“We have to look at the possibility that maybe she just ran off.”
“She was planning to go to the concert, her parents said she was looking forward to it,” I said. “And she didn’t take a car or have access to a large sum of money.”
“Sometimes people, especially teenagers, don’t think things through,” Laura reasoned. “And if she was that wound up to go to the city, and this big chem test was bearing down on her, she could have made a rash decision and run away.”
“I know about this kid, and I just don’t think she ran off. I don’t have any proof, but I have a hunch.”
“You still think it’s the boyfriend?”
“It could be. Or someone else. But it’s something shady going on. It’s about to drive me out of my mind, Vance. Rockford Falls is supposed to be a safe haven. Shit like this doesn’t happen in this town, not on my watch,” I ran my hands over my face.
I looked up and realized we were at the station, that I’d parked in my spot. That I’d been talking about the case, not even realizing I’d arrived. I rubbed my eyes.
“We need some water,” she said. “We’re both tired and going around in circles.”
“I should’ve had you drive. I was so absorbed in the case and so tired, I didn’t even realize we were already here.”
“We made it. It’s okay. You’re running on fumes, Chief,” she said with a half-smile.
“You must feel sorry for me. You’re not even busting my balls about driving while impaired. We both know sleep deprivation causes a lot of accidents.”
I pushed open the door, got to my feet and stretched. We went in the station and I grabbed a couple bottles of water from the fridge. I chugged half of mine down and paced the length of the room. Most of the other officers were already back, and they hadn’t turned up a trace of Becky either. I headed for my office, ate a handful of almonds from the can in my desk, and did some stretches to clear my head. The frustration was getting to me. The trail on this kid would go colder the longer this took. Even if it looked like she was a runaway, I didn’t buy it. So I’d have to find evidence, and find the kid.
After a while, there was a knock at my door. “Come in,” I called out. I was surprised when Laura walked in with a couple cups of coffee. I took a cup, thanked her, and cleared my throat because I shouldn’t have been thinking about how good she looked in her uniform, how she filled it out perfectly. I indicated the chair across from my desk and she had a seat.
“I was thinking,” she said. “A case I worked about five months back, we found the girl. She was zip-tied in a storage unit. She was dehydrated and beat up, but she was alive. She wasn’t a runaway. And it wasn’t a boyfriend that did it.”
“Who was it?”
“Sister and the sister’s boyfriend. The younger sister had always been jealous of her, and when big sis got engaged, there was all this attention and a party and presents, it was too much.”
“So it wasn’t the fiancé. I would’ve bet on him,” I said. “How’d you figure it out?’
“We didn’t get pigeonholed on the idea it was gonna be intimate partner violence. We looked at work, had her boss or coworker made unwanted advances? Was there anybody that felt like she cheated them? Did she owe money? Did the fiancé owe money and someone was using her to get the money back? I was asking all these questions, and it seemed like the only person who thought she might be unpopular and disliked was the sister who kept bringing up how even if everybody acted like she was perfect, her sister was far from it.”
“So you saw the jealousy and used it as a clue?”
“Pretty much. So we dug in on the sister and found that the boyfriend had rented a storage unit even though he didn’t have a vehicle, motorcycle, or boat registered in his name—nothing to need such a big unit all of a sudden and only paid for a month.”
“That was some damn fine detective work, Vance. How long was she in there?”
“Two days. She was gone twenty-four hours before the fiancé called. The mom wouldn’t report it because the little sister kept insisting she’d just gone off for a spa day and not told anyone, turned off her phone, whatever.”
“That’s cold. But I’m impressed at her commitment. She sounds vicious.”
“And calculating. But not good enough to outsmart the investigators. So we’ve got to think outside the box on this one.”
“You have a point. I’ll try not to fixate on the ex-boyfriend.”
“I know that statistically, he’s the prime suspect. Especially if there’s a recent breakup or threat of one. So we’ll keep him in our back pocket as a possible lead, but we need to branch out,” she said. “And I know I said not to rule out the idea that she’s a runaway, but that’s just one avenue to pursue. There’s more than one possible answer. That’s what’s so frustrating. It’s not a clear, easy case.”
“And it’s worse because I know the parents, and I don’t wanna see this kid come back in a body bag.”
“Agreed,” she said, setting her coffee on the edge of my desk.
“Thanks for telling me about your case. I’ll keep an open mind on this one. Even when I want a straightforward answer.”
“I know you’re not afraid of detective work. If you weren’t the best cop on the force, they never would’ve made you chief.”
“Damn, Vance. That was pretty close to a compliment—you better watch yourself,” I said with a wry laugh, “you might accidentally be nice to me.”
“Why would I want to go and do that? I don’t want you going soft.”
“I don’t have a softer side,” I said, lying.
“Really? That’s why you coach Little League? Because you’re such a tough bastard with ice water in your veins?”
“Yeah, something like that,” I said. She had me dead to rights and she knew it.
She rolled her eyes at me in a way that set my whole body on edge. The way we teased and bickered, the easy back and forth of it, was full of this energy and kinship and it was confusing because it was so much like flirting. And because I liked her, really genuinely liked joking around with her. She could give as good as she got, and I loved a woman who could dish it out.
The thought made my blood pressure spike. How had my thoughts roved to anything that started with ‘I loved a woman who…’? There was overtired and then there was unhinged. I wasn’t interested in finding another wife, not even a girlfriend. I had my job, my friends, the team I coached. I didn’t want complications, certainly not smart-mouthed, round-hipped, dangerous complications that worked for me. She was all kinds of off-limits.
I was trying to come up with a graceful way to make her leave my office. Some excuse to send her to deliver a message or talk to the secretary or something. The office was small enough without her and what must be some intoxicating pheromones filling it up. I felt drunk around her, relaxed and at ease with myself and like I had shaken off the discipline and the strictures that I depended on to keep my life in order. Things seemed possible when I was wit her that really weren’t possible. It was hazardous to me to hang around with her, and I wouldn’t be spending any time with her outside of work. In fact, I wouldn’t ask her to ride along with me again. The intimacy of hours of driving and searching, the exhausted stream-of-consciousness conversation that loops around to how long we’d known each other, how much we had in common. A shared history, an attraction, the way she’d looked back over her shoulder at me when we were at the falls, with the water crashing in the background and the wind catching the loose tendril of her hair. The way that fresh breeze had felt on tired, sweaty skin was exactly the cool, refreshed feeling she gave me. Like everything seemed lighter and too dangerously possible. She was impossible. I would do well to remember it.
My phone rang, the landline on my desk. I picked it up.
“Hey, Brody,” Clint said. “I got something. I knew you’d want me to tag it and bag it, but I thought you’d want a heads-up. I think I found Becky Simms’s cell phone.”
“Where y
ou at?”
“I was walking a field over west of town. I cut across here to get to the pond on my grandpa’s land to do some fishing sometimes. I thought since there was an empty barn out this way I’d check it out. There was nothing in the barn, no sign of anything, but when I was headed to the car, I saw something on the ground. Good thing we had a dry year and the beans ain’t too good or they’d be bushed out where I couldn’t see what was on the ground between rows. It was just inside the edge of the field, screen’s cracked but when I tapped it, the pictures of Becky and two other girls.”
“That’ll be it. Good work, Clint. Bring it in. I want to send a picture of it to her parents to identify that it’s hers and not one of the other girls’ but this could be a big help. Send me your location, right where you found it. I just want a clear picture of where she was or where the person who had her phone was. Thanks, Clint.”
I hung up and turned my eyes to Laura who was sitting forward on her chair, gripping the edge of my desk.
“Clint found her phone in a bean field west of town. He’s bringing it in so we can catalog it and check it out.”
“Nothing else though?”
“No. So it could be somebody just threw her phone out a car window. It could be she was never there.”
“Or we may know what direction they were going. Did he take a picture of exactly what the phone looked like before he picked it up? We could tell which direction it was thrown from if that’s what we suspect.”
“I don’t think Clint thinks much about trajectory. He’s already picked it up and touched the screen without gloves on. I’m glad he found it, but he’s due for a refresher course on not disturbing evidence before you collect it,” I said.
“Are you saying he’s stupid?” she teased.
“I’m saying it’s a mistake you or I wouldn’t have made, touching the phone ungloved before it was photographed.”
“I hope it didn’t fuck anything up,” she said, and I nodded in agreement. We had so little to go on, we couldn’t afford any mistakes.
“Clint will be here soon. Will you tell Mrs. Rook to send him right back here?” I asked. She nodded and left.
9
Laura
My mom had saved me a plate of dinner. When I got home, practically dead on my feet but also wired from the worry and frustration over the missing teen, Mom heated up the plate and set it in front of me while I downed a tall glass of her sweet tea.
“You make the best tea in the universe. I’ll swear it on a bible,” I said with a sigh. I looked at the baked chicken and vegetables and couldn’t even imagine having the energy to lift a fork to eat it. I shouldn’t have sat down. The tiredness really hit me when I stopped moving. Brody had sent me home after fourteen hours on the job and said to get some rest. I wondered if that was possible.
“I heard about the Simms girl. I went all through school with Kayla Pritchett’s aunt Angie—this would be Angie’s great niece. Becky’s a good girl. Angie’s torn up about it, and she says something’s fishy. Becky came and cleaned out Angie’s gutters last year when Angie broke her ankle in the Fall Festival square dancing competition. She was beside herself about the leaves piled up on her roof and that gutter guard didn’t do much even though she paid a fortune for it…” My mom’s chatter soothed me, and I ate a few bites.
I listened and tried to calm my thoughts. Then I heard her ask, “Can you tell me anything about the search? They don’t think she’s—already gone, do they?”
“Mom, you know I can’t tell you stuff like that. Confidentiality and everything,” I said. “We all hope for the best outcome for Becky and her parents. And we’re doing everything we can do to find out what happened and locate her.”
“So you’re still treating it as a missing person? Not as a body recovery? I know that the guys from the mill that work with her daddy are going out on their ATV’s tonight and searching for her. They got night vision cameras.”
I sighed, “I wish people wouldn’t do that,” I said. “They can run over tracks we haven’t found yet that might be a clue, and they can destroy evidence accidentally. I know they mean well, but amateur searchers usually do more damage than good.”
“I understand that, and I know cops have their procedures they have to stick to. But I know if it was you gone missing, I’d want every man I know out there with their night vision goggles and their heat-seeking drones they use for hunting and—,”“Mom, it freaks me out that all these guys around here have that stuff. I mean if Damon told me he wanted a heat-seeking drone for Christmas—”
“Then you’d ask him if he was having that much trouble getting laid, I know,” she said with a shrug, and I barked a laugh.
“Or I’d say I thought he was a heat-seeking drone.”
“True,” she said, “but I want to know what’s going on with the Simms girl. She’s not the kind of girl to run away and scare her folks like that. Angie says she’s a smart kid, and she got grand champion at the state fair for her solar robot thing in 4-H a couple years ago. It was a tiny little thing but it could pick up sticks in the yard.”
My mom shook her head, marveling. I was pretty impressed myself since I never built anything but a birdhouse in school and I ended up hot-gluing that when I bent the nails on accident. Truth was, I was lucky to make mac and cheese without burning the house down, so solar-powered stick-picker-uppers sounded pretty brainy to me. She seemed more like she was a science geek than a kid who went off looking for a party and some drugs and no phone, car or money. She wasn’t stupid. I thanked my mom for the information and texted it to Brody. Even if it just gave us insight to her personality, it was useful. She’d spent weeks designing and building a robot that won awards at the state fair. That seemed like a whole different type of teenager than the sort who scared the shit out of her whole family by running off to parts unknown.
I took my plate to the sink, thanked my mom and gave her a hug.
“I’m glad you’re back, baby,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said, squeezing her tight.
I went up the stairs to go take a shower. I tried to stretch my back, everything sore from sitting too much all day. I shucked my clothes and turned on the water. It was going to be a quick one so I could fall in bed, I decided. I was barely keeping my eyes open. I slid the shower curtain open and a mist of water dusted my face. That woke me up because it reminded me forcibly of the way the spray had spattered my hot skin at the falls earlier, when I’d been with Brody. There had been droplets of water on his jawline, glinting in the pitiless sun. I’d wanted to lick them off, just rise up on tiptoe and put my mouth to his jaw, feel his gasp and the kick of the pulse in his neck as I kissed away scattered drops of water and left a trail down his throat with my hot mouth. I gritted my teeth as I stepped in the shower.
Maybe this was what I needed. I was tired and frustrated, and my body was keyed up from the day. As much as I knew it was wrong to think about my boss and Damon’s best friend that way, a single harmless fantasy might get it out of my system and let me get some sleep. So I stepped under the sharp spray of hot water and pulled the curtain shut. I squeezed body wash on my sponge and slid it across my collarbone and down between my breasts, then over the nipples, biting my lip, imagining it was him.
Brody, naked under the waterfall, pearls of wetness glinting on his tanned skin, his eight-pack glistening and begging for my hands and mouth. Hot as it was, he’d stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shallows of the river, slid down the rocks and stepped under the gushing surge of water, letting it spill over his head, plastering that hair to his forehead and pouring over his shoulders and down his bare chest and back.
Biting down hard on my lip, my sponge stroked over my stomach and then I let it fall to the shower floor, my fingers slipping between my legs eagerly.
I stripped down too, no inhibitions, hungry for the cascade of cold water on my burning skin, starving for his touch. I didn’t hesitate to wonder if he’d welcome my joining him. I j
ust followed instinct, peeled off thick, unforgiving polyester and dropped it onto the riverbank. I waded out, the icy water curling my toes as I strode toward him through the roar of rushing water pounding in my ears, or was it my heartbeat? I was so aroused that my fingertips throbbed with it. My tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth, tense and craving him. I stepped under the falls, the force of the water hitting me with a shock. I started back, but a big hand steadied me, his fingers digging into my hip. He hadn’t grabbed my arm, but my bare body, my waist and the curve of my full hips. An arrow of desire shot straight between my legs so hard my knees buckled. But Brody was holding me up, his fingers rubbing my ass cheek. God, that felt good, to have his big, calloused hands on my hot, sensitive skin. I shuddered. I opened my mouth to say something and he covered it with his. Hot and demanding, his tongue plunged between my lips, warring with mine, making me desperate. I clung to him, wound an arm around his neck. He pressed me hard against him. There it was, the massive, powerful cock I’d spied the outline of against his leg when I’d first walked into his office. The man was hung, thicker than my forearm and so long. I thirsted for it in a way I didn’t normally about anyone. I never fantasized about sucking a man off, but at that moment, I could have dropped to my knees and counted myself lucky.
I didn’t want him to service me. I wanted to ride him. I wanted to slide down on that cock and feel him pump into me. My core quivered at the thought, intimidated and excited at once. I kissed him back even more frantically. Then, Brody lifted me by my hips, turned me and pressed me to the rock behind the falls, so the water sprayed on me but didn’t deafen me and pour over me so hard. It was like a secret rendezvous back there, a wall of water shielding us from sight, but out in the open, under the sky, where anyone could find us. I thrilled at the idea.
“Do you think you can take it, baby?” he asked, kissing my jaw. “Do you think you can take all of me? You wouldn’t be the first woman to run scared when you saw my cock. But you seem like you want it so bad.” I nodded furiously, speechless, wanting. I looked at him, met his hot eyes and blinked rapidly. I was shaking hard, wanting to beg for him. I ran my hand up the back of his wet hair and pulled his mouth back to mine, “Yes,” I panted, “yes, all of it, all of you.”
Hot Cop: A Brother's Best Friend Romance Page 7
