by Debra Webb
But he wasn’t here to notice a woman’s beauty or anything else. They needed to forge a working relationship somehow, although he’d have been satisfied to tell her to continue her other duties and he’d keep her informed.
She didn’t strike him as the type who was going to give him a leash that long.
Oh hell, he thought and reached for a potato wedge. He’d begun all wrong, but he didn’t know how he could have begun better. He was furious beyond words over his brother’s murder. He wanted the killer to face trial at the very least, and when he returned to his battalion, he wanted to know the guy was in jail. Caught. Going up the river as fast as possible.
Only when justice lay within reach would he be able to properly grieve for Larry. Because justice had indeed been important to Larry, something he’d been willing to risk his neck over. Then there was Duke’s own guilt. He’d never be able to overcome that now, but he could deal with finding justice. Finding peace for Larry.
He spoke at last, trying to discover a way to meet this woman somewhere in the middle. Neither of them was happy to be here.
“Larry always used to say that the dead can’t rest without justice.”
Her head lifted from her salad, and he felt again the impact of her eyes. “You said he believed in it.”
“The thing is, my brother was a realist, hardheaded and fact oriented. Then he’d say something like that. It was one of the things that drove his reporting.”
“While I only knew him a short time, I didn’t see anything remotely fanciful in him.” She paused. “So you think Larry won’t rest?”
“I don’t know what comes after we die. It’s all a mystery, and I tend to rely on facts, too. But since I don’t know, I want Larry to get his justice. And frankly, I want justice, too.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
She sounded as if she did. Well, maybe that was a step in the right direction. He certainly needed to find one, since he’d started wrong, at least as far as Cat was concerned.
Parsing through the problem, trying to come up with a strategy, he slowly ate potato wedges and gave Cat space to enjoy her salad while he looked out the window. Spring sunshine drenched the street, and all the buildings appeared to have arisen early in the last century. He suspected renovations in this town tried to preserve the past, not erase it.
Maybe she needed to understand that he hadn’t had to come to the police. He’d done so because he didn’t want to get in a war with the cops here. That could mess everything up. And while he’d tried to make that clear, he wasn’t sure he had.
There was Cat’s reaction. He had to figure out how to persuade her before this became a bigger problem.
* * *
NEARLY TWENTY MILES AWAY, in a fold in the earth that cradled them in secrecy, three men sat around a small fire. The stream that trickled beside them, clearly runoff from the remaining snow high above in the mountains, made a pleasant sound as the afternoon began to wane.
It was far nicer than many of the places where they’d made a surreptitious camp. They all dressed casually, like campers or hikers, in jeans and long-sleeved shirts of varying plaids. Hiking boots finished off the unimpressive ensembles.
“You getting anywhere?” asked Man One.
“I hate these new phones,” Man Two remarked. He held a smartphone in his hand. “The only contacts I can find are in recent text messages. The rest must be in the cloud somewhere, and we can’t even get cell coverage here.”
“What’s a cloud?” Man Three asked. “And how can you be sure those aren’t his only contacts?”
“Oh hell,” said the first man. “He was a reporter. He probably had hundreds of contacts.”
“No help to us,” said the third man. “Hundreds of contacts? How do we weed through that?”
“We look at only the ones around here,” said Man Two. “But I need his cloud access, and he’s got it protected. When he said he’d put a copy in a place we’d never find, he might have meant that. And breaking into the house of one of his poker buddies last night turned up zilch.”
“Clouds aren’t that safe,” the first man said. “Remember when that motion picture company got hacked? He probably wanted a copy he could reach that would be safe. Maybe an external hard drive or flash drive.”
“Or,” said the second man, “he might have kept notebooks and files. You know, old-fashioned paper. I dated a reporter a few years ago. She always kept her notes on paper. In those reporter notebooks, for one, and she had drawers full of files.”
The first man looked at him. “Any reason?”
“She said it was the best way to protect her sources. She said that too many people could get into her computer.”
If a breeze hadn’t been wending its way down the narrow gully, ruffling grasses and the just-grown leaves of spring, they might have heard a pin drop.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?” the third man demanded. “We didn’t know to look for that kind of stuff last night.”
The second man shrugged. “Who thinks of paper files these days? I sure as hell don’t. That just popped up from memory.”
Their search had just gotten bigger.
“We can’t break into that house again,” said the second man.
“Nope,” agreed the first man. “We may have screwed that up. But I’m still not sure about his poker buddies and other friends here. Did he know any of them well enough to turn over serious information to them? We don’t know.”
“There’s no way to find out,” said the second man. “Maybe the most important thing we can do is find out where he stashed the information.”
“There’s another team working on his contacts back in Baltimore,” the first man reminded him. “Maybe they’ll find out.”
“I hope so,” said Man Three. “Because I sure as hell don’t want to go back without finding something.”
The three exchanged looks.
“Why,” asked the second man, “do I feel like we’re Curly, Larry and Moe?”
“Because,” said the first man, “we weren’t given decent intel. We have to do that as well as find the stuff.”
They all fell silent again. Each of them was thinking of events in Afghanistan.
Then Man Three stirred. “Hey, One? Did you know Larry Duke?”
“Why?”
“Because when you were...interrogating him, I got the feeling you did.”
“Never met him,” came the clipped response from the first man.
The other two exchanged glances. Neither was quite sure they believed it. They knew they’d come for the money. What if Man One had a different agenda?
Copyright © 2020 by Susan Civil-Brown
ISBN: 9781488055461
The Darkness We Hide
Copyright © 2020 by Debra Webb
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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