Love Under Two Detectives

by Cara Covington

  That would be extraordinary considering, half the time, I don’t understand it myself.

  “I left Wyoming and came here because the last case I was on went south. Hundreds of hours of investigative work brought us to a bust that should have been rich and put a serious dent in an extensive criminal operation and was, instead, a bust of another kind.” Toby inhaled deeply then let it go. It was hard to take himself back to that time and place. Having unfolded only months ago, it instead felt like it had been years.

  “We’d been working on trying to break a gang-slash-cartel, who call themselves the Red Desert Rats.”

  Adam held up one hand. “Seriously? Why the hell did they call themselves that?”

  His question, and the look on his face, did something to ease Toby’s tension.

  “Um, because the name ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ was taken?” He shrugged. “There’s an area in south central Wyoming called the Red Desert.” He inhaled and felt steadier, which, he guessed, was the entire purpose of Adam’s interruption.

  “Anyway, the Rats, as we call them, deal in the usual—weapons, human trafficking, drugs. You name it, they likely have their hands in it. Over the course of our investigation, we received an anonymous tip that led to a major break. We discovered a warehouse where there was to be a meeting and an exchange of cash and goods. The head honcho and their top client all in one convenient location. We had eyes inside that facility as little as six hours before the raid. It should have been a huge win for our side.

  “But when we executed the op, the warehouse was empty. Not so much as a latent scrap of paper was left for us to process.”

  “How the hell did that happen? Didn’t your team have the place under constant surveillance?”

  “We did. And after we brought in special equipment, we found a tunnel, one that didn’t show in the blueprints but had clearly been in existence for a long time. They’d cleared the entire place out in a matter of a few hours.”

  Adam met his gaze and slowly nodded. “You had a leak,” he said.

  “No, we didn’t have a leak. We had a bad cop.”

  Adam looked pissed. “They did not think it was you?”

  Toby thought he might look back on this moment, in years to come, as the point in time where it finally hit him that, even though he was no longer in the state of his birth and his youth, he was nonetheless home, right here, and amid family.

  “Fingers were pointed in several directions. The order came down to put a lid on the whole sorry situation. The coverup proved better executed than the op itself, because I don’t believe that, to this day, anyone outside the people involved in the whole debacle know a single thing.”

  “So you left because you were disgusted?” Adam asked.

  “Partly. I gave the reason for my moving here as wanting to be closer to my grandfather. I left without burning any bridges.”

  Adam tilted his head to the side. “Do you want to know what I think, cousin? I think you know who the dirty cop is—or you suspect you do. And you left because knowing isn’t enough. You needed proof, and you didn’t have any.”

  Toby sighed. “I feel like you’re painting me a lot more noble than I really am. No, I didn’t have any proof, none that would stand up in court. But I…I don’t know. I thought about going to my captain with what I suspected. But what could I say, really? And I just… The truth is I just didn’t want to ruin a man’s career, not one who’d been on the force more than a quarter-century. One who’d been wounded in the line of duty. Yet I knew I couldn’t stay there.

  “So I took the easy way out. I left and came here. But now I have to wonder if my doing that somehow gave my suspicions away. Despite their hokey name, the Rats have a very long reach. Maybe someone found it suspicious that not long after that disaster of an op, I left. Maybe they found me and decided I was a problem they had to take care of.”

  “Who did you suspect, Toby? I can’t work handcuffed, you know that. Give me a name, and I promise you I’ll keep it to myself.”

  Mary squeezed his hand. When he looked at her, he saw compassion and understanding. Anthony’s expression was a balm of a sort, too. Being a cop, his current partner could fully understand Toby’s state of mind. He’d said so last night, and his expression said so now.

  Adam was right. If Toby’s silence and his leaving Casper had somehow brought trouble to Lusty, then his former alliance had to give way to his current one—which was to this town and this family.

  “His name is Beck Conway. He was my training officer, and then he was my partner. My only partner on the force there. He was like a second dad to me, Adam. And I just couldn’t destroy his career, just on my gut feeling and a couple of circumstantial clues.”

  “I won’t arouse any suspicion, Toby. But my first priority is keeping this family safe—and that most definitely includes all y’all.”

  “That’s my priority now, too. And I trust you to do what’s right and what’s necessary.” He inhaled deeply again, and this time he felt as if a bit of weight had finally been lifted off him. He’d never been the kind of person to sit back and let someone else clean up his mess. He looked over at his partner, and his woman, then turned back to Adam.

  “Tell me how I can help.”

  Chapter Ten

  Mary would never claim to be an expert in a lot of things. She hadn’t pursued a single, narrow discipline in education. The career goal she had in mind wasn’t something as normal as becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Being normal had never been her plan. Neither would she ever be a woman of great political power, but then, she truly didn’t aspire to be that, either.

  Mary Judith Kendall was an author, a weaver of tales that appeared to be created primarily as entertainment. But in order for her to hone her craft, she’d needed to learn about many things. She had it in her heart to create fiction, but that didn’t mean that any of the critical details in her stories were made up. Therefore, she’d taken courses, so many courses, learning new things, but even that wasn’t the main reason she’d put herself in the college environment time after time.

  As a result, the one thing she’d learned better than anything else, the one thing she could say with confidence that she knew more about than most of the members of her family, was also the one thing she had not pursued an actual college course in.

  That one thing was people. How they thought, their basic and variant psychology. Mary knew how to read people, and mostly, she understood them.

  Of course, this knowledge lined the bottom of every novel she wrote. Mary knew that it wasn’t how flashy her characters were or how clever the lines they delivered while under the gun—necessarily—that had her readers falling in love with and then rooting for them. It wasn’t clever plots that drew her readers back with gratifying regularity.

  It was her characters’ relatability. What drew readers to her stories, time and again, was the way they could see themselves or people they knew in her characters. Mary understood that she did this so well that her characters stopped being characters to some of her readers and began to be real people.

  She supposed it could be argued that, in the case of Thomas Thorncliffe, she’d done her job a little too well. Mary mentally shook her head. Emotional knee-jerk reactions aside, she really was too self-aware and well centered a person to believe that she bore any responsibility for that man’s behavior. Creating relatable characters was good. People loving them was good. Crazy-ass stalkers, not good.

  As they left the sheriff’s office and headed back to her house, a walk that would take no more than a few minutes, Mary knew Toby’s sense of self was smarting. He was a cop. For him, as it was for Anthony, being cop wasn’t just a job. It was who he was, down to the bone.

  Toby was hurting. She used her walking time to try to consider how she could help him. Mary believed that there were times when talking with someone who cared was the best medicine. It was true for herself, and it was true for most others.

  As she walked, Mary
wondered if she was going to have a hard time getting Toby to talk about his feelings.

  Lucky for me my guys aren’t as averse to that as most men are.

  “You sit, New York.” Toby held one of the kitchen chairs for her. “I’ll make us some sandwiches while Anthony makes the coffee.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She liked her little kitchen, although she could confess that it was a lot smaller since Anthony and Toby moved in.

  “I feel better,” Toby said. “I didn’t think I would. I thought I’d lose Adam’s respect when I told him why I left Casper. I thought I’d just feel like a schmuck for letting my feelings determine my decision about Beck.”

  Mary couldn’t have written a better opening. “But did you do that, Toby? Did you let your feelings determine your actions in the way you think? Because I’m seeing things a bit differently.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her as he set the packages of ham and cheese on the counter. “Differently? How so?”

  “You’re a cop, and you did the one thing that every cop who has a partner would and should do. You put your partner first. That is what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? It would have been another thing entirely, and I think you know it, if you’d had proof that Beck had broken the law. But you didn’t. For all you know, your suspicions were in fact inspired by, oh, I don’t know, perhaps a bit of larceny on the part of the bad guys? Maybe something that someone, somehow engineered?

  “Maybe you were being manipulated so that you’d be suspicious of your partner. Seems to me, that kind of redirection or obfuscation created by the Rats, if you run with the idea for a moment, would have created chaos on the force. How would you be able to investigate the criminals you were after—those Rats—with your department in such open chaos?”

  Toby met her gaze and held it for a long moment. “What you’re saying is the Rats achieved their goal. It was assumed that there was a bad cop on the force, and so the force just shut the entire investigation down. Word was only until evidence was found that would reveal the bad cop. But if there really wasn’t a bad cop at all…”

  “There would never be any evidence found. The bad guys got everything they wanted. The force closed the investigation. The Rats had already cleared the warehouse. Instead of scrubbing the place for clues, the force began, instead, to look inward. That gave the gang time to set up in another location.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Toby looked pissed at himself, and that hadn’t been what she’d intended at all. She caught the look on Anthony’s face. Clearly, he hadn’t been thinking along the same lines that Mary had, either.

  Toby shook his head and then met her gaze once more.

  Ah, there it is. That look tells me he’s stopped beating himself up. Mission accomplished.

  “Tell me again why it is you’re not a cop yourself, sweetheart?”

  Mary grinned and shrugged her shoulders. “Because I couldn’t pass the physical?”

  Both men chuckled. Then Anthony tilted his head to the side. “Is that the reason those New York cops had their heads up their butts and didn’t take you seriously when you called them about your concerns?”

  She sent him a sideways glance. “You think I know how their minds work?”

  Toby grinned. “Of course, you do.” He turned back to making the sandwiches while Anthony passed around the cups of coffee. Within a few minutes, both men joined her at the table, food and beverages distributed.

  “All right, maybe I do know how their minds work. Or I can at least make some educated guesses.” She picked up her sandwich and took a bite. Mary used the time she chewed to get her thoughts in order. “I think, bottom line, that they felt threatened by me. I tend to think outside the box. That’s a useful skill to have when you’re a writer trying to construct unique, and if I may say so myself, clever mystery plots.

  “In the beginning, those same cops would share with me some of the cases they were working on, just you know, generally speaking. Between me and you, I think they were hoping I would write a book about them. Anyway, a few times when I’d make a suggestion—and it proved to be on the money—I could sense they were waiting for me to rub their noses in the fact that I had figured something out that they’d never thought of.” She knew that not just from intuition but from one detective who’d gone off on her, claiming she was just waiting for the right moment to do just that. “Which, of course, truly never even occurred to me.”

  “You’re not that kind of person.” Anthony said.

  “I’m not, no. And I guess they just couldn’t understand that.”

  “It takes all kinds, I guess,” Toby said. “Cops and writers have one thing at least in common. We both can see human nature in action, and we take notes, as it were. What I’ve realized after more than a dozen years as a cop? There are too many people in this world who think everyone must be exactly like them. They lie, and so they figure everybody lies. They lash out, and so they think everybody lashes out. They act like assholes, and so they think everyone does.”

  “I know.” Because she was a student of human nature, she couldn’t help but be frustrated by the great cultural divide that seemed to be consuming her country. This is America, damn it. The greatest nation that ever existed. We should be better than this. And yet there was a line down the middle, and it seemed to her the people Toby had just described were, for the most part, on one side of it. And they were interfering with the forward momentum of the human race in this country.

  Mary pulled her attention back to the conversation at hand. “I do know that,” she repeated. “What I don’t know is how to change that. I don’t know how to reach people who are totally uninterested in the facts.”

  “People conflate belief with truth,” Anthony said. “But in the end, I happen to believe that the truth will emerge and win. Eventually.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears,” Toby said. He looked from Anthony to Mary. “Adam’s going to let us know what results he gets, looking at the security feed from last night. Maybe he’ll have a clue as to who was out there watching us.” He picked up his coffee and took a sip. “Were either of you as surprised as I was that there was a security feed for him to check in the first place?”

  Anthony grinned. “I wasn’t. They changed the boundaries of the town to include the roadhouse several months ago, because so many of the family work there. Plus, of course, there are cameras at other places—the warehouse, the fitness complex, and on the main road at either end of town.”

  “I’d say they were being paranoid,” Mary grinned. “Except for the fact that we apparently have, well, if not a stalker, at the very least a voyeur.”

  “As have others in the past, apparently.” Toby said. “I said it last night, and I’ll say it again. You think this is a sleepy little town, until you get here. And then you realize it’s not.”

  Toby’s assessment matched her own, perfectly. Verbal expressions become immortalized as adages for a reason. In Lusty, appearances not only could be deceiving—they often really were.

  * * * *

  “I really don’t have any objections to giving Mary the time she needs to write.” Anthony looked over the roof of his Lincoln at his partner.

  “Neither do I.” Toby shrugged and then grinned. “Cops gotta be cops, and writers gotta be writers. We heading to the range?”

  “Habits.” Anthony grinned then got into the car. It was Wednesday, and every Wednesday he and his partner spent time at the WPD’s gun range. The one that belonged to the town of Lusty, and that they’d been given a pass to use, was a much better equipped facility.

  The drive was barely ten minutes. Anthony wasn’t the least surprised they weren’t the only two who had in mind to get in some firearms practice. He was surprised to see who else was there on this particular afternoon, taking target practice. They didn’t have any time to do anything but ensure their ear protection was in place. Then he and Toby stood back while Kate Benedict, Anna Jessop, and Samantha Kendall took them to
school.

  “I think we have to start calling you ‘dead-eye,’” Anthony said to Kate Benedict.

  Grandma Kate laughed. “My husbands would have burst with pride if someone had,” she said. “They taught me how to shoot before they were called back into the theater, during the war. It became a Saturday routine for us in Lusty. We’d gather behind the convalescent home—now the Park View Inn—and we’d take turns, honing that particular skill. And for some of the men who were in residence, recuperating, it was a good way to get them handing firearms again. A few of them were destined to return to war, as my husbands were. And we all benefitted from their tutelage.”

  “My husbands also taught me to shoot,” Samantha said. “And they gave me my first handgun, a Colt, similar to the one Kate is using.” Then Samantha looked over at Anna. “You didn’t need any lessons though, did you?” She grinned as she looked at Toby and then him. “Did you know that our Anna singlehandedly saved herself and her husbands from that armed idiot…” She turned back to Anna Jessop. “Do you know, I don’t even remember his name?”

  “Idiot is a pretty good one,” Anna said. “His name was Carl Sanders.” She shook her head and gave Anthony a very sly smile. “Among his many sins, he called me a bitch and a blond bimbo—before I shot him.”

  “The man was clearly demented,” Toby said. “Um… what did he have to say after you shot him?”

  Anna waved her hand as if the matter wasn’t significant. “Well, you can’t necessarily hold against a man the cuss words he might utter whilst on the ground, writhing in pain and bleeding, can you?”

  Toby laughed. “No ma’am.”

  It was a bit of a challenge for Anthony to envision that the woman who looked like Mrs. Santa Claus had actually shot a man. Clearly, a case of self-defense. He decided to leave it as an item without an accompanying picture in his thoughts. “Good for you,” Anthony said. “I’ve always believed that anyone who carries a gun ought to know how to use it and then use it if the moment arrives.”