by Marie Force
“On that we disagree, my love,” Nick said. “But I’m not going to waste everyone’s time fighting a losing battle. Brant, we appreciate your thoroughness and ask you to keep us posted on the situation with Nevins.”
“Will do, sir. I’ll wait for you outside.”
When they were alone, Sam looked up at Nick. “I know what you’re going to say, and—”
Nick kissed her hard. “I’ll see you at home later. Let me know if anything pops on the Gibson investigation.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“That’s it.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“You surprise me.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Then my day is officially made. I’ve managed to surprise my shrewd, sexy wife.”
“I thought you were going to do the whole alpha-dog lift-your-leg thing and demand I have a detail.”
“Sorry to disappoint you on the leg lifting, babe, but we have a deal. Would I like you to have a detail? Abso-fucking-lutely. Do I understand why you won’t allow it? Yeah, I get it. Doesn’t mean I like it, but I get it.” He kissed her forehead and then her lips. “Now, we’ve both got stuff to do, so let’s get to it so we can get to the best part of the day.”
“Which is?”
His lips were a heartbeat away from hers when he said, “The part where you crawl into bed with me and rub your naked self all over me.”
“And I’m expected to work with that visual in my head?”
“Yep.” After another quick kiss, he headed for the door.
“Hey, Nick?”
Turning, he raised a brow in inquiry. “Thanks for being the best husband I ever had.”
Normally he’d say Peter had set the bar pretty low, but not today. “Being your husband is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ll see you later, babe.”
Passing Nick as he left, Avery came into the conference room looking like he’d been up all night. His eyes were rimmed with red, his clothes rumpled, and his normally well-styled hair was a mess.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Sam asked.
“Everything is wrong.”
“Care to be more specific?”
“Shelby and I broke up. The engagement is off.”
Sam’s mouth fell open in shock. “You can’t be serious! The baby is due any second—the baby you were going to raise together.”
“You think I need you to tell me that?”
He’d never spoken to her in such a harsh tone, and it took her by surprise.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
“I’ll let her tell you. I’ve got work to do. Where are you with the Gibson case?”
“Avery...”
“Let it go, Sam. I didn’t have to tell you anything, so please just drop it. I need to focus on work so I don’t lose my fucking shit.”
“All right.” Sam did as he asked and dropped it, but she’d be texting Shelby the second she could to find out what the heck had happened. “You’ve heard about the possibility of a suspect in Oklahoma City?”
“Yeah, I’ve been briefed on that and some of my people are working with the Secret Service there. What’s going on here?”
“We’re leaving shortly to dig into the Gibson case.”
“I was also briefed on what was done to him. Are you okay?”
“I will be once we figure out who decided to torture and murder my ex-husband.”
“Speculation is it may be related to our threat. What’re your thoughts on that?”
Sam brought him up to speed on the info Brant had shared with them. “Nick wondered if Peter was killed to draw me out of hiding.”
“That’s a definite possibility and one that came up at our briefing this morning.”
Sam’s belly began to ache at the thought of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies discussing what had once been her most personal business. During her contentious divorce from Peter and the crap he pulled afterward, Sam had hated having her private life picked apart by her professional colleagues. It had been a while since she’d had to deal with that, but it was happening again on multiple levels with the entire country riveted by the story of the second family being threatened and now Peter being murdered.
“You mind if I tag along with you guys?” Avery asked.
“Not as long as you stay out of the way and let us take the lead on Gibson.”
“He’s all yours, but the second he ties into my investigation, he’s all mine. Got it?”
There was no way she’d concede to that. “We’ll see.” He didn’t like that answer, but too bad. It was the only one he was getting. She pushed past him into the pit. “Gonzo, Cruz, you’re with me. Let’s get moving.”
* * *
THEIR FIRST STOP was the Good Night Mattress store on Wisconsin Avenue where Peter had been a sales associate since March.
“We can’t all go in there, or they’ll think we’re shutting the place down,” Sam said when she, Cruz and Gonzo met Hill outside the store. “Cruz and I will take this one. You guys wait.”
Avery began to object, but Sam’s glare shut him down. She headed for the front door and walked into the showroom with Cruz following behind her.
A pretty young saleswoman greeted them. She brightened at the sight of potential customers, but her smile faded when they flashed their badges.
“Lieutenant Holland, Detective Cruz, Metro PD.”
“You’re here about Peter.”
“Yes, you worked with him?”
“I did. Come on back.” She led them past the displays of mattresses that had Sam yearning for a nap to the workstations in the back of the showroom where three other male associates were seated.
“These officers are from the MPD,” she said. “They’re here about Peter.”
“You’re his ex-wife,” said one of the men, an older guy with a shock of white hair and a beer belly.
“I am,” Sam said, her teeth gritted.
“He didn’t think too much of you.”
“The feeling was mutual.”
“So what’re you doing working on the investigation into who killed him?”
“Just doing my job the same way I’d do it for anyone else. I don’t like people who hurt kids and dogs, but I go after their killers the same way I do anyone else.” Sam wasn’t sure why she was bothering to justify herself to strangers, so she took control of the conversation. “What can you tell us about him that might help us find whoever did this to him?”
They exchanged glances before one of the other men said, “We didn’t know him all that well. Kept to himself pretty much.”
The others nodded in agreement.
“He wasn’t much of a mattress salesman,” another guy offered. “He had the lowest sales of any of us.”
For some reason, that information made Sam sad for the man who’d caused her so much grief.
“He was always on time to work,” one of them said. “Early, even.”
“That’s true,” the woman said. “He told me once that he was turning things around and this job was part of that plan. He went to every training they offered at the corporate headquarters, some of them on his own time.”
Sam took notes, trying to reconcile the man she’d once known with the description of him that these people were giving her. When they were married, he’d worked for a national telecom company developing award-winning advertising campaigns. That Peter wouldn’t have been caught dead attending mattress-salesman training on his own time.
“Did any of you meet his friends or hear of anyone he hung out with outside of work?” Freddie asked.
While the men shook their heads, the woman bit her lip as if pondering whether or not she shou
ld share her thoughts. Sam gave her the death stare and watched with satisfaction as she wilted under its potent power.
“He had this one friend, Donny, who would stop by sometimes while we were working.” She blushed to the roots of her blond hair. “He liked to flirt with me and last week when he was in, he asked me out. He gave me his card and said to call him if I ever wanted to get together.”
“Would you mind letting us see the card?” Sam asked.
“Of course not. I’ll get it.” She went to her cubicle and returned with a flashy business card for Donny Bautista, Entrepreneur. Yes, it really said that. Sam wanted to snort with laughter at anyone who’d list that as their title on a business card, but rather than laugh, she took down the Oxon Hill, Maryland, address as well as the phone number and handed the card back to her. “Could I get your name and number too, please?”
Her eyes went wide with what might’ve been fear. “You’re not going to tell him I sent you to him, are you?”
“No, your name won’t come up. I only need it for the possibility of follow-up questions.”
“Oh,” she said haltingly. “Okay. It’s Lucy Kaul.” She gave Sam her phone number.
“Thank you for your time. This has been very helpful.”
“We hope you find whoever did this to Peter,” Lucy said, her eyes brimming with emotion. “He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve this.”
Sam didn’t necessarily agree that he was a good guy, but she definitely concurred with the latter statement.
Outside, she took deep breaths of the fresh air and gazed up at the bright sunshine. Still recovering from the days in the dungeon, she would never again take things like fresh air, blue sky and sunshine for granted.
Avery pounced immediately. “What’d they say?”
Sam filled him and Gonzo in on what they’d heard inside. “It’s ridiculous for you to tag along with us. Why don’t you two go to Peter’s building and talk to the neighbors again.” She gave Gonzo an imploring look, basically asking him to take Avery off her hands. The agent was always annoying, but in his current unhinged state he was only adding to her anxiety. Besides, she needed a minute alone to check in with Shelby to find out what the hell had happened between her and Hill.
“Come on,” Gonzo said to Hill. “Let’s go talk to the neighbors.”
“Fine,” Hill said begrudgingly, “but let us know if you get anything.”
“You do the same,” Sam said, rolling her eyes at Gonzo behind Hill’s back.
Gonzo’s grimace nearly made her laugh, but she didn’t dare when Hill was in such a foul mood.
“What crawled up his butt and died?” Freddie asked when the other two left in Hill’s car.
“He told me earlier that he and Shelby have split.”
“What? Isn’t she about to pop any second now?”
“Yep.”
“Damn,” Freddie said. “What could’ve happened that would break them up when she’s about to have a baby?”
“God only knows,” Sam said as a sinking suspicion that she didn’t want to know overtook her. Despite that, she still fired off a text to Shelby.
Saw Hill and he told me you guys broke up. What happened? Are you ok? Let me know if you need anything. We should be home later.
As they walked to Freddie’s car, Sam took a good look around to make sure no one was paying her more attention than they should. She didn’t see anything to be worried about, but that didn’t mean the coast was clear. Even during the height of her issues with Peter, when she’d realized he’d been following her, she hadn’t felt quite as paranoid as she did now with the unsettled threat against their family looming over her.
“We need to run Bautista,” Sam said, flipping her phone open to call HQ.
“Do it on the tablet.” Freddie pointed to the thing the department had given them for fieldwork.
“Why the hell would I do that when I can make someone else do it for me?”
Freddie rolled his eyes and pulled the car into traffic.
When the dispatcher answered, Sam asked to be put through to the pit.
“Where, please?”
“Oh my God! Who trains you people? The Homicide detectives’ pit. Hurry up about it.” While she waited, she said to Freddie, “Remind me to talk to the chief about training these people better.”
“I’ll make a note,” he said.
The phone rang and rang in the pit, but no one picked up. “We need some more people.”
“Or you can run Bautista on the tablet and have the info in under a minute.”
“Fine! Tell me how to do it.”
“If you’d attended the training session—”
Sam glared at him. “If you finish that sentence, I’ll write you up for insubordination.”
“I’m just saying...” Step-by-step he walked her through the process of using the tablet to search the department database for information.
“What the hell kind of keyboard is this anyway?”
“It’s called a touch screen. If you’d take a look past the 3G, you’d discover a whole new world out there waiting for you to catch up.”
“I’m perfectly happy in the 3G. Ah, fuck, now I’ve got to start all over again because this stupid thing is so touchy.”
Freddie wisely rolled his lips together to keep from laughing.
“If they call this efficiency, I’d hate to see what they come up with next.”
“It’s actually really efficient if you know how to use it.”
“This is why I need to do the driving and you need to do this crap.”
“You won’t hear me arguing, but since the Secret Service brought you to work today, you’re stuck with the tablet. Or you can drive my precious Mustang.”
“I’ll take the tablet over this backfiring piece of crap.”
“I’m wounded on behalf of my piece of crap.”
After a few more autocorrect disasters and some additional muttering on her part, Sam finally managed to complete the search for Bautista. “He’s got a few misdemeanors, simple assault, shoplifting, open container. Nothing major.”
“See? Was that so hard?”
“It was ridiculous.” Stashing the hated tablet between the seats, Sam stared out the window, wishing to be anywhere but in the midst of an investigation into her ex-husband’s murder by torture while a threat hung over her own family.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“YOU OKAY, BOSS?” Freddie asked as he headed toward Oxon Hill, Maryland, just over the line from the District’s southeastern corner.
“Sure, never better.”
“What’re you thinking?”
“My brain is all over the place. Between the threat and Peter’s murder and the floater, I can’t seem to find my mojo on any of it.”
“It’s been a strange few days for sure,” he said, glancing over at her.
“What’s on your mind, Freddie?” She didn’t really want to know, because whatever it was would probably add to her own load, and she had more than enough on her plate.
“You should know that Tyrone turned in his badge and weapon and walked off the job yesterday.”
Okay, she hadn’t seen that coming. Or maybe she had. Maybe they all had in the months since they lost Arnold.
He looked over at her again before returning his attention to the road. “We knew you were dealing with Peter and everything. I’m sure that’s why Gonzo hasn’t mentioned it yet.”
Sam looked out the window, watching the world go by in a blur. “I wish I could say I’m shocked, but I’m not. He’s been different since January. His heart hasn’t been in it.”
“That’s what Gonzo said too. Are you going to try to talk him into staying?”
“No.”
“Why not, Sam? H
e’s a great detective. He has a fantastic career ahead of him.”
“Not if he doesn’t want it.”
“You can’t just let him quit when he’s dealing with grief. It wouldn’t be right.”
“It wouldn’t be right to talk him into continuing to do a dangerous, thankless job if he doesn’t have the belly for it anymore—and I probably could talk him into staying. I could appeal to his sense of loyalty to the squad and me and Jeannie. But that wouldn’t necessarily be in his best interest. He’s a grown man, and he’s made his decision. We need to respect the guts it took to make the move.”
“I do respect it, but I worry that once the grief begins to get more manageable, he’s going to regret it.”
“And if he does, we’ll do what we can to bring him back. But I refuse to try to talk him out of a decision that he spent months making. That’s not in anyone’s best interest. Do you want someone covering you on the street who doesn’t really want to be there? I can’t let Jeannie work with a partner whose heart isn’t in it.”
Freddie’s deep sigh spoke for him. “You’re right. I know you are, but still...”
“It sucks. No question about it.”
“Poor Jeannie is distraught over it, and right before her wedding.”
“She’ll rise above it. She’s gotten past worse than this.”
“Yeah, she has.”
“I know it’s hard when things change. It’s hard for me too. We had a great group of people that was fractured by the sudden loss of one of them, and that loss has touched us all in various ways, some more than others.”
Though he didn’t say anything, Sam could see that he was thinking about what she’d said. “I’ll talk to him, though.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a good friend and colleague to be concerned about him.”
Freddie shrugged. “He’s a good guy.”
“So are you.”
“Awww, thanks. Are you going soft in your old age or something?”
Sam scowled at him, relieved to see him smile. “Who you calling old?”
