by Aiden Bates
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Father Figure
(Never Too Late Book 4)
Aiden Bates
Important information…
This book, “Father Figure” is the fourth book in the Never Too Late Series. However, this book and every other book in the series (more books coming soon!) can be read as a stand-alone. Thus, it is not required to read the first book to understand the second (as so on). Each book can be read by itself.
Table of Contents
Important information…
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Bonus Chapter Sixteen
Preview Chapter: Look Back
Chapter One
Oliver checked himself out in the mirror. The new haircut was a good one. It showed off the slight waves to his hair instead of fighting them. His shirt emphasized his narrow waist and his slender body, while the print brought out the best in his eyes and his skin tone. He looked good, damn it.
Then he threw his hairbrush down. What the hell was the point of any of this? He looked good. Fantastic. The well-cut shirt, which hadn't been cheap, would be hidden under a lab coat for the day. The hair could be well cut, or it could be bowl cut, or it could be shaved. No one was going to see it. No one who mattered anyway.
What good was working with a bunch of alphas if the one he wanted wouldn't even look at him?
He stripped off the pretty shirt and replaced it with something cheaper. The nice shirt was wasted on Detective Nenci, and he didn't give even half a crap if a table full of lab samples thought he had a nice ass or not.
He raced toward the door and barely remembered to grab his lunch on his way out. He didn't want to forget that; he hated to leave the lab once he got into a rhythm, and things had a way of building up enough that he found it difficult to leave.
He unlocked his bike from the rack in the parking garage and wheeled it out to the fresh air. He could drive to work. He did that if the weather was bad, or if he had a lot of stuff to bring back and forth. He would generally rather get out and enjoy a little bit of fresh air and exercise and restrict the amount of pollution he dumped into the air if he could. He only lived a twenty-minute ride away from the lab, for crying out loud.
The air was beautiful at this time of year. It hadn't gotten to be too hot yet, and all of the flowers that he passed gave off amazing scents that helped to ease his mood on his way in to work. Okay, so Nenci wasn't interested. He'd had time to get used to it. He could just avoid him, right? He loved his job, and the guys that he worked with were fun and respectful. Maybe it wasn't the kind of sunshine and roses life he'd imagined when he was a young teen, but he helped people every day and he could feel pretty darned good about that.
He waved to Rebecca, the lab's receptionist, on his way in. His workstation looked deceptively calm as he approached. There were no brightly colored sticky notes on his monitor, at least. That counted for a lot. Three huge file folders had been dropped into his inbox already, but that didn't mean a whole lot. Each file was a case. He might have a lot of analysis for each case, or he might have to run one DNA sample. There was no way to know.
He settled in, stowed his helmet and his lunch, and logged into his computer. Most of his emails were pretty bland and boring. He got the usual round of agency emails, to include the one that went around in mid-June or so every year reminding people about uniforms and standards of professional dress. Someone in Human Resources had taken to sending around weekly examples of Staties "doing good," in response to the recent dirty cop scandal. Oliver deleted that; he knew they were doing good, just by doing their jobs. He didn't need to be pepped up.
Then he started to dig into the nitty gritty. The dirty patrolmen, and the dirty folks in Organized Crime, weren't the only scandal facing the state troopers. The Crime Lab had its own issues. Oliver had those scandals and issues to thank for putting him in the position he was—a senior analyst, at only twenty-five. That wasn't too shabby at all. Unfortunately that good fortune meant a lot of extra work. The Crime Lab had been forced to let a lot of people go very suddenly when they'd found out about some of what had been going on. And all of that extra work got a lot more scrutiny than it would have only a few short years ago.
He opened his first real message. This one was from Ryan Tran in Abused Persons. He wanted an analysis of injuries reported from one particular neighborhood in Springfield. He could build the program to do the statistical analysis, that wasn't a problem, but he needed data to run the program from. Was that something that Oliver could get for him?
Oliver tapped his pen against his teeth for a moment. He could get some of the information without a problem. Of course, so could Ryan. Teachers, principals, and school nurses were all mandated reporters. Sergeant Tran was a smart guy, and he'd have already thought of that. He needed something more.
Oliver accessed data from local hospitals. He couldn't see specific patient data; that would be illegal. It would be up to Sgt. Tran to go out to Springfield and talk to people, which was why he was a senior detective and Oliver was a technical analyst. If Oliver had to guess, Tran was working on something involving human trafficking; he did a lot of work with human trafficking. Well, good luck to him.
The next email came from Ray Langer. Oliver knew perfectly well which case Langer was working on. He had a thirty-year-old case involving a murdered child. Everyone knew that he had the Reyes case. He was in the news at least once a week, thanks to the Reyes case. Any word on that rope, Oliver?
Oliver sighed and scanned down the rest of his messages. The results should have come from the machine overnight, but they hadn't. Sorry, Detective Langer. The machine is still processing the data. The good news is that there's something to process. You'll be the first one to know.
That wouldn't make Langer all that happy, but out of all of the alphas on the Cold Case Squad, he was the most reasonable to deal with. Oliver made a note to revisit that and make sure that the machine was still processing that request, and hadn't malfunctioned, and moved on to the next request.
"Hey." Wheels spun as Oliver's nearest neighbor slid his chair around the cube wall and into Oliver's space. "You got any plans this weekend?"
It would have been easy for Jake and Oliver to compete. They were both good at what they did, and as omegas they both had something to prove. What was more, they both had something to prove to the same man. The main difference, and what kept them from being at daggers drawn with one another, was that Oliver was trying to prove something to the only man he would ever want for his alpha.
Jake was trying to prove something to his father.
"Nah." Oliver looked up from his computer. "I figured I'd come in here and get caught up on some stuff. You?"
"Nothing too serious. I figured maybe I'd go into Cambridge and hit a club or two. You want to come with?" Jake lifted his eyebrows and smiled in invitation.
Oliver squirmed. He'd never
been into the club scene. They were all about pickups and hookups, and he didn't want that. "Thanks, but I've got a lot on my plate here."
"Hmm. Yeah, I know those guys over in Cold Case are running you kind of ragged. But you know, you're never going to find someone if you let them use you like that. Come out with me tomorrow night. You can come and pick me up at my place." Jake dropped his voice, so no one else could hear them. "I'm pretty sure my dad will be home."
Oliver's cheeks blazed. "Jake!"
Jake clapped his hands and laughed. "Oh, man. You should see your face. You look like carbon monoxide poisoning, dude."
Oliver glowered. "That's not a good thing!"
Jake toned down his response just enough. "Oliver, man, I'm mostly messing with you, but come on. You have to know that it's a great opportunity to let him see you out of the lab coat."
Oliver slumped in his chair. "You're joking, right?" He shook his head. "It's been years, Jake. If he wanted to see me out of the lab coat, he would have by now."
"Okay, so come out and meet someone who isn't literally old enough to be your father." Jake rolled his eyes. "Trust me, it's a life changing experience."
Oliver straightened up. "Some other time. I have this rope thing for Langer, and then once I've got that done you know he's going to want to run a test on the DNA under her fingernails. There's the room reconstruction, too. Plus, Robles is working on the kid they found in the Blue Hills, and Tessaro's got that forty-year-old shooting and someone needs to identify the remains for him."
Jake jabbed him in the arm. "You mean the good folks at NAMus?" He shook his head and scooted back toward his own space. "Look, buddy. The only way to know for sure that you can't have him is by not trying, okay? You know that. You have to know that. If you want to spend the rest of your life knowing that you didn't even reach out for what you wanted, then be my guest."
Oliver huffed out a bitter little laugh. "Yeah, okay. I'm sure he'd be all over an omega just strutting up to him and saying, Hey, baby, my place or yours?" He checked his messages. "He's pretty old fashioned."
"Maybe he'll be so bowled over by your good looks and charm that he'll forget that he thinks fire is an innovation." Jake chuckled and retreated entirely to his own workspace.
Oliver got up from his desk. He was the go-to analyst for the Cold Case squad, but they weren't his only constituents. He had a load of soil samples to run for an arson investigation up in Haverhill and six rape kits to run, just as part of the overall project to get the backlog down. He didn't have the time to sit around and moon over Detective Nenci.
He soon lost himself in the rhythm of the work. Lab work was precise. It required his full attention, all of the time. He needed to know exactly what he was doing. The soil samples came in unlined, clean paint cans. He heated the cans and used a charcoal plug for the vapors, and then he heated the plug to inject the vapors into the chromatogram.
He did this for six samples taken from the scene of the crime. Oliver could do this all day, but the process only took a short time. He'd worked on a lot of arson cases when he first started, and he'd interned at the fire marshal's office during his undergraduate days. He could run these tests in his sleep, and he could even interpret them before coffee.
He collected the results and brought them back to his desk to examine them. From the looks of things, the heaviest concentration of the accelerant used—kerosene, contaminated by what looked like evaporated wood oils—was found in a spot near the front of the house. A small concentration of kerosene was found near where the front door would have been. Samples that had contained wood, labeled as having been from the second floor, showed that the kerosene had been splashed liberally upstairs too.
He wrote up his report and sent it to the detective in Haverhill. If he wanted to talk about Oliver's findings, he would be available. Until then, Oliver had rape kits to work on.
Once Oliver had gotten that depressing task out of the way, he started work on projects for the Cold Case crew. He checked on the rope in Langer's case, and found that the machine had finally finished analyzing the sample provided. He set it to work on the DNA from under the girl's fingernails and wrote up a report for the detective, but he knew that Langer wouldn't read it. He put a hard copy into a file folder and put it into his outbox so he could walk it over later on.
He might have given up hope of actually being with Nenci, but he could still catch glimpses.
He'd just started working on the few non-human artifacts found with the skeletal boy found in the Blue Hills when his boss walked over to his lab workstation. "Hey, Oliver," said Nina. Her bright blue eyes burned into Oliver. "Lock that back up for a while, would you? I need to speak with you for a little bit."
Oliver nodded and obeyed, but inside his entire body trembled. Was he about to be fired? He'd have hoped that they would give him more notice that this. As far as he knew, his performance was more than satisfactory. Had Nenci complained about him? He thought he'd been subtle and not at all overt or obvious, but maybe he'd gone too far. Maybe Jake had said something to his father, and Nenci had complained to Human Resources.
Maybe they were transferring him to the lab in Sudbury or in Maynard. Maybe they were just sacking him outright.
He followed Nina into her office, which was about as orderly as a government employee's office could get. The stacks of paper were neat and weren't threatening to take over the room, at any rate. "Is something wrong, Nina?"
Nina smirked. "Wrong? What could be wrong? We're down ten lab techs thanks to that scandal, we don't have the money to replace nearly enough of them, and do you think that means that they're asking less of us?" She snorted. "Have a seat. Nothing's wrong with regards to you. On the contrary, everything's just fine. No, I asked you in here because I'm giving you an assignment that's a little bit outside your normal comfort zone. It's going to involve actually getting out of the lab."
Oliver frowned. "You mean like collecting evidence at the crime scene?"
"Well, maybe." She winced. "Your friends at the Cold Case Squad have decided to re-open an investigation into an arson and murder that happened up in Salem some fifty years ago."
Oliver tilted his head. "Well, that's kind of their job, isn't it?"
"Right. I mean yes, it is, but here's the thing. This case, it's not going to be like other cases that they work." She tapped her fingers on the desk and glared out her window. "It's different. So much of the case is going to be built on physical evidence, and they don't really understand the science behind how all of that works. Lt. Devlin asked that we put you on the case in a more hands-on kind of role, to make sure that the data is interpreted correctly and that the detective on the case is able to use the information correctly. I wanted to give you the heads up before we go into a meeting with them."
Oliver's insides clenched. "Do you know which detective will be assigned to the case?"
She shook her head. "No. I know that neither Nenci nor Morris has a specific case assigned to him right now. Say the word and I’ll make sure that bastard Nenci stays far away from you."
For a brief moment, Oliver considered saying it. Nenci's feelings about having omegas in the field were well known. He didn't want to put himself through that kind of torment. Then Jake's words came back to him. This could be a good opportunity to show himself in a good light to the alpha of his dreams. To be sure, Nenci still wouldn't love him, but he might be more open minded about omegas. Maybe the next omega would have a chance.
"That's okay, Nina." He forced a little smile. "It really doesn't matter to me which detective I work with. They're all great guys, good professionals, and I can work with any of them."
***
Sam finished typing up his report on the Vecchio homicide. He remembered when the case was new, and Sarah Vecchio had only just been killed. There had been a manhunt for a mysterious "black male assailant," with thousands of Bostonians being stopped and searched and all sorts of things because they fit the description.
Sam had been new to the force back then. He hadn't been a detective. He'd just been a regular trooper, but even then he'd been suspicious of the husband. He hadn't been the only one. Too bad it had taken another dead wife to prove it.
He ran the spell-check thing on his report, decided that it didn't know what it was talking about after the third time that it implied that he didn't know the difference between "your" and "you're," and hit send. Devlin would forgive any real spelling mistakes in favor of not having to puzzle through his handwriting anymore.
Today was a busy day around the Cold Case squad room. Langer had one of the biggest cases of the century, in terms of visibility anyway. The Reyes case had been an absolute scandal when it hit, with the poor little girl at the center getting completely lost in the lurid accusations against this family member and that family member. If Sam was any judge, and he was, Langer was the right guy for the job. He was smart, sure, but he was also the gentlest alpha Sam had ever met. He could handle the case and keep the victim in mind.
Robles was working on some kind of mess in the Blue Hills. They'd found a body, the body of a young adolescent boy. The finding of bodies in the Blue Hills wasn't all that unusual, unfortunately. Some "businessmen" had seen land that eventually became incorporated into the Blue Hills as an excellent dumping ground. Most of those bodies had once belonged to adults, however. This one had not, and finding out what had happened to him seemed like an impossible task.
