by L A Dobbs
Jo fished her keys out of her desk and followed Sam to the office. “Now what? We need a plan.”
Sam nodded. “I’m hoping we can play it by the book. We know who’s behind this.”
Jo lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. “And if certain things come to light in the investigation?”
“Maybe it’s good if we go over things and think them through from all angles. Not here, though.” Sam glanced at his door. He couldn’t risk anyone overhearing them. “Tonight. My house.”
Jo nodded and turned toward the door.
“And Jo,” Sam called to her as she got to the door.
She turned back to look at him. “Yeah?”
“You bring the beer.”
Chapter Five
The day had yielded a big fat nothing. Sam had spent the afternoon trying to call in favors from his contacts in an attempt to home in on who Thorne would have ordered to kill Dupont. His contacts either didn’t know, or weren’t saying. Sam couldn’t blame them. No one wanted to cross Thorne. He was a cold-hearted killer.
When he drove home that night, all he had was a smoking gun and a smudged leaf. But he had an idea about someone else he could press for information, an informant he’d been grooming for a while now. That person probably wouldn’t know who was closest to Thorne in his chain of command, but he’d know the lowest link in that chain. Sam would have to start at the bottom.
Sam lived in an old log hunting cabin deep in the woods. His grandfather had built it, and the sight of the golden logs and wide front porch nestled between pines, birch, and oaks always brought him comfort.
He pulled into the driveway, and Lucy bounded out of the Tahoe and onto the porch. The green wooden rocking chair—his grandfather’s favorite—rocked slightly as she sped past. She waited at the door, glancing back at Sam impatiently.
“You want dinner?”
Lucy wagged her tail furiously and gave him a look as if to say, “Duh.”
Sam opened the door, and Lucy rushed to her stainless-steel bowl in the kitchen. Sam tossed his keys on the cedar log table beside the door and let the day’s stress roll off. The cabin was still decorated exactly as it had been when his grandparents lived there: rustic, comfortable furniture, happy childhood memories, and the scent of cedar.
Sam poured the dry dog food the vet had recommended into Lucy’s bowl then looked around the cabin. Grandma hadn’t been much for decorating. She’d hunted and fished right alongside Sam’s grandfather. In fact, one of the big taxidermy rainbow trout hanging on the wall was one she’d caught in the Sacagewassett here in town.
The warm log walls were dotted with other taxidermy and paintings of lakes and mountains in sunset pink, orange, and blue. The furniture was mostly hickory or birch. An oak china cabinet housed about the only items that couldn’t be described as rustic: some of Grandma’s old blue china. The cabin might not make Architectural Digest, but to Sam, it was perfect. It was home. Though it was a little messy right now. He supposed he should pick his socks up from under the coffee table and put away the T-shirt draped over the kitchen chair. Sam didn’t socialize much with Jo outside of work and unwinding at Holy Spirits, the downtown bar built from a decommissioned church. Heck, he didn’t socialize much at all, which was why the place was a mess. He never really had to pick up for anyone.
He’d just finished sprucing up and pouring some chips into a bowl when a soft tap at the open screen door brought his attention to the front of the house. Jo stood tentatively outside the door, holding a six-pack of Sam’s favorite Moosenose beer.
The fading sunlight made her copper curls shine. Sam felt a rush of emotion. He was a solitary guy and didn’t have many friends. Jo was one of the few people he trusted. One of the few people he could share things with. And now that they were in this mess together, it solidified that bond even more. He felt closer to Jo than he had to either of his two wives. That was probably because their relationship was purely platonic. Once you got romantic, things turned squirrelly. Luckily, that would never happen with Jo. For one, it wouldn’t be appropriate because she was his second-in-command. Two, he couldn’t risk losing her.
“Come on in,” Sam said. Jo swung the door open and strode into the cabin, a smile flitting on her lips as she looked around.
“I always liked this place.” Jo handed the six-pack to Sam, pulling one of the tall green bottles out for herself. “I think your grandma had style. It’s comfortable.”
Sam glanced around. Most women thought the cabin was a man cave. His ex-wife had refused to come here at all after Sam had inherited it. She preferred to stay in a fancy Victorian closer to town. As soon as the divorce was final, he’d sold that place and moved to the cabin. But it figured Jo would like it. She wasn’t like most women. She was practical and earthy.
“Thanks. I like it.” Sam gestured toward the couch, and Jo sat. Sam took the chair beside the couch and popped the top off his beer before handing the opener to Jo. Lucy trotted to Jo and sniffed and wagged her tail as Jo ruffled her behind the ears.
“So, I guess we’ll need to conduct a full investigation after all,” Jo probed.
Sam leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs, the beer clasped in both hands. “Yeah. I guess we should have known that suicide thing wouldn’t fly. Probably never should have moved the gun.”
“I don’t think that will be too much of a problem. Who’s to know that the killer didn’t put it there?” Jo took a sip of beer. “What I don’t get is why the killer left the gun in the first place.”
“I think Thorne is up to something. Maybe there is something on the gun and he’s trying to frame someone.”
“Yeah, like us.”
“The gun is still at the crime lab. Ballistics reported it was the weapon that killed Dupont. So far, there’s nothing else. But we don’t know what else Thorne has in store.”
“That’s why we need to solve this fast. We need to be able to maintain control of the investigation.”
Sam picked at the label on his beer. “Might be hard with Kevin and Wyatt. We have to be careful about which aspects we investigate and which they investigate.”
Jo sighed and pushed up from the couch, running her hand through her mass of curly hair. “You know, it shouldn’t be this hard. We didn’t do anything wrong. We were only trying to protect Tyler’s reputation.”
“I know. And then to find out he’s related to Thorne ...”
“Did you ever get the report on the DNA from the lab? Could we be wrong about that?” Jo asked.
“Funny thing. There is no report. I talked to someone I know at the lab, but they couldn’t find anything. Somehow, it seems to have disappeared.”
“Thorne.”
“He has people everywhere.” The thought made Sam nervous. Where else had Thorne placed his people? “Look, I wouldn’t worry too much. I won’t let you get into trouble. You haven’t done anything.”
Jo turned, her face screwed up in a frown. “Well, I did forge the logbook so it would look like Tyler had written in that stop. And I don’t need anyone covering for me. I take responsibility for my actions.”
Sam should have known better than to expect Jo to let him take the blame. “What I meant is that no one is going to know you wrote in the logbook. I don’t think that will even come into the picture, and if it does, he did make the stop. His body was found there. No one will scrutinize that logbook.”
“Yeah. He made the stop, but apparently not for the reasons we thought.”
When Tyler’s body had been found, they’d thought he’d pulled over to help someone change a tire and stumbled across a drug deal. The car with the flat tire was still at the side of the road. They’d found drug residue in the ashtray and a partial fingerprint. They’d never been able to trace that fingerprint to anyone. Now it looked as if Tyler had been up to something else entirely, although Sam had no idea what.
“What do you think he was doing out there that night?” Jo asked.
“Who knows
? Maybe meeting with his contact.”
“But then why was he killed? Why was the car left there with a flat tire? Sounds like a setup to me. Do you think maybe he knew too much and Thorne wanted to get rid of him? His own son?”
“Good question. Maybe there’s a rival drug gang, and that’s who killed Tyler. If Tyler was working with Thorne, a rival gang might have wanted to get rid of him.”
Jo plopped down on the couch again and grabbed her beer. “Well, either way, it doesn’t bode well for us. Especially for you, with that donation from the Fallen Officers Fund you gave to his mother.”
Sam grimaced. Tyler had supported his mother and his disabled sister. When Tyler had died, Sam had written a check out of his retirement plan to Tyler’s mother, pretending that it was a donation from the Fallen Officers Fund. Of course, that was before Sam and Jo had discovered a large deposit in Tyler’s bank account. His mother had thought that deposit was back pay, but now Sam knew better. Either way, if people started looking into Tyler and discovered Sam had written a check to his mother, it could be trouble.
“What’s done is done. We can’t go back and change it. All we can do is damage control now,” Sam said. “I wonder about Tyler’s mother and Thorne, though. I can’t quite picture that.”
Jo raised a brow. “I know, right? You never know. That was a long time ago. Maybe Thorne was nicer then. I wonder if Tyler knew that Thorne was his real father all along or how he even found out. Seems like Thorne must have doubted it if they needed DNA testing.” She shrugged and took another swig. “So how do you propose we do damage control?”
“First, we want to make sure we control the aspects of the investigation that might expose anything that could be misunderstood as wrongdoing on our part.”
“Like moving the gun at the crime scene?”
“Yeah. That wasn’t good judgment, but I don’t think anyone needs to know I moved it. Like you said, the killer could have done it.”
“I think we can probably get Kevin and Wyatt on board with keeping quiet about anything that sheds a negative light on Tyler’s reputation. As long as it’s not pivotal to the investigation of Dupont’s murder, I think we may be okay.”
“Right. And how could it be pivotal? Tyler’s been dead for months. The two are unrelated.”
Jo looked thoughtful. “But we never did find out what that key locks.”
They’d found a key taped under Tyler’s desk after his death. They’d suspected Tyler had been up to something, though they thought he was conducting some sort of investigation on his own, never realizing that the investigation included spying on them for his father. They’d looked at all the safety deposit boxes and gym lockers in the area to see if the key fit but never found a match. Back then, they were hoping to get evidence on Thorne. Now, they needed to find what the key unlocked for another reason: whatever it was might contain evidence on them.
But what evidence? They hadn’t really done anything wrong. Cut a few corners here and there. Sam didn’t trust Thorne, though. For all he knew, Thorne had Tyler set things up so it looked as if they’d been doing something wrong.
“Yeah. We need to keep looking even more now. I always thought it was odd that Tyler wouldn’t have included us in any off-the-book investigating he was doing. Now we know why.”
“There’s another wrinkle that we need to watch out for,” Jo said. “Mick was at the crime scene that night. What if someone saw him leaving?”
“I thought about that. Let’s hope no one saw him. If it comes up, we’ll have to handle it.”
Mick Gervasi was Sam’s best friend, his buddy since grade school, and a private investigator that he often hired to look into things when Sam couldn’t do it officially. They’d had Mick investigating Tyler when they’d been told it was a conflict for them to investigate. He’d made little headway other than to discover that the car that had been left at the crime scene had been stolen. Mick suspected the grandson of the car’s owner had something to do with that theft.
Sam drained his beer. “You want another?”
Jo held hers up to the light, barely a half inch of liquid swirling in the bottom of the bottle. “Why not? It’s not like I’ll get pulled over on the way home.”
Sam got up to grab the beer from the refrigerator. Jo walked around the cabin, stopping in front of a birch-framed photo of Sam’s twin daughters, Hayley and Marla. Sam remembered taking that photo on a ski trip a few years ago.
“How are the girls?”
Sam’s heart swelled with thoughts of his daughters. They were the only good things that had come of his first marriage. They were both in college, pursuing careers in Massachusetts. Sam missed them. He wanted them to come back to White Rock, but they claimed there were no opportunities up here near the Canadian border for ambitious young women.
Still, he harbored a glimmer of hope that someday, when they were older, they’d realize nothing compared to the beauty of the mountains and the laid-back lifestyle. If Thorne didn’t ruin it before then.
“They’re doing pretty well.” Sam popped the tops off both beers and handed one to Jo. “Marla is doing an internship at Woods Hole, and Hayley is taking some summer classes to try to speed up that pharmacology degree.”
“Nice girls,” Jo said. When Jo had first come on board, the girls had been in high school. Sam was under no illusions that his girls were angels. He knew they got into the same sort of trouble he had as a teen. Nothing big. Drinking. Boys. He also knew that Jo had cut them some slack on a few occasions, even though she and the twins thought they were keeping it from him.
Jo sipped her beer and looked at him hesitantly. Sam wondered why. She could tell him anything. “Something on your mind?”
“The knife. We never found it.”
Sam sighed. The knife had been on his mind too. It all went back to Sam’s cousin, Gracie. She’d been raped in Boston decades ago. Sam and Mick had been young then, Sam just starting out in law enforcement. The rapists were from wealthy families, and not all of them got the punishment they deserved. Sam and Mick had taken matters into their own hands to try to force the truth to come out so there could be justice for Gracie. Things hadn’t worked out exactly as they’d planned.
Somehow, Dupont knew something about what had happened back then. He hadn’t been involved in the rape, but he must have known the players. And Dupont had never been one to pass up an opportunity to get something to hold over someone else’s head. He’d come into possession of Mick’s pocketknife, which had been left in a place it shouldn’t have. He’d passed it along to Thorne. And now Thorne was using it to threaten Sam. If that knife made its way to the police, things might not look too good for Mick.
Sam and Mick had shared some of this with Jo the night they’d found Dupont. In a way, it had felt good telling her. Keeping the secret had weighed heavily on Sam, as if it were something between them. But now it burdened Jo just as much. He almost wished he’d never told her.
“Let’s not worry about that now. That problem will be solved once we prove that Thorne is behind this murder and we put him away.”
“I guess you’re right.” Jo didn’t seem convinced, and Sam had the feeling there was something more she wanted to say. He could see indecision in her face, but then she smiled, and Sam thought maybe he’d imagined it. “Don’t worry. We’ll nail him, and everything will work out, especially now that we have another cop to help out.”
“What do you think of the new guy?” Sam asked. They stood in the kitchen now. Sam glanced out at the backyard and the cedar doghouse he’d built for Lucy a few weeks ago. She never used it because she was always by his side, but he felt better knowing she had shelter if she wanted to go outside. Sam leaned his hip against the counter, and Jo leaned her shoulder against the large cedar log that anchored the built-in bookshelves between the kitchen and the living room.
Her forehead creased slightly. “I’m not sure what to make of him yet. I haven’t worked with him very much. He seems a little cautious
.”
Sam nodded. He hadn’t really formed an opinion of Wyatt yet, either, but he sensed there was more to the guy. He had the disconcerting feeling that Wyatt was watching him, as if waiting for something to happen. Maybe he was only trying to figure out where he stood in the department and what Sam was about. It would take a while for him to get a good bead on Wyatt.
“So, what do we do next?” Jo asked.
Sam swigged his beer. “Run it like any other homicide. This one’s actually easier. We already know who’s at the bottom of it. We just need to get the facts to prove it.”
Chapter Six
The stress rolled off of Jo’s shoulders as soon as she pulled up in front of the small cottage in the woods that she called home. She loved the remote location, away from the hustle and bustle—not that White Rock had much hustle or bustle, for that matter. Jo liked the seclusion, liked not being able to see her neighbors, the serenity of being in the woods with nothing but birds and the brook beyond the cottage to interrupt her thoughts.
The sun had set, and she could hear the cicadas buzzing as she headed up the steps of the front porch. Beyond the cottage, the flickering of fireflies at the edge of the dark woods gave the scene a magical feel.
On the porch, she stuck her finger into one of the railing boxes overflowing with bright-red petunias. They were looking a little wilted. Yep, the soil was dry. She’d been putting in so many hours on the Dupont case and the stakeout she’d neglected her flowers. She made a mental note to water them early the next morning.
She glanced down at the empty bowl beside the door. She’d seen an orange cat out back a few times and had been putting food out for him. She didn’t know if he had a home or not, but he looked pretty thin. Maybe eventually she’d make friends with him. Maybe even adopt him. Was she ready for that kind of commitment?
The interior of the cottage was cozy. Jo liked the freshness of the off-white and pale florals she decorated in. The chippy paint she’d applied to update her furniture had turned her shabby yard sale finds into chic retro pieces. The cottage was small, but her needs were simple.
