TAMING KNOX (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 3)

by Glenna Sinclair

  He turned and surveyed the debris. “No. I wouldn’t even…I do dry wall. I don’t know how to mess with the gas lines.”

  “What about your wife? She know how to do that sort of thing?”

  I didn’t understand why Knox would ask such a question, but I let her do what she wanted. There was no stopping Knox when she was on a roll, anyway.

  “No. She’s a kindergarten teacher. She doesn’t know anything about construction.”

  He seemed almost outraged at the suggestion.

  “Stay away from Mattie,” I said, pushing his shoulder again. “But thanks for telling us about Julep.”

  He nodded. “I want nothing but the best for my kid. But Mattie’s not mine. She’s yours.”

  I appreciated that. In fact, it was like a wave of relief, of peace, that moved through me at his words. I guess a small part of me had always worried that he would come back and stake a claim on my daughter. Hearing him say that, it killed a little more of that fear.

  Knox and I went out onto the porch. The hot tub was in pieces now because it had sat behind the kitchen wall. It was almost a relief to see it gone. But there was something…Knox walked over to it, bending low to touch the pipes coming out of what was left of the bottom half of the wall.

  “It was connected to the gas line?”

  “Yes. It was heated by gas.”

  “Really? I assumed it was electricity.”

  I shook my head. “We’d always heard that the gas tubs were more efficient. And Colby had one like it at her mother’s house, so she wanted one here.”

  “Julep has one like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  She shook her head, her attention focused on the lines, the debris, everything that had to do with the tub. Something was troubling her. I could see it on her face, in the tension in her shoulders. She wasn’t pleased with something.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “It just…everything points to Julep.”

  “It does.”

  “But that seems too easy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems too easy.”

  I stepped up behind her, resting my hands on her shoulders. “Sometimes the evidence is what it is. Julep is a woman whose life revolves around her reputation. She would do anything to protect it.”

  “I guess so.”

  But she didn’t seem convinced. And, for some reason, I was beginning to have my doubts, too.

  Chapter 19

  Knox

  I stopped by the house Alexander and Elliot were manning across from Dunlap’s, careful to walk out of my way and come in through the back door. Alexander smiled when he saw me, but Elliot was his usual sour self.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I just wanted to check in and see if you guys noticed anything unusual.”

  Alex shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  I moved up behind him and looked at the computer terminal they were sitting in front of. A dozen video feeds filled the screen, mostly feeds from the cameras Dunlap’s security company had installed. But there was also feed from cameras our people had put up when Dunlap first hired Gray Wolf. The cameras were pretty much recording nothing at the moment. The construction crew had sealed off the open space into the house and begun to clean up the debris, but they were gone now. They’d be back in the morning, but the job was likely going to take a week or more. And then Dunlap still had to decide if he wanted to rebuild or not.

  “No sign of Julep?”

  “No.”

  I studied the screens a few minutes longer, then I squeezed Alexander’s shoulder lightly. “Okay, I’m out of here.”

  I headed for the door. Elliot came up behind me.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  I turned, almost weary because of the tone of his voice. There was disapproval dripping from his lips.

  “If it’s about this case, Kipling thought it would—”

  “No, it’s about Dunlap.”

  “What about him?”

  He hesitated, going from studying my face to staring at the floor. Finally he cleared his throat and focused on me.

  “I’ve known a lot of men like Dunlap Spencer. They claim that their wives cheated on them repeatedly while they sat at home and waited. But most of the time they were the ones who cheated first. And once a cheater, always a cheater, you know?”

  “You’re worried I’ll get my heart broken?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I know it sounds stupid, but—”

  “Dunlap is not a cheater. If either of us is a person of that sort of character, it’s me.”

  “You’ve never cheated on a partner.”

  “I’ve never had a partner. Not like Dunlap. But that doesn’t mean I’m the kind of person he needs in his life.”

  “You’re a good person, Knox. A little confused, but a good person.”

  I smiled. No one had ever described me quite like that. I touched his arm. “Thanks. I appreciate your concern, but I know what I’m doing.”

  “Yeah, well, if you ever need someone to take his ass out and kick it, I’m the first in line.”

  I chuckled softly. “I appreciate that.”

  ***

  Ricki arranged a family dinner that night. Ingram, Bailey, David, Ricki, Kipling, Dunlap, me, and four kids gathered around the dining room table and laughed ourselves silly as we listened to little Chase explain to Stevie how things worked in the main house. He was trying so hard to be grown up, his four year old’s lisp undermining his attempts. To her credit, Stevie listened closely, smiling politely when he was finished.

  “Thanks.”

  Kipling wandered away from everyone as soon as it was polite to do so. I walked over to where he was standing by a set of windows that overlooked the back of the property. He had a beer in his hand, his fingers absently playing with the label wrapped around the thin neck.

  “Difficult day?”

  He looked at me, a smile catching me off guard. I think it was one of the first times I’d seen him smile.

  “Every day is a difficult day.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  He shrugged. “People have survived worse than what I’ve gone through. I have my health. I have a safe place to sleep and good food for my belly. I think I’m pretty lucky.”

  “With those criteria, I think we all are.”

  He glanced back at the rest of the group. “That Stevie is quite a firecracker.”

  “She is.”

  “I knew a little girl like her once. A real beauty and smart as a whip.”

  “Yeah? What happened to her?”

  Darkness came into his eyes, a mixture of grief and anger and fear. “She’s not with us anymore. She’ll forever be three.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “It is what it is. All I can do is learn to live with it. And that,” he touched my chin with the top of his fist, “is the hard part.”

  I looked over at Stevie, trying to imagine waking up one day to discover that she was no longer a part of my life. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t wrap my mind around it because it was too much.

  “Difficult day.”

  He smiled again, this smile less joyful than the previous one. But it was a smile.

  Dunlap put the girls to bed while I walked to my cottage and changed the sheets on the bed. I was suddenly feeling domestic for reasons I couldn’t begin to express. When Dunlap came into the cottage, I was on the bed wearing nothing but a smile. He sighed, exhaustion written in every line of his face. He pushed me back against the pillows and buried his face in my shoulder.

  “Can we just lie like this for a while?”

  “Only if it’s for the rest of our lives.”

  He kissed me, tugging me into his arms as he settled down against the mattress. We didn’t talk, but we didn’t really need to. He was tired and worried about his kids, worried about his house, worried about every
thing but us, I think. Or maybe he was worried about us. I don’t know. But he lay there in silence for a long while before his breathing finally changed and he drifted off to sleep.

  I lay with him until I simply couldn’t be still a moment longer. My head was still working the puzzle of what had happened at his house ten months ago and last night.

  Colby chose, out of character, to stay at the house by herself while Dunlap and the kids were out of town.

  On the night Dunlap was due to get back, Colby decided to hang out in the hot tub with a glass of booze—scotch, the coroner said. In the glass of scotch was enough Oxycodone to kill a person half her size. And the thermometer was broken at one hundred twenty degrees.

  Julep was at the house at the same time Dunlap was arriving home with the kids, but she left without calling the police or informing Dunlap of Colby’s death. And then she accused Dunlap of murder even though the coroner ruled the death an accident. Had she done that out of grief, out of spite, or had she seen something that night that told her Dunlap was involved? Or was it her attempt to avoid the police looking too closely at her?

  Did Julep kill her own daughter because of what her stepfather had done to her as a child?

  Julep sued for custody of Dunlap’s kids twice, failing both times. She paid Mattie’s father off to come and make a claim on Mattie. She shot Tony in Dunlap’s living room, destroying all her plans.

  Someone messed with Dunlap’s brake lines. Then they blew up his house, but only the kitchen.

  How was that possible that only the kitchen was destroyed. It was an open floor plan. If it was just gas, wouldn’t it have contaminated the rest of the house? Wouldn’t the fire have spread? Did the person who did it know something about the house, know that it would be contained to the kitchen?

  None of it made sense. It all pointed to clearly to Julep, making me wonder if someone else had a reason to do these things, if someone else was trying too hard to make Julep look guilty.

  Who might have that sort of motive? Was it something personal against Julep, or was she just a convenient scapegoat?

  My instincts told me Julep was just a scapegoat and I’d learned during my time with the CIA to go with my instincts. But if not Julep, who?

  I looked over at the bed. There were still bruises clear on Dunlap’s face, on his chest and arms. They were reminders that this was a time-sensitive case. If I didn’t figure this out soon, I might lose the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  I couldn’t do that.

  I dressed and slipped out of the house, determined to put this thing to rest now.

  Chapter 20

  At the Compound

  Another insomniac.

  Kipling watched Knox make her way to the house, walking quickly in the cool breeze of the early August night. She was alone, suggesting that her man was asleep. That told him that she was coming to look at video footage of his house, trying to solve the case while everyone slept.

  She was definitely his kind of girl.

  He went downstairs, meeting her in David’s office.

  “He has it on the hard drive.”

  She nodded. “There’s one thing about David: he’s kind of predictable.”

  Kipling chuckled. “He is.”

  He walked up behind her and watched as her fingers furiously flew over the keyboard of the computer set up. David had a complicated array of computer monitors and desktop configurations that confused Kipling. He’d never really cared much for computers except where they made his work overseas more efficient. He was beginning to see how it made things more efficient here, too.

  Knox settled in David’s chair as she sorted through the files on his computer that contained important security footage. She found what she was looking for, a group of images that Ricki and her team had taken from the live feeds that had come from Dunlap’s home before the explosion.

  She frowned as she studied an image of a woman bent low over the gas lines outside the house, a black sweater covering her head.

  “I heard Ricki say that they’d tried to enhance the image, but they didn’t have any success.”

  She barely nodded as she leaned close to study it.

  “Do you see that?” she asked, pointing to the woman’s hoodie. “Do you see that lump there?”

  “I think it’s just the design of the hood.”

  “Maybe.”

  She switched to another image, one of the woman inside the house. The long, dark pants she was wearing were clear in the image, as were the heels underneath. Who wears heels to sabotage a house? But she had on the same heels and her face was carefully turned away from the cameras.

  “Who would know where the cameras are?”

  Knox sat back a little. “Anyone with access to the security company’s information. Dunlap. Maybe Julep. And his assistant, Janis. She seems to know everything about the house.”

  “Janis?”

  Kipling grabbed and iPad off a shelf behind David’s desk and pulled up the information on the Spencer case that was kept in a central database there at the house that anyone with the right security information could access using the iPads.

  “We had the girls do a background check on all the people working for Dunlap.” He paused a second. “Here it is. Janis Macky. Thirty-eight years old. Graduated suma cum laude at Northwestern University.”

  “Northwestern? That’s where Dunlap met Colby.”

  “She graduated the same year, too, apparently. She came to college a little later in life, I suppose.”

  “How’d she end up in Texas?”

  Kipling perused the file, then shrugged. “Doesn’t say. In fact, there’s very little info here. She grew up on a farm in Illinois, went to Northwestern later in life, but it doesn’t say why. Illness, maybe? Then she moved here, worked a few other jobs—mostly secretarial—then she went to work for Dunlap a little more than six years ago.”

  “About the time Stevie was born.”

  “No criminal arrests, no traffic tickets, no record of any kind. Her credit history is clean. She had a bank account, two credit cards that she pays off every month. No real debt. No unexplained deposits.”

  “But she has access to everything in Dunlap’s office. His architectural plans, his contracts, all his business stuff. And how much you want to bet she knows about the house, the way it was designed, the way it was built, the security company’s designs? Dunlap built that house with one of his own crews, through his business. That means all that stuff would be at the office and would be something she could access.” She leaned toward the computer screen again. “Janis would know how to avoid showing her face to the cameras. She would know how to tamper with the gas lines to keep from blowing up the entire house. I bet he even has her deal with the garage that services his car. They would know how to fiddle with his brake lines.”

  “But there’s something wrong there. The explosion, that was clearly designed to scare them, not to hurt anyone. The car? He could have died.”

  “Maybe the brakes weren’t supposed to go completely out. Or maybe…” she hesitated, still staring at that still picture on the computer screen. “They both grew up on farms. She would have known that he knew how to work farm equipment, how to use an emergency brake. Maybe she assumed he played chicken on the farm a few times, as I’m told he and his sisters loved to do. Maybe she assumed he would know how to control the crash.”

  “But that’s a huge risk to take.”

  “So is blowing up someone’s kitchen with the assumption everyone would have been in bed. What if he’d gotten up in the middle of the night for a snack? Or one of the kids had wanted a glass of water?”

  Kipling nodded, agreeing with her, even though the evidence seemed weak even to his inexperienced eyes.

  “These shoes,” she said, running her finger along the line of the heels the woman was wearing. “Unusual thing to wear while setting up someone’s murder. But not so unusual in an office setting.” She continued to study them, her finger moving
over the shoes and then up to the bump at the back of the woman’s hood. “I’ve seen these shoes before. And this…doesn’t it look like a ponytail pressing against the material of the hood?”

  “Could just be a knot in the material.”

  “Could be. But I don’t think so.”

  She went back to the file and sifted through the stills Ricki’s team had pulled from the footage. She pulled out another, then another, studying each one for long moments each. Then she smiled, taping her finger on the screen.

  “Do you see that?” she asked. “That little line of yellow? It’s a ponytail.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ve seen it. This is Janis. I know it is.”

  “Knox—?”

  “The shoes. I know those shoes. She was wearing them the day I went in for my interview. I remember distinctly staring at those shoes while she filled out my paperwork, thinking that they were pretty fancy for an office setting. I remember because I have this dress that would have looked stunning with those shoes.”

  “Women,” Kipling muttered.

  “Yeah, well, men should be more grateful for women who notice that stuff.” She tapped the screen again. “It’s her.”

  “Okay. I’ll call Alexander and we’ll go to the office, see if we can find anything in her desk that implicates her.”

  “We will.”

  She was confident. And that made Kipling confident.

  Chapter 21

  Knox

  Alexander was more skeptical than Kipling had been. He kept shaking his head as I searched through Janis’ desk, looking for some proof that she was the one on those tapes. It looked like we were going to come up dry. As unorganized as Dunlap’s office was, Janis’ desk was neat. She kept everything in the right place, carefully put away and filed. Everything. She even filed sticky notes he’d put on contracts for her to read.

  And then I found it. It was a file marked Dunlap’s house. I pulled it out of the file cabinet and opened it, watching the paperwork from the security company fall out onto the desk in front of me.