by Marnee Blake
He trudged to his truck, put his bike and his gear in the back and shut the gate. Stepping up into the driver’s seat, he slammed his palm against the steering wheel.
With nothing else to do, he started the engine and left.
Chapter 10
Three days later, Heidi locked her office as the sun went down. She’d stayed late, going over her notes, having a phone conversation with another investigator. Not that anything was waiting at home, but she didn’t usually have things to keep her there this late, either.
Today, though, she’d stayed. She’d called the lab to check on the soil samples and they had promised that they would get her the report tomorrow. Thank God.
Lyle Parrish still hadn’t returned her call. She’d left a message after talking with Dak at the pool hall last week, requesting a few minutes of his time to answer a few questions. She’d left the details deliberately vague, hoping that he might want to meet with her out of curiosity.
He hadn’t called, though.
Was he hiding something? Was she right, he was involved? Or was Dak right to suspect his brother? She hadn’t stopped by to speak with him, wanting to see what Lyle said first. But now she might have to adjust her strategy. There hadn’t been any new fires, but she could feel that she was running against the clock.
She was missing things. It was clear, in all the gaps in her notes, but she had no idea what the things she didn’t know were.
Jesse had helped her some. She had only heard about two different fires on the reservation, but he’d told her that there had been five. Add that to the wildfire that started adjacent to tribal lands, and they appeared to have a serial arsonist. She had contacted other Forest Services investigators and adjacent federal agencies as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, trying to piece together the details of all of the fires.
Jesse had told her that Kirk didn’t seem overly concerned, but that he suspected he was covering at Lyle Parrish’s request. Jesse had assumed Parrish didn’t want to cause a community panic, and Kirk had gone along with him. Because Kirk was his superior, Jesse hadn’t argued, but he said that the other lower ranking officers believed they should be doing more to protect the community and worrying less about public opinion.
After their meeting, Jesse had sent her copies of all the reports. Technically, it was a long-standing practice to share information among agencies when possible. Kirk hadn’t followed protocol. Jesse’s help was the most cooperation she had received from the police department on the reservation so far. She could see how the relationship should work—if she could get around Kirk and Dak’s father.
Lyle Parrish was obviously hiding something. For a man who wasn’t technically on the tribal council, he had enough clout to bury information. But why had Kirk gone along with him?
Now that the tribal police were helping, she was getting a larger picture.
But still no answer on motive.
And Dak, she still couldn’t figure out how he was connected to all of this. Nothing said that he was directly involved, but his father’s desire to have him accompany her remained suspect. She’d planned to ask him more about it, after their bike ride. But, she hadn’t, and then the moment had passed.
Maybe because she’d chosen that moment to freak out about how close she was getting to him instead. That kiss had been amazing. She’d taken him by surprise the other night when she’d kissed him. This time, he’d taken her into his arms with clear intent and their kiss had been explosive.
Which had completely terrified her. She’d known spending time with him would only lead her there, to wanting him more. She should have steered clear in the first place. Well, at least she’d learned her lesson now. Beyond the text she’d sent to tell him she was home, she hadn’t spoken with him. Because her head was a jumble of confusion. Instead she’d poured herself into the investigation and she had been productive.
She’d call him, tonight when she got home.
Standing next to her car, she hit the button to unlock it and the lights blinked.
She was thrown off her feet. She landed hard on her back, barely keeping her head from hitting the concrete. Her ears rang as she shifted, propping herself up on her elbows.
What had happened?
In front of her, flames shot out from the undercarriage right where she’d been standing. Digging her heels in, she crab walked back, away from the roaring fire. Blinking, she glanced around, disoriented. The street had been mostly empty when she was leaving, but now there were people stepping out of businesses, stopping on the street in this mostly commercial area of Bend.
Her car had exploded. But, she had it serviced not that long ago. After her drive across the country, she’d wanted to make sure that it was in good shape, so she’d had them check everything. There was no way it had malfunctioned. And right next to her? When she was trying to get into it?
Around her, street sounds started penetrating the ringing in her ear. There was shouting and the beat of feet running.
“Ma’am, are you all right?”
She nodded to the nameless man on the pavement, yelling at her. But before she could respond, her car exploded again.
* * * *
“Some car blew up in Bend.” Rock relayed the information to Dak and Lance while they were packing cargo bags.
Dak paused in his counting and arranging. “Everything okay?”
“I guess. Happened an hour or so ago. They have it under control. Just heard some of the local guys talking about it.” Rock shrugged. “Don’t hear that every day.”
No, they didn’t. “What do they think caused it?” Cars didn’t just explode.
“Don’t know.” Rock tapped the doorjamb before wandering off.
In his pocket, his phone vibrated. Retrieving it, he found Heidi’s name on the face.
She’d been avoiding him, so he was surprised to hear from her. Something eased in his chest when he answered. “Hey, you.”
“Dak?”
The way she said his name set him immediately on edge. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.” Her voice wasn’t, though. It was toneless. “Would you please come to the hospital in Bend to pick me up? My car is, well, it was on fire earlier.”
“What?”
“My car blew up.”
His fingers tightened, and he saw red. “What?” No. That was too much of a coincidence, wasn’t it?
“My car. It blew up,” she repeated. “I don’t have anyone else to ask. Could you come get me?” Her voice was tinny, and it tore at his gut. Heidi was fierce, always. Hearing her shaken wrecked him.
“Are you okay, though?”
Her sigh was heavy, rattling over the line. “I’m not hurt, if that’s what you mean.”
He wasn’t sure if that was what he meant, but it was the best he could do until he saw her. “I’ll be right there. As fast as I can.”
“Thank you.” The response was formal. He hated it.
After disconnecting, he met Lance’s eyes. He found his own fear mirrored there.
“What?” Lance asked.
“The car. It was Heidi’s.” The words were thick, heavy like paste in his mouth.
“Go.”
Without another word, Dak hurried off to find Mitch. It only took minutes to clear him leaving with him, and he was on his way to Bend, beating himself up the entire way.
What the hell had happened? No way that her car exploded on its own. Cars didn’t explode, not without a whole lot of persuasion and just the right circumstances. Even in car accidents, they didn’t usually blow up.
That left only one explanation: someone had blown up her car.
Why, though?
More important, she said she wasn’t hurt, but was that true? He wouldn’t put it past her to withhold how badly she was hurting.
He did his best to keep it at the
speed limit as his truck ate up the miles.
Chapter 11
“I’m looking for Heidi Sinclair.” Dak shifted his weight from foot to foot, tapping his fingers on the nurse’s station counter.
“One moment.” The woman at the keyboard typed a few strokes. “Spouse? Family?”
He didn’t know what he was to her. But, she’d called him when she needed help. That had to mean something. “No. I’m her ride home.”
“Dak.” Heidi called from the reception area. She stood, and only then did he get a good picture of how ragged she was. Her clothes were covered in soot, and there was a rip on her pants. Her face was streaked with dirt, and there was a bruise under her left eye.
She was still the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.
When she offered him a self-conscious wave, he saw an angry red scrape on her palm.
Striding forward, he clasped her hand gently, turning it palm up. “These.” His voice was soft, and he did his best to keep the menace out of it. But his outrage was there, on full display.
“When the car exploded.” She glared at her hand, as if angry with it. As if it scraped itself.
He stared at her hand, at the injuries, and rage surged through him.
“Your car exploded.” It was a question and a statement. He wasn’t sure how hard to push. Her face was flat, but she didn’t look in danger of falling apart. In fact, she looked pissed.
“Yeah.” She pulled her fingers from his hand and headed toward the sliding doors.
“Wait, don’t you need to check out?”
“They discharged me already.”
He followed her outside, hurrying to catch up. Though he could see she was fine, he allowed his fingers to find the small of her back, reassuring himself.
The drive there had been difficult. He hadn’t known the details, only that her car had exploded. Something like that—she could have been really hurt. He’d imagined every possible option. If she’d called him to get a ride, he had assumed it hadn’t been that bad. But still, the hospital could discharge broken bones, any number of bruises and cuts. She could have sprained her ankle, her shoulder.
It had all played through his head on his drive. Seeing her, though, walking, appearing to be mostly unharmed, it eased something that had been tight and afraid in his chest.
On the sidewalk, she paused, not making eye contact. “Did you park in the parking lot?”
She was dodging him. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
She exhaled, finally glancing up. “Yes. In the car. I don’t want to talk about it here.”
He nodded, replacing his hand on her spine and guiding her toward the parking lot. As he disengaged the door locks, she hurried around to climb in the passenger side without waiting for him to open the door. He let her without making a fuss.
Inside, after they’d closed their doors, she shifted to face him. The bruise on her cheek looked even more gruesome in the shadows of the parking lot streetlights. “The police found the remains of a homemade bomb under my car.”
He could only stare. He had assumed someone had messed with her car, but a bomb? She was investigating arsons and as far as he was aware, they were all fires started in places where no one had been hurt. This? A bomb was a deliberate attempt on her life. “Do they think you were specifically targeted?”
She shook her head. “They don’t know. The FBI will be here in the morning. They’re going to investigate for terrorism. I don’t think it’s terrorism. At least not the kind they’re searching for.”
“You think this has to do with the arsons.” It was a logical conclusion, and one he would expect any decent investigator to reach. And Heidi? He suspected she was better than average.
She nodded. “I’ve been on the reservation twice. Jesse forwarded me all the information about the arsons. There are six others, besides the one that you jumped.”
“Six? I thought it was two.” Even as he said it, he hated that he wasn’t being honest. His father had already told him there were five. He should have told her.
“Apparently not.” She swallowed. “I wish I knew exactly what was going on. Why are they hiding arsons? And why is someone trying to—why is someone trying to kill me?”
She said the words strongly, and he could tell she was trying to keep a brave face, but he could see the tension on her mouth.
“I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.” It was a vow, to her and to him. This was too far. If this was his father’s doing, if he was protecting Mikey, Dak understood. But protecting one person while another got hurt wasn’t fair.
And this was Heidi. She didn’t ask for this, to be dragged into this. If someone was targeting her because she was getting too close to the investigation, then that person should go to jail.
Even if it was someone he was related to. She needed to hear the entire story.
He’d come clean to her. Tonight. He’d get her home and settled and tell her the truth.
If his family had anything to do with her getting hurt, he would personally pull his father apart.
Because there was no way this wasn’t related to her investigation on the reservation.
She nodded, staring out the front window. “Can you please take me home?”
“Absolutely.”
From here on, he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight.
* * * *
When Dak pulled up in front of her condo, she didn’t get out immediately. Staring at the building in front of her, where she had been most comfortable since moving to Oregon, now she could only see shadows.
“Dak?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you come in for a little while? Please?”
He shifted into park. “Absolutely.” He turned off the car, got out and came around to help her out in record time. Though she wasn’t much in the mood, she smiled. This man, so old-fashioned. All this door opening, the hand at the small of her back, she should find it frustrating. She was an independent woman. She’d moved across the country by herself without knowing anyone. She lived alone and worked alone at her job.
She had become good at being alone.
But when he did these things, he didn’t think she couldn’t do them herself. It was as if he was saying she didn’t have to.
She let him lead her up to her door. When she couldn’t keep her hands from shaking long enough to unlock it, he gently took the keys from her, did it himself, and pushed it open to let her walk in first.
Leaving him in the entryway, she hurried through the small apartment, flipping on all the lights. With each one, the rooms became more her own, reminded her again that she was fine, herself there in that space.
When she was done, she returned to where he stood, still in the entryway, watching her.
This. He understood her. He was waiting to see if she wanted him to stay now that she was inside. He hadn’t assumed anything, only let her take the lead. Had her husband been this in tune to her? She and Jeff had been together for years, met right after college. But his personality had always been so big. Next to him, she faded, allowing him to take the lead. It hadn’t been intentional, and looking back, she assumed that Jeff would’ve been horrified to realize how much he overshadowed her.
But at least then, she hadn’t felt this exposed. Because Dak had a way of looking at her like he could see into her soul.
“It was too dark.” She motioned with her hand, self-conscious and trying to explain her need to light the place up.
He nodded. “Is it better now?”
She wanted to lie, to pretend, but she couldn’t. She shook her head. “No. It isn’t.”
“Did you still want me to stay?” He hadn’t moved, remaining there motionless, as if he was afraid to spook her. “It’s fine, either way.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. Biting her lower lip,
she lifted one shoulder. “Yes.”
He took one step in, lifted his hands and placed them on her shoulders. Closing her eyes, she allowed the gentle press to ground her. Something about the pressure, soft and undemanding, made her inhale deeply for the first time in hours.
“It’s okay, you know. It’s okay to be upset. It doesn’t make you any less strong.”
She squeezed her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry, not tonight, not in front of him. Too many times over the past two years she’d cried, weak, hopeless. She didn’t want to be that way, not tonight, not with him.
Opening her eyes, she looked up at him. There was so much understanding in his expression that she ached to lean forward, into him.
“I have to tell you something.” His gaze shifted between her eyes, as if searching for something there.
“Me first.” She exhaled. “This wasn’t my first explosion.”
His brow furrowed. “What? What do you mean? Did something else happen?” His fear, for her, it warmed her stomach.
She shook her head. “No. Not in Oregon. Back when I lived in DC.”
He didn’t push her, and that was one of the things she liked so much about him. He only waited, knowing she would give him whatever she could. “I was married. To another DEA special agent. We met during training, and it all happened so fast. A whirlwind.” She glanced over his shoulder, lost in the memory. “When we decided to get married, I moved to administrative work, and Jeff stayed on in the field.”
Jeff hadn’t ever wanted to do anything else, and though she hated the danger involved, she hadn’t had the heart to ask him to stop.
“A lot of what he did was undercover or classified. I understood. As part of the job. And then one night it all went wrong.”
Dak’s fingers tightened on her shoulders, not painful but insistent. “What happened?”
“We were at dinner. I wanted it to be a special night, so we got dressed up and we went out to a little Italian place we’d heard great things about. It wasn’t in a great part of town, but the area was getting better, lots of government money being pumped into restoration. But we didn’t make a reservation.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, hugging herself. “One of the cases Jeff had been working, a young cartel. The boss, he got Jeff’s name, and they followed us. The van, it came toward us and two men—the driver and the passenger—jumped out, leaving it to run into us.”
