saved her,” I say, not willing to back down on this.
“Regardless, it pissed him off,” Ironsides says. “And if his plan was to kidnap her after that anyway, don’t you think it makes sense that he and his friends might try to make that happen when doing things his daddy’s way wasn’t enough?”
“Fuck this,” I finally snap, turning and storming away from the conference table. “I’m the only one who knows this girl, and if you don’t want to listen to me, then you can all go fuck yourselves, I’m going for a ride.”
“Bones!” Breaker calls after me, and I know I’m in brazen defiance when I throw the door open and storm past the bar on my way up to the stairs outside, my mind buzzing as if someone rolled a hive of angry wasps into it.
Where the fuck did they get off trying to talk over me when I’m the one who has firsthand experience in all this? The guys might have their own thoughts, but I’m the only one who has spent any time with Lauren. I’m the one who’d know if someone was after her, and getting pulled in seven different damn directions isn’t going to get us anywhere.
I get on my bike and roar away from the clubhouse, jaw tight. It isn’t the first time I’ve stormed out of a meeting, and just like it won’t be the last, it won’t be the last time I get chewed out by Breaker when I get back, either.
The wind whips around me on the dusty road as I tear down it. I drive toward Lauren’s house while I try to clear my head. I don’t care that there might be a trap there, I feel like I want to punch something, and Diesel’s crew haunting Lauren’s house might be the perfect excuse.
Of course, by the time I ride past it, there’s nobody there. Still, I bring my bike to a stop outside it, and I stare at it for a few moments before tearing away. Maybe I shouldn’t have stormed out of the meeting like that. Hell, I know I shouldn’t have, but I’m a man who has always followed his instincts.
That doesn’t work out for the best, sometimes.
Still, I think the guys are feeling as overwhelmed as I am by having enemies on all sides, seemingly, and I need Lauren’s guidance more than ever—direct or not. So far, on top of everything I said at the meeting, I remember that Lauren mentioned her family siding with her dad during the trial. In fact, to hear her tell it, she didn’t have many allies to speak of at all.
Then it hits me.
Murray couldn’t do anything from prison on his own, but Lauren said that he might have made friends in prison that are working with him now. I still don’t think prison would be friendly enough to a guy like Murray for that to happen, but if Murray happens to be an especially charismatic guy, it isn’t unbelievable.
What if someone’s helping him?
What if Diesel is helping him?
The dots are coming in from all sides, but these dots might be connected after all. There’s only one way to find out. I have exactly one lead that I have a chance of actually following through on, and if the Heartbreakers want to get caught up worrying about the jarheads, they can do that.
I’m going to pay Kevin Cranston a visit.
Bones
In a turn that leaves one large, screeching arc of rubber on the road, I whip my bike around and take off in the opposite direction. I’m heading right back to where I had been just a few moments ago—back to Lauren’s house. When she agreed to move in with me for a while, she hadn’t exactly packed up her entire life and come with me.
More importantly, I had seen just about everything she came over with, which was almost entirely clothes. The clipping of the newspaper from twelve years ago I saw was not among them, which meant she had left everything to do with that part of her life back at home, if there was anything else.
If there were any clues to be had, they were going to be in there.
I pull up to the house and leave my bike as I stride across the lawn and head around back, glancing in either direction to make sure there was nobody else coming up the road. I don’t exactly have a key on me, but I need to be inside this house, and I would rather not let any locals see whatever I’m going to have to do to make that happen.
Around back, I check around for any of the usual hiding spots for spare keys. People leave
those things out more often than you’d think. But I have no luck, nor with the windows—none of which should be surprising. Lauren is a woman who lives on the run, always looking over her shoulder. There’s no way she would leave any part of her life exposed unless she wanted it to get found.
After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to jimmy a window open, I murmur “Fuck it” under my breath and dig out a couple of sturdy paper clips from my pocket I keep for situations like this. A few minutes later, I’ve picked the lock, and I slip inside.
Everything is as still and dark as we left it last time we were here, and I have to admit, I have fond memories here thanks to her. The sight of the interior will always make me think of that first time I felt her on me, and I don’t think that’s something I’ll be able to forget even if I have to.
The thought of having to makes me stop in my tracks, and I close my eyes a moment, taking a deep breath.
A lot of dark thoughts have crossed my mind since I last got separated from Lauren. For the most part, I’ve been able to keep them at bay. I stay focused, and I think about cracking some heads together and carrying her home safe and sound. The wind on my chest doesn’t feel right anymore without feeling the warmth of her arms around it.
But the whole time, I’ve told myself I can’t let myself think about the worst case scenario: that whoever kidnapped Lauren this time has no intention of giving her back.
I quietly lay my hand on the back of a chair, then let my hand wrap around one of the wooden bars and tighten, letting out the tension in my muscular bicep until I hear the grainy wood start to groan and crack under my grip. When my arm starts to hurt, I relax, roll my shoulders back, and take a deep breath.
“That’s why you’re here, Bones,” I whisper into the darkness to myself before flicking the lights on and marching down the hallway and into her bedroom.
Heading straight to the drawer that has that damned article in it, I rip it out and set it on the bed and start digging. A quick search confirms that the junk mail I saw earlier is all “real” junk mail—it’s all addressed to the real address of this place with Lauren’s new name on it. Still, I glance inside a few of them to make sure they aren’t hiding anything, and after finding my third coupon for half off a pizza, I decide there’s nothing to find in there and look back to the article.
Frowning at it, I hold it up to the light. Immediately, I notice the black rectangles on lines of the text where she seems to have run a black marker over her name. That’s understandable, I’m sure she doesn’t want this getting found in the first place, much less connected to her. But this can’t be all.
I look down at the drawer in my lap, now empty, and I furrow my brow. Taking hold of the sides, I lift it up and shake it slightly. Something rattles inside, and a grin spreads across my face.
“Knew this thing was too heavy to be just mail,” I murmur as I take out a switchblade and pry open the false bottom in the drawer.
There are two things inside that make my eyes widen: a laptop and a thick, aged folder brimming with papers.
An hour later, I have a lamp shining on the kitchen table as I lay out the documents I’ve found that are most relevant, which is a hell of a lot, because I’ve stumbled on a treasure trove of information. The folder turned out to be stuffed with as many court papers from Lauren’s father’s case as she could get her hands on. They weren’t in any order when I found them, but each piece of paper has been read over thoroughly at least once.
I know, because every instance of Lauren’s name is censored. And the way the stroke of the marker tip flares up a little at the beginning and down at the end ever so slightly is a dead giveaway: Lauren is the one who censored her own name.
The court records detail one hell of an ugly trial, from what I can tell. The first thing I look into is some record of Murray Smyth speaking, so I can read the words right out of his mouth and see what kind of man could do those kinds of unforgivable things.
And immediately, I can see how this case wasn’t so cut and dry as I thought it should be.
Murray Smyth isn’t the hand-wringing, creepy-looking walking red flag I had in my head when Lauren gave me the full story on him. In fact, he’s a good looking guy—just the right amount of rough around the edges for a respectable middle aged man living in the suburbs, but otherwise very put together and charming in a relatable way. He answered all questions respectfully, and there was no indication that he ever hesitated or wavered with any of his answers. He was a confident liar. He came off like everyone’s dad, in a good way.
And he didn’t just have a silver tongue, either. Murray had the track record to keep his fake life pristine. He spent his weekends volunteering at a soup kitchen, he jogged in the community marathon events, and he had recently gotten a promotion at work. He didn’t come off as a serial killer, and he didn’t tick many of the usual boxes that were signs of people like that. I could almost feel the jury’s confusion about him even though he was long behind bars.
I had been able to figure out it was Lauren’s name that was censored by context when I get to her earliest testimonies. Each line I read breaks my heart a little more. She was already at an age where it was easy to feel overwhelmed by the world, and she clearly wasn’t ready to testify. She contradicted herself just enough times to provoke the defense into pushing her too hard, and I can only imagine the damage that did to her when she was so vulnerable.
Reading through the family’s testimonies is easier after going through a separate stack of correspondences Lauren seems to have had with her family during the trial. Some of them are letters, others printed emails, a few diary entries about what someone said to her one day, and so on. And damn, she wasn’t exaggerating when she said the family turned on her.
It looks like her mom was still in love with Murray at the time, and based on what all of the family writes to her, it’s easy to see why: he’s a pillar of the community, always been a successful and stable gentleman, nobody in their right mind would think he’d hurt a fly, blah blah blah. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the whole family wasn’t ready to see it yet. It just pisses me off.
She was just about to be a teenager. Even if she had been wrong, she had pretty damn good reason to be taken seriously, and that was clear to the jury in the end. But small town politics were ironclad sometimes, and that victory had come at the cost of her relationship with her family. It’s even worse than she made it sound.
I frown down at the stack of papers, looking at a round wrinkled patch on one of the pages where a tear had fallen and dried at some point. She really has been honest with me from the very start. She could have lied to me about all of it, and she should have taken one look at me and done just that. But she stuck around and opened her heart to me.
And now, I’ve got to show her what that means to me.
This overview hasn’t gotten me any closer to finding out who Kevin Cranston is, though. Thankfully, the laptop is there for that. I open it up and find that it isn’t locked, which is kind of surprising, but as soon as I glance through the digital folders, I see why. She has scanned all the documents I just looked through and backed them up here. No need to bother risking a password she’ll forget, if the hard copies are right there with it.
I use it to look up Kevin Cranston and see what I can find. Immediately, I see that he’s a journalist at a news journal that operates not too far from here. I even find a picture of him winning some stupid award, and I see the pencil-necked prick himself grinning as if he’s not about to lose those sparkling white teeth when I get my hands on him.
The rest of his articles have the same snide tone as the fucking tabloid piece he ran about Lauren, even if he redacted her name. None really go for the throat like that one did, though. He seems to focus on the cases of wrongfully accused murderers, people whose cases were just murky enough or tampered with enough that there was room for debate. My mind flits to Murray. Kevin is definitely an annoying, shrimpy journalist, though, and that’s more
than enough to piss me off. Nobody talks about my Lauren like that, much less him.
I keep searching, because there has to be some connection to Lauren somewhere elsewhere. But of course, looking their names up together doesn’t turn anything up. I’m at a loss for a minute, and I start to worry I’m at a dead end when another thought hits me.
I look up Kevin’s name alongside Murray Smyth’s.
The first page of results is vague and doesn’t seem especially related, except for one link to...a university website? I look into it, and I clench my teeth at what it shows me. It’s an archive of a university’s page for some scholarship several years ago. It lists a Kevin Cranston as the winner of a full ride scholarship to the university to study journalism based on his essay.
And his essay was his first entry into the world of disputable murder cases: it’s an independent investigation he did into the case, and he firmly believes that Murray Smyth is innocent. The damn essay won him his career. And he’s using it against her now that she’s trying to move on with her life. I set the laptop aside and pace the kitchen, wishing Lauren was enough of a drinker to keep more in the house.
“So I’ve got a motive for Kevin,” I murmur. “He’s a journalist, and Murray might get out soon, so Kevin wants to start picking that case back up again.”
That sounds right enough, but it’s a dead end. I could head to wherever Kevin works and beat his ass until he talks to me, but that would cause more problems than it solves...for now. Maybe I missed something.
Heading back into the room, I start feeling around for hidden spaces in the room, checking the usual areas people hide things. If nothing else, doing a sweep of the room will give me time to sort my thoughts out.
But the first place I search is the space between the bedframe and mattress, and the feeling of something plastic brings a smile to my lips. I wrap my hand around the phone I just found and take it out.
It turns out to be more than just a phone. There’s a note taped to the back of it, and I recognize Lauren’s handwriting immediately.
Bones Page 13
