by Dana Marton
“Once a cop, always a cop.”
Harper confirmed that the car in the ditch was hooked up securely, then he walked back to the cab of his pickup and hopped in so he wouldn’t have to shout over the howling wind and the crackling phone. He had one bar out there; the reception utter crap. “You ever regret leaving?”
“I’m never going to regret a single minute I spend with Kate.”
Murph had gone into witness protection so he could stay with the woman he loved when she’d been the target of an international assassin. Now that Interpol had eliminated the bad guy, Murph and Kate were back in town, running the new vet rehab facility. Murph was ex-Army Reserves and Kate was a therapist, so they were perfect for the job. Then again, that didn’t mean…
“You happy at Hope Hill? For real?”
“Nice to be making a difference. It helps that the town is supportive.” Murph sounded like he meant every word. “You need my help or not?”
“Your plow isn’t any bigger than mine.” Harper put the truck into Drive and moved forward a dozen feet.
Hope Hill had pretty much the same setup he did. He drove a Ford F-150 with a detachable front plow. The rehab center had a Dodge Dakota for their long driveway and the parking lot in front of the registration building.
Murph groaned on the other end. “Do you really want to have a whose plow is bigger conversation in the middle of a weather emergency?”
“We’re having the road is closed conversation. It won’t be open until morning. By then, Eddie Gannon will have the snow cleared with the big town plow. You stay home and snuggle up to Kate. No reason for the both of us to be freezing our balls off in this hell.”
“Why did you go out?” Murph wouldn’t let it go, clearly a victim of cabin fever.
Harper had a fair case of it himself. It’d been a long, hard winter. “Thought I’d check to make sure nobody was stranded. Found some lunatic dressed like a grizzly bear, got her to the pub for a hot meal. I’m just going to tow her car out of the ditch, then I’m done here.”
“Why was she dressed like a grizzly bear?”
“Damned if I know.” Harper pushed his hat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “She had cowboy boots. Spurs and all.”
“You making this up? Why would anyone drive with spurs?”
Harper put the pickup in Park and jumped out. “Why do women do anything?”
“Maybe Brittany Wallingford could tell you,” Murph said. “If you asked her nicely.”
“Still not funny.”
“Heard it was hilarious. Mike says he wishes he snapped pictures.”
Harper didn’t doubt it. Brittany did have a great body. She’d dated his brother Jack for a while, really into the whole Navy SEAL thing. Then Jack broke up with her and married someone else, and Brittany dated another one of the Finnegan brothers, Ian.
And then she set her eyes on Harper, and fine, they hooked up once or twice. Harper meant it as good times. Brittany, however, had her heart set on marrying a Finnegan, for some unfathomable reason. So when Harper didn’t return a call on her timeline, she called for police assistance when she knew he was on the night shift. She lied about an intruder and waited for Harper naked at the front door. Except Harper got tied up and sent Officer Mike McMorris.
“Hey,” Murph said. “Maybe your mystery woman was Brittany trying some other trick.”
“Don’t think so. She wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that much clothing.” Harper walked around the Chevy and checked it over for damage. Looked like the back kissed the telephone pole as the car slipped into the ditch, but the damage was barely a scratch. “Car has Virginia plates.”
“So?”
The wind died down enough that he didn’t have to shout his response. “I thought she looked familiar.” Vague thought fragments floated at the edges of his consciousness, right there, yet out of reach, teasing him. “I don’t know anyone in Virginia.”
Murph must have heard something in his voice, because he asked, “But?”
Harper felt stupid saying, “I don’t know. Something was off about her.”
Murph didn’t laugh him off. Ex-cops didn’t discount cop instincts.
“She hid her face,” Harper told his friend. “She had a scarf wrapped around her head, and she didn’t take it off on the ride into town.”
“She was cold.”
“Plenty warm inside the pickup, and I cranked it up extra.” He thought back, testing his memories to see if he’d missed some detail.
“Was her voice familiar?”
“The scarf muffled her. She didn’t talk much. Like she was trying to say as little as possible. I introduced myself. She only gave me Abby. No last name.”
“Some people get nervous around the police.”
“I’m not in uniform. I’m not in a cruiser. She had no way of knowing that I’m a cop. I didn’t tell her.”
Several seconds of silence stretched on the line before Murph offered, “Look at the insurance and registration in the glove compartment. Then call Leila at the station and have your mystery woman run through the system.”
Harper thought about it, but going through the glove compartment would constitute an illegal search. The owner of the vehicle had given him the keys, but she hadn’t known he was a police officer. And he wasn’t on duty.
“I can just have the license plate run,” he said. “And she’s not my mystery woman.”
Although, she was a mystery.
“How old is she?”
“Not too old, judging by her voice and her ability to carry the massive fur coat. No idea what shape she was under there. Her hat covered her hair. Her scarf hid most of her face. Her eyes are brownish, as far as I could tell in the cab’s dim light. I spent half an hour with her, and I have nothing.”
“Losing your touch, bro.”
Harper didn’t dignify that with a response. He panned the car with his flashlight again, ready to hang up with Murph so he could call Leila with the license plate number, but then he saw something he’d missed before.
“Aw, hell.”
“What?”
“Blood on the car.” Big blotches of frozen red, like raspberry Slurpee. “On the handle of the passenger-side rear door.”
Murph’s tone switched to all-business. “Was there any blood on her?”
“I don’t think so. Not on her hands. I watched her put on her seat belt. She didn’t have gloves.” The overhead light had still been on at that point. He was a cop, dammit. If there’d been blood, he would have noticed.
“Probable cause,” Murph gave his opinion over the phone.
Yeah. Few things were more probable cause than fresh blood.
Harper left the red-stained door alone so he wouldn’t contaminate possible evidence. He walked around to the driver’s side instead, and since, unlike the woman, he did have gloves on, he tried the handle.
“Car’s locked, but I have the key,” he said as he slid that key into the lock. “Driver’s seat’s empty. A plastic coffee mug and a couple of used napkins in the middle console. Box of clothes on the passenger seat. More clothes and shoes on the back seat.”
Nothing suspicious.
No more blood.
No weapons in sight.
He pushed the trunk release, but it didn’t click.
“Going to look in the trunk. Man, I don’t want to find a dead body.” Because if he did, the freezing-his-ass-off part of his day was just beginning, instead of ending.
He slammed the door closed so the wind wouldn’t blow any snow inside. Even with gloves on, he touched as little as possible, didn’t want to smudge any fingerprints should he have to hunt for some later. He was careful not to rub against the car either as he trudged through the snow to the back.
She’d definitely nipped the telephone pole, whether she’d realized it or not. Hit in the middle, Harper saw as he leaned closer. The lock was popped. Damaged. Harper used his flashlight to push up the trunk lid, then panned the light around in the cro
wded interior.
A jumble of bags and two large suitcases occupied the space, but that wasn’t what he saw first. He stared at what sat on top of those suitcases… “Wow.”
“Find a dead body?” Murph sounded almost hopeful.
“Not exactly.”
Harper blinked, but the vision didn’t disappear. He wasn’t hallucinating the pile of 100-gram gold bullion bars. They gleamed in the light, making him feel like a certain famous boy wizard peeking into a vault guarded by goblins.
Except this was no fairy tale for children. Like the door handle, a couple of the bars on top were smudged with blood.
He estimated about seventy or eighty bars altogether. 999.9 pure gold, according to the letters and numbers stamped into each. He happened to know the value. At around sixty-five hundred dollars a bar, he was staring at a cool half a million US dollars.
“I have to go.”
He hung up on Murph without explanation and called his mother, who didn’t pick up—big surprise. She tended to set her phone down in the office and leave it there while she worked in the kitchen.
He called the old wall phone at the bar, then swore at the busy signal.
He shouldn’t have taken the stranger to his parents’ place.
Then again, maybe she hadn’t gone in. Last Harper had seen her, in his rearview mirror, she’d still been standing on the street, looking after him.
She’d probably called her partner, or partners, in crime by now for a ride. They might even be on their way to pick up the gold.
Harper watched the road as he tried to make sense of the past hour. For one, why would she give him her keys?
Maybe she hadn’t wanted to arouse his suspicion by refusing when he’d asked. Maybe she hadn’t thought he’d open the trunk. Maybe she’d figured they’d catch up with him before he got this far and take care of him.
“Come and get me, then,” Harper mumbled as he headed to his pickup. He had his gun in the glove compartment. He didn’t keep it on him when he was off duty.
He dialed Leila at the station, running on pure instinct. “Hey. Any bank robberies reported?”
“Nope. Why?”
“I’ll tell you later.” He had another thought. “Do me a favor. I need whoever is closest to Old Man Lamm’s place to pop in for a wellness check.”
Chuck Lamm was Broslin’s eccentric recluse. He was always convinced the sky was falling, the New World Order was about to take over, war was about to break out. Either that or a zombie apocalypse. The only person Harper knew in Broslin who might have gold bars stashed in the basement—in preparation for the collapse of the banking system.
While Harper listened to Leila on the radio, requesting assistance from any unit in the vicinity, he grabbed his gun and looked back at the Chevy.
“Abby” had said she’d been traveling to Broslin, had a room at Shannon’s B and B. She could be lying. Snow had long covered her tire tracks, so he had no way of telling from which direction she’d come. When the car had slid out of control, it could have turned around, crossed the road, done any number of spins before it smashed into the snowbank.
Harper didn’t know for sure that the gold had been stolen, but the blood definitely didn’t give him a good vibe. A wellness check on Old Man Lamm was no big deal. No harm done if Harper was wrong.
If he wasn’t…
He moved around for heat, stomping his boots as he waited.
“Chase just pulled into Lamm’s driveway,” Leila said over the phone. “Okay, he says the front door is busted. He’s going in. He’s requesting assistance.”
Harper swore. “Who else is on duty?”
“Mike.”
Okay. Mike was good backup. Broslin PD was a small outfit, not one bad guy among them, which made work a hell of a lot easier.
Leila kept the phone line open.
Harper could hear Chase on the radio, but couldn’t make out the words. “What’s he saying?”
“I’m going to have to call everybody in.” Leila’s voice was thin with shock. “Someone shot the old man in the face.”
Chapter Four
“Oh my God. Allie Bianchi?” Brittany Wallingford squealed from the pub’s entry where she waited with two friends to pick up their order.
Allie scrolled on her phone and ignored them.
“Is she back for another bicycle?” Zoey, Brittany’s second-in-command, asked, and that set them off.
Allie gritted her teeth. Embarrassment cannot kill a person. It can’t. That’s a scientific fact.
“Hey, Allie!” Dakota, the third wannabe celebutante, called over. “Are you looking for the town dump?”
Are you looking for another football player to blow under the bleachers? Allie could have asked, but she didn’t.
While the daughter of the president of the golf club could bully her in public, Allie’s role was to be silent. If she responded with something equally nasty, it’d get back to the Historical Society by morning, and she would lose her gig, the current version of being sent to the principal’s office and getting detention.
Brittany added, “Need directions?”
They all laughed way too hard at that, drunk, or at least tipsy. Probably coming from a party, the kind Allie would never have been invited to ten years ago, or now.
The women were still laughing and whispering when Kennan Finnegan strode into the pub, because what Allie needed at that moment was another Finnegan.
He was freshly home from the Marines, according to his mother. He looked it, with an out-of-place tan at the end of winter, crew-cut hair, built shoulders, and mess-with-me-at-your-own-risk gaze.
“Kennan!” Brittany flashed her homecoming queen smile. “Is Harper going to be here tonight?”
“Not that I know of.”
Zoey and Dakota immediately surrounded him, touching at every chance, just about throwing panties at Kennan.
He disengaged without showing the slightest interest, scanned the room until he found Allie, then he strode straight over. He let the disapproval show in his eyes as he checked out her boots.
“Allie.”
“Kennan.” She tilted her head and smiled sweetly. “Did your mother call you in to make sure I don’t steal the saltshakers?”
She was normally better at biting her tongue, but she was cold and tired and hungry. She was entitled to a moment of crankiness.
The right corner of his mouth twitched. “Sally can’t come in because of the snow. I’m going to help out. But, yes, I was advised that you were here.” He paused. “What did Harper say?”
“Told me to put my dinner on his tab.”
Kennan watched her as if sensing a faint whiff of bullshit, but then he nodded. And then he walked away from her with the sure stride of a soldier on a mission, disappearing through the swinging doors of the kitchen.
Okay, then. Finnegans encountered. No permanent damage suffered.
Not that she could put them from her mind. Kennan was back in a minute with Allie’s food and water. “Enjoy your meal. Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thanks.”
Allie dug in and watched as he brought out a much larger order, all wrapped up and bagged.
“Who’s driving?” he asked the waiting women who’d been whispering at the entrance.
“Me.” Brittany stepped forward with a seductive smile, stopping close enough to Kennan to be kissed, for which Kennan showed zero inclination.
He held the food out to the side, out of Brittany’s reach. “Are you saying there’s nobody sober out there waiting in the car?”
“Just me and my girls.” Britany pushed her boobs out. “Want to come with us?”
Kennan walked away and stashed their order behind the bar. “You can have the food when your Uber gets here.”
The smile slid off Brittany’s face real fast. “That’s a two-hundred-dollar order. People are waiting for that.”
“Five minutes isn’t going to make a difference,” Kennan told her as he started
pouring drinks.
Suddenly, Allie’s dinner tasted even better. She might even have smirked a little, which Brittany immediately caught.
“Dumpster girl,” she said, covering it with a cough, but didn’t go any further than that, which Allie strongly suspected had to do with Kennan staying behind the bar, within hearing distance.
Allie did her best to keep the peace by ignoring the women, until finally their ride arrived and off they went.
Dakota couldn’t resist calling back a “Be careful with riding a bike in the snow!” But after they piled out the door, just about falling over laughing, Allie got a chance to fully relax.
She finished her food, everything as tasty as she remembered, then she leaned back in her booth to watch the door. Fifteen minutes ticked by. Twenty. She curled her toes in the boots, the tips a little too narrow, all right for a short time when she was doing a show, but not so great for long-time wear. She wanted to be out of them.
Rose swung by. “Dessert?”
“No. Thank you. The food was amazing. Exactly like I remembered.”
And so was everything else. Allie was tired of people watching her as if she was the night’s entertainment, talking about her in lowered voices. So as Rose walked away, Allie pushed to her feet and strode through the pub with a swagger, in ringing spurs. Then she wrestled into her coat and gave her audience a jaunty wave before she left the stage.
She trudged through the inch of snow that had collected on the sidewalk since someone had last shoveled. At least she wasn’t freezing now that a hot meal was working in her belly. She reached the B and B without frostbite, or spotting Harper. Hopefully, he would just drop her car and purse at the B and B and leave.
Allie used the broom by the front door to brush off her boots before shaking herself to dislodge the snow from her coat and hat. As she walked into the meticulously restored gingerbread Victorian’s foyer, the bell above the door rang, bringing Shannon O’Brian from the back.
“Oh, hello there.” Shannon crossed the dining room. “You must be Allyssa.” She hurried across the parlor next, then a brief pause, a widening of blue eyes as she reached her guest. “Oh! Allie Bianchi! I know you. I didn’t make the connection when I saw your name on the reservation. It’s been so long. For some reason, I thought you moved to the West Coast.”
