by Cara McKenna
He met her eyes with those pale ones. “I’ve been told I’m a real piece of something. I leave it to the individual to fill in the blank.”
She came close, pretending to fuss with his tie but tugging the knot loose, shifting it all cockeyed. He corrected it the second she took her hands back, the act looking more reflexive than petulant.
She smiled sweetly. “I bet you jack off with your pinkie stuck up in the air, don’t you?”
His smirking lips twitched, faint and quick as a flea sneezing. “Picture it however you like.”
“Good night, Duncan.”
He offered a smarmy bow. “Ms. Harper.”
She gave a little curtsy, glaring at his back as he exited. She couldn’t tell if she wanted simply to fuck with that man’s head or straight-up fuck him. In either case, she’d pay good money to hear him beg for mercy.
Chapter 4
Duncan was hungover.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been properly hungover. Overindulgence was not his style. He’d walked back to the Gold Nugget Motor Lodge with a sway in his step, the five or six shots’ worth of liquor in those drinks like a bender to a normally temperate man. To a man who craved self-discipline. He’d escaped, slipping out of range of a cat’s batting paws before he could find out what Raina might want out of him. Would that have ended with Duncan’s body wound in her sheets, or did her pleasure come merely from her ability to wind him up? She had far too much control over him. And control was a commodity Duncan treasured above all others.
So rather than follow the flirtation to its natural conclusion, he’d headed to the motel, popped a couple of Ambiens and more than a couple of ibuprofens, and woken up with a brass band playing in his skull, and chores beckoning. Always chores.
The bathroom fan whirred all around him, and the world was speckled laminate and smooth white acrylic. His knees hurt, the towel-thin bath mat and his lounge pants doing nothing to protect them from the biting tile. But he wasn’t bowed before the toilet, sick from the vodka. No, he was sick in a far different, and deeply familiar, way.
His shoulder ached, and his lower back, and he felt high from the bleach. But that was good, surely. Meant the stuff was doing its job.
He scrubbed at the plastic tub. Plastic—worst. Porcelain would be so much easier to disinfect. Plastic never felt clean enough to trust. Never.
Degrading though these chores were, the calm was coming to him now. The fumes and the ritual were subsuming him, quieting his brain, banishing the panic and the pulsing headache.
He could hear his bygone foster mother’s voice in his head—that soft, cultured accent offering the only kind words he’d known in the first half of his life. Look at that! You cleaned that all by yourself? What did I do to deserve such a good helper? To deserve him. Insane, those words had seemed—insane and wondrous as a choir of angels after ten years of being called a burden at every turn. Thirteen measly months he’d gotten with his silver-haired savior. Then she’d been taken away, her kind voice and eyes hollowed out by a stroke that had scared Duncan worse than any slap or threat issued by his harsher guardians. She was gone as quickly as she’d appeared, and Duncan had been dropped neck-deep back into the shit of the foster system. Just over a year, she’d given him. One good year, and a fondness for Wagner, and this compulsion to clean when he felt uncertain.
He scrubbed harder, so hard that it roused the perennial ache in his right elbow, cartilage whining. Repetitive strain injury, a doctor would tell him. Whatever you’re doing, knock it off. Same as a doctor would tell a masochist to quit with the self-flagellation and those raw red stripes would clear right up.
Yes, because that’s going to happen. He might as well give up breathing while he was at it.
The bucket was just about empty, the scrubber sponge shedding blue flecks. He braced his rubber-gloved hands on the ledge of the tub and shakily made it to his feet, joints wailing. He turned on the shower to rinse his handiwork.
Clean. Pretty damn clean. The tub was shining. The sink, too, the mirror spotless, and the grout between the mint green backsplash tiles whiter than it had been since the Carter administration, surely. No surface neglected, no room for oversight. The plastic would never be perfect, but by anyone’s standards, no trace of this tub’s former sins had been spared. He felt marginally cleaner himself.
Satisfied, he snapped the gloves from his hands and draped them over the rim of the empty bucket. He washed his hands once, twice, three times, rinsed the sink. He flipped off the light but left the fan on to suck at the fumes.
He eased the bathroom door open a couple of inches, peering out and finding his roommate predictably planted at the threshold.
“Keep out, Astrid. Bad enough your daddy’s disinfected half his brain cells. Let’s keep one of us lucid.” With a gentle push of his foot, the tabby gave up her post, rising to stretch and saunter toward the bed.
Duncan shut the bathroom door at his back and gulped two lungs’ worth of comparably fresh air.
He wandered to the edge of the bed and switched on the television, greeted by the regional news. His shaving bag was behind him and he fished out an orange bottle and swallowed a Klonopin dry. Astrid leaped onto the covers and he stroked her back, her spine rising in reply. Poor beast, stuck with these four walls and the parking lot for a view. She had to be missing their Southern California skyline as much as he was. Still, the motel beat any other housing option at the moment—better than some grubby little room for rent, or a trailer such as the Virgin River foremen stayed in. He’d also negotiated an insanely generous bonus for this job, spearheading Sunnyside’s first big out-of-state project. A bonus, and a promise to be kept close to home for his next assignment. Time would tell if it proved a worthy trade beyond the figures on a page.
“Two years,” he murmured, taking in little more than flashing colors and garbled words as commercials assaulted the screen. He flopped backward and Astrid took it as an invitation to sit on his belly.
Two years until the project was done. Allegedly—this current delay might merely be the first of many. Even after the casino was running, who knew how long until Duncan’s service was deemed complete? The Eclipse’s PR demands would merely evolve after the ribbon was cut by that walking Napoleon complex known as Mayor Dooley. At least by then Duncan would be set up in one of the luxury apartments slated for construction on the east face of Lights Out. And for all of its many faults, Fortuity did boast one hell of a sunrise.
Shit, though. He’d be in his forties by the time his contract was fulfilled.
Time passes quickly for the industrious, he reminded himself.
With the bleach smell fading, the calm wouldn’t linger, but the ritual performed him, not the other way around. Do as it says or have a panic attack. Not really a choice, in Duncan’s estimation. Normally the demands of his job kept him too busy to indulge the urges more than once or twice a week—he went through the motions of his role each day, cleaning up the messes left by progress. It kept his brain too distracted to push him around. Kept his mortgage paid and his cat fed.
Kept his mind off Raina Harper . . . and his right hand off his cock when he inevitably failed at the former. Christ, when would this standstill be done, already—
A startling thump, thump, thump, thump at the door had him sitting up so suddenly Astrid tumbled hissing to the floor.
He hastily zipped the prescription bottle in his bag and lamented his relative state of undress. He smoothed his hair as he went, a perverted bit of him hoping against hope it’d be Raina. Though what good would that be, when the incriminating state and scent of the bathroom precluded him from inviting her in?
He needn’t have worried—the peephole offered a bespectacled tan face and buzz-cut hair, a dark suit.
He undid the chain and opened the door. “Can I help you?”
“Duncan Welch?”
“Yes.” The morning air was cold on his naked arms and feet, the rising sun piercing his pickled brain through his eyes.
“Going to need you to put on some pants and come with me,” said the man.
Duncan frowned. “And who are you, exactly?”
The man pulled a wallet from his back pocket—not a wallet, a badge. He flipped it open. Fed. “Agent Flores.”
Duncan blinked, cold misgiving creeping across his bare skin like spreading frost. “What’s this about? The Virgin River investigation?”
“Just change out of your pajamas and come with me.” He nodded to a silver SUV parked beside the Mercedes.
Duncan’s eyes narrowed. “You do realize I’ve been more than cooperative in these matters for the past month, don’t you? I can’t say I appreciate being addressed like a suspect.”
Flores looked grim. “I’m sure you can’t. But you may want to get used to it.”
* * *
Not ten minutes later, they pulled into the Brush County Sheriff’s Department, half a mile down Railroad Avenue. As Flores parked, Duncan tongued his tooth again, eyeing the spot on the asphalt where he’d fallen to his knees, cupping his bleeding mouth. No good ever came of this place, he decided.
His guts were churning, and from far more than the hangover now. Flores had refused to discuss anything on the way, and the uncertainty was torture—physical torture, wringing his insides with vicious fists. They exited the vehicle, the sun already baking here at the edge of the desert, its glare sharpening Duncan’s headache. He felt naked, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, probably still smelling of bleach. No time to shower or fix his hair or put on proper clothes. He felt as though his skin had been stripped away, exposed to his very nerves.
You’ve nothing to worry about. He’d already been punished by Sunnyside for the one thing he’d actually done wrong. And if this matter had to do with that bit of trespassing . . . surely that was no concern of the feds. As they strode for the BCSD’s entrance, Duncan faked the confidence he was entitled to.
The young assistant looked up from her computer screen as they entered, but Flores led Duncan down a short hall and into a windowless room. Two mismatched chairs, one table. An interrogation room.
“What, no handcuffs?” he asked, shooting Flores the tiniest taste of the contempt boiling in his body. “No orange jumpsuit? I feel unloved.”
Flores didn’t reply until he’d set a tape recorder on the table and depressed its red button. “You’re a suspect, not a criminal.”
“A suspect for what crime, precisely? Up until this morning I was a valued and cooperative witness.”
“Have a seat, Mr. Welch.” Flores waved to one of the chairs, a hard plastic utilitarian number, sitting himself on the far more dignified, upholstered one.
Duncan sat, clasping his hands in his lap to hide their shaking. “Tell me what on earth this is about.”
“This,” Flores said, lacing his fingers atop the wood, “is about money. You like money, don’t you, Duncan? Nice car I saw in front of your room. S-class, isn’t it? What’d that put you back? Ninety grand? Ninety-five? And nice clothes, I’m told. Nice state-of-the-art, luxury high-rise condo, back in San Diego.”
Duncan frowned, lost. Another loathsome sensation. “I make a decent salary. Surely that’s not an arrestable offense.”
“No. But accepting bribes is.”
The blood drained from Duncan’s head, seeming to rush into his heart to force thick, strangling beats. “Excuse me?”
“Specifically, accepting bribes from a suspect in a murder and conspiracy investigation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve been informed by a key party that you accepted bribes from Virgin River foreman David Levins in exchange for not reporting shoddy construction practices to your bosses.”
“What?” Being found guilty of such a crime could get a person permanently disbarred—and to Duncan, a man whose profession was everything he’d worked for, everything that defined him, the possibility felt tantamount to execution. “Who said this?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Duncan paused, body rocked with every roaring heartbeat. Wait. “Levins. Has Levins been caught?”
“Does that make you nervous?” Flores asked, leaning forward.
“No,” Duncan said, livid. “No, it does not. Because I’ve never exchanged a thing with that man aside from pleasantries and paperwork.” Still, the thought calmed him some. “Is he the one who’s accused me? If so, it’s a criminal’s word against mine, and I’ve done nothing wrong that hasn’t already come to light. And why on earth would I have participated in the investigation that implicated him, if he was privy to my own complicity?”
“We’ve wondered the same things,” Flores said smoothly.
“As you should. There’s no case to be made here. Probably just a desperate man’s ploy to distract everyone from the real scandal, the real crimes. Or retribution, for my involvement. Do what your job demands, but we both know these accusations are going nowhere.”
“Do we know that?” Flores asked, eyebrows rising dryly.
Duncan sighed, annoyed and tired and insulted. And hung the fuck over. Mustering courtesy took a superhuman effort. “I appreciate that you have protocol, and motions to go through, but come on. You know as surely as I do, there’s no evidence against me.”
Flores tapped a pen against a yellow legal pad. “I’m afraid that’s not entirely true.”
Duncan’s head went eerily quiet. “Excuse me?”
“A worker’s come forward. A laborer with Virgin River, who claims he saw you accepting money from Levins.”
Duncan gaped, feeling struck. “That’s preposterous. Money? What, a big stack of bright green bills? A fat envelope with Bribes for Duncan written on it?”
“Calm down, Mr. Welch.”
Duncan realized he’d leaned forward in his seat. His chest hurt, and his underarms were prickling with sweat. He needed to be careful, before he gave himself an attack. “When was this meant to have happened? My accepting bribes?”
“We’ll get into details soon enough. Just wanted to let you know how everything’s shaping up. I take it you’re not changing your position based on this development?”
“You can’t honestly believe this is a credible witness. Levins could have arranged it all before he turned himself in. Paid this person off, or intimidated him—”
“It’s not my job to believe anybody. That’s what judges and juries are for. Just consider yourself in the loop.”
“I’m free to go, as it were?”
“Free to go? That’s all relative. Free to leave Fortuity? Not any time soon, except under special circumstances.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Free to escape my company? Not yet. I need to take a look inside your motel room.”
“What?” Duncan felt more naked than he’d have guessed, imagining strangers poking around in his borrowed space, smelling the evidence of his compulsions, upsetting his cat. They wouldn’t find anything incriminating, surely, but suspicious . . . ? Some aspects of his daily routine did defy logic.
“Search warrant should be waiting at the front desk by now,” Flores said calmly. “I just want to take a quick look around. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll drive you back to your premises. Then you’ll be asked to wait outside. Any property seized as a result of this search will be made known to you—”
“I know how a warranted search works.”
Flores smiled. “Do you, then?”
Duncan rolled his eyes furiously, not in any mood for banter. “This is fucking ridiculous. All of it.”
Flores’s eyebrows rose. “Then you’ve got nothing to fucking worry about, I imagine. Be thankful you haven’t been accused of anything violent or deemed a flight risk—
no need to detain you.”
“I should hope not.” He sighed his disgust. “Haven’t you got more pressing matters than this to occupy yourselves?”
“Sure. But until the team gets a viable lead on those bones, looks like I’m stuck ruining your day, Duncan.”
Bones. Christ, that word. Everything had begun to go wrong with that one little syllable, spoken by Deputy Dunn, obsessed over by Vince Grossier. Now those bones had drawn Duncan into their miserable orbit.
“Perhaps your team ought to try a little harder,” Duncan said. “Those bones will prove me innocent as surely as they’ll prove Levins guilty.” Forensics would supply the victim’s identity, likely motives, and lead the investigation to the truth—and away from Duncan.
Ignoring that, Flores got to his feet and beckoned Duncan to do the same. “We’ve been in touch with your employers, of course.”
All the misplaced blood was suddenly rushing in Duncan’s ears, leaving his face hot. That was all he needed, when he was already on informal probation. He pulled himself together. “Of course. This wretched morning wouldn’t be complete if you hadn’t.”
“You’ll probably need to negotiate some time off. We’ll be chatting again soon, maybe often.”
Time off. He’d be lucky if Sunnyside didn’t sack him. Christ, then what would he do? Who would he even be, with that blemish on his otherwise perfect professional record? And God forbid these accusations make the news—exonerated or not, he’d be a pariah for the rest of his career, to say nothing of what the angrier locals would want to do to him . . . Duncan got dirty looks simply for being associated with the development. If people believed him complicit with the men who’d murdered a well-liked deputy, he’d be attracting more than just glares.
“How long am I trapped in this town, precisely?”
“Hard to say,” Flores said, drawing car keys from his pocket. “Search shouldn’t take too long. Once you let us in, feel free to go find yourself some breakfast.”
Duncan would take a walk, at any rate. He needed the air, the sun, the ground under his feet. Proof the world was still solid, that he still existed.
