An Absence of Motive

by Maggie Wells

  “Thanks, Deputy. See you then.”

  Ben ended the call and sat staring at the television screen without registering what was happening on the cold-case show he’d been watching when his phone rang the first time. Warmth unfurled in his gut. People were starting to trust him here. At least, one was.

  The conversations he’d shared with Lori were the easiest they’d exchanged since the day he walked into the Pine Bluff municipal building. He didn’t blame her for being wary of him. Aside from being an outsider, he was also a city guy, and a former federal agent. In these parts, those were the kinds of strikes a guy didn’t get a chance to swing at often. The realization made him feel all sorts of warm fuzzies he’d never admit to having.

  People had warned him when he took the job. Everyone from the resident agent in charge of his old division to Henry Masters himself had told him he’d have a hard time settling in and an even tougher row to hoe if he wanted to actually belong in his new hometown. Locals were still rattled by the drug busts that exposed the seedy underbellies of several bucolic Georgia towns. But the life of a social outcast was something he could deal with if he had to. A life outside of law enforcement was not on the table.

  Tossing his phone aside, he reached for the bottle of beer on the coffee table and took a swig, grimacing as the now-warmish brew flowed past his lips. He cradled the bottle between his palms, laced his fingers together and let his head fall back against the sofa cushion. The ceilings in his cozy house were tongue-and-groove knotty pine. To his surprise, it took him only two nights in this new exile to discover he loved looking at them.

  Those ceilings provided endless games of connect-the-knots. Some nights, he assigned the spots of burled wood key points in the cases he’d left open when he’d opted out. Others, he traced and retraced his steps through the maze of deals and double crosses ultimately culminating in his resignation. On the darkest nights, he luxuriated in torturous games of “what if,” starting with the large black hole of a knot in the corner of the ceiling, and let the twists and turns of his life lead him from one impossible spot to another until the game ended with his childhood best friend, Andre, emptying a good portion of his bumped-up AR-15 into the agents rushing the room where they’d stood. Though he lived to rue his decision for a whole host of reasons, Ben had had no choice but to take his oldest friend down.

  A blown cover and the death of the man he’d once loved as a brother would have been reason enough to move on. The bounty placed on his head by the leader of the SEATL—the notorious southeast Atlanta gang whose business he’d been infiltrating—helped move his decision process along.

  Ivan Jones was a white kid born in East Point, Georgia. A maniac with an ego the size of all of Atlanta. In order to survive, he’d spent most of his life telling everyone who’d listen that his family was connected to the Russian mafia. His parents were actually penniless Serbian refugees, but the truth didn’t fit the image of the cunning Russian oligarch he fancied himself.

  After Ben’s cover was blown, Ivan could have had him popped on any number of occasions, but he hadn’t. No, he’d wanted to make a game out of it. A hunting game, with Ben as the prey and a quarter-million dollars as the prize. In essence, he’d made sure there wasn’t any place in Atlanta Ben might be safe.

  The agency had put him on permanent desk duty and wanted him to transfer to another regional office, but Ben resisted, so they cut him loose altogether. His use as an undercover agent was spent. When Masters County found itself without a sheriff due to fallout from a sting operation targeting methamphetamine production, a friend of a friend gave Henry Masters his name. “The rest was history,” he said, reaching for the remote control on the cushion beside him.

  The screen went blank with the touch of a button, but Ben didn’t move from the couch. He was half-afraid to go to bed. What if he spent the night replaying bloody scenes from dead-end streets of Zone 3? What if he lay awake thinking about Marlee Masters’s long, bare legs? He snorted at the last thought.

  Of course he was going to think about Marlee Masters’s legs.

  What had Lori said about Jeff Masters’s death being too similar to Clint Young’s? The two men had been friends once. Or so Lori had indicated. Had they veered off in different directions? Young started working for Timber Masters prior to Jeff Masters’s death. Perhaps the two of them would have become friends again. Would Marlee Masters have come back to town if her brother had lived?

  With a groan, he shook his head to clear the spiderweb of thoughts, set the bottle on the table, switched the television on again and stretched out on his side on the sofa. Better to spend the evening zoning out on cold cases and waking up with a crick in his neck than to lay awake chasing ghosts and elusive women.

  * * *

  “MORNING, BOSS MAN,” Lori called out when he shuffled through the door the following morning. “You’re up early.”

  Ben was dressed and mobile, but he wasn’t necessarily awake. He cast a baleful glance at the empty coffeepot. How anyone made it through an overnight without coffee was beyond his powers of comprehension, but he didn’t have the energy to question the woman’s life choices.

  “I’ll give you Schaeffer’s stapler if you’ll make a coffee-and-doughnut run,” he said as he trudged past her desk.

  Lori narrowed her dark eyes appraisingly. “The good one? The Swingline?” she pressed.

  He nodded as he dropped heavily into his seat. “Yep, but I’m holding it in escrow until I get some decent caffeine in me.”

  She moved to the coffee maker Julianne had banned him from operating in his first week on the job and gave it a fond pat. “I’ll do you a double solid if you’ll wait until I come in this afternoon to tell Schaeffer about the redistribution,” she countered.

  “Done.”

  With practiced ease, Lori set a pot to brewing. “I want to make it clear I’m doing this because I want the stapler, and I want to see Mike’s face when you tell him it’s mine. Gender has nothing to do with it.”

  Ben nodded his understanding. “And I want to make it clear I wasn’t asking because you’re a woman, but because you are on the approved list of coffee makers.”

  “Noted,” she said as she hit the switch and the machine burbled to life. “Okay, I’ll run and grab an immediate infusion for you. Do you want one dozen cliché-makers or two?”

  “One,” he said gruffly. “And if you order at least one cream-filled, I’ll ask Julianne to order some of those colored paper clips.”

  “Done.” She raised a hand as she beat a path to the door. “Okay, but I expect them to be jumbo-sized.”

  Ben nodded. “Noted.” Watching her go, he made one last attempt to gain the upper hand in their dealings. “Make it two cream-filled doughnuts,” he shouted after her.

  Lori laughed, and he closed his gritty eyes, rubbing them with his thumb and forefinger. He heard the creak of hinges but figured it was the door closing in Lori’s wake.

  “Wow. Hitting the cream-filleds hard. I take it you didn’t sleep much either?”

  The plush softness of Marlee Masters’s voice set him off like a starter’s pistol. He kicked out, sending his desk chair flying across the tile floor. He crashed into the wall, arms flailing as momentum pitched him forward in his seat. He grunted and bit back an oath when the back of his hand connected with a metal filing cabinet. He shot out of his death trap of a chair, cradling his throbbing hand in the palm of the uninjured one. “Ms. Masters,” he managed to huff.

  “Oh, Sheriff, I’m sorry,” she said, moving farther into the room. She drew to a stop just shy of touching him, then looked up into his face. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you heard me say hello to Lori,” she said in a rush.

  “I, uh, no,” he managed to mutter. He shook his head, hoping the action would pull double duty by negating her assumption and clearing the fog from his brain. “No. Sorry, I didn’t.”
<
br />   “You had doughnuts on your mind.”

  She wore running shorts. The strappy top she paired with them may as well have been a second skin. To add insult to injury, the mile-long legs he’d spent half the night purposefully not imagining were on display. She had cordless earbuds in her ears, but she wasn’t shouting, so he assumed the phone strapped to her bicep wasn’t cranking out the beats. He pressed his fingers to his throbbing temple in a vain attempt to block the mental image of her jogging down his street in her T-shirt and panties.

  “Were you out running?”

  She glanced down at the toes of her running shoes, then pushed a hand to her rib cage as she caught her breath. “Wow, you really do have what it takes to make detective, Kinsella,” she quipped. “What gave me away?”

  Ignoring her flippancy, he shook his head again, this time in disbelief. “Seriously? You’ve got some creeper peeping in your windows at night, then you’re going out running all over town alone?”

  “I’m assuming you mean like a person who jogs for exercise,” she said, enunciating each word.

  Ben copped to her meaning and cringed as he played the question back in his mind. If he’d had even a couple hours of escape into sleep, he might not have blundered into caveman territory, but damn, her legs were enough to make a man lose his ever-lovin’ mind.

  “I, uh...” Mortifyingly aware there was no way he could retract or redirect his misstep, he tried a different tack. “It’s barely light outside. You shouldn’t run with—” He gestured to her ears. Then, his instincts for self-preservation finally sprang to life. Holding up both hands in surrender, he squashed the chorus line of admonishments kicking its way through his mind. “Yeah, I didn’t sleep much. Sorry for being old-fashioned.” Then, quickly shifting topics, he asked, “What can I do for you?”

  The corner of her mouth tilted upward. “Much better.”

  She huffed a breath, apparently as annoyed as he by the tension between them. Ben admired the effort, but watching her chest rise and fall did absolutely nothing to get his mind right.

  “I came to talk to you about my brother,” she said, jolting him from his wayward thoughts.

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes.” She shifted her startlingly direct blue gaze to the file cabinet he’d assaulted. “I’m sure you’ve heard about my brother’s death.”

  It was a statement, not a question. A leading one, but a statement nonetheless. Uncertain how to proceed, he opted for the less-is-more approach. “Yes.”

  A small harrumph of disgust escaped her. The resigned set of her jaw told him she’d expected nothing less but had still hoped for more.

  “Small town,” he said gruffly.

  “Microscopic,” she concurred.

  “And I am the sheriff.”

  “Then, if you are acquainted with the circumstances surrounding my brother’s...passing,” she said with a hitch in her voice, “I’m sure you’ve heard that Jeff and Clint Young were friends when they were boys.”

  Lowering his arms, he nodded. “Yes.”

  “They hadn’t been close in years,” she hurried on. “People are making all sorts of assumptions—”

  “Assumptions?” he prompted, interrupting her midstream.

  “About connections between their deaths,” she said, meeting his eyes directly again.

  “Deputy Cabrera told me she was involved with your brother. While it’s possible for someone to be interested in more than one person, I didn’t get the impression there was any question in her mind she was the only one.”

  “You trust her judgment,” Marlee determined.

  Though she wasn’t asking, he nodded anyway. “I haven’t known her long, but in the short time I’ve been here, I have found Deputy Cabrera to be a quick study and a good judge of character. I trust her gut.” He added the last because, to his way of thinking, what she’d said was all that needed to be said on the matter.

  He gestured for her to take the seat opposite his desk and waited until she’d settled into the chair, then reclaimed his own. Rolling back to his desk, he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from wincing when he reached into his shirt pocket with his sore hand. He pulled out the notebook he kept there and flipped it open to a blank page. “Was there something you wanted to tell me about your brother’s death?”

  She wet her lips, then glanced away, her gaze traveling over the postings and notices pinned to a corkboard. “My mother always said he didn’t do it.”

  She spoke so softly, he scooted to the edge of his chair, hoping proximity would improve his chances of catching every word. “Your mother?”

  “No doubt you’ve heard some whispers about her as well.”

  He had, but he’d be damned if he’d confirm or deny what he may or may not have heard about Henry Masters’s beautiful but fragile wife. When he didn’t answer, she continued her perusal of the room, refusing to look straight at him.

  “My mother drinks too much,” she said at last. “She’s...” Again, she wet her lips, but this time she met his gaze head-on. “She’s not in the most stable place right now.”

  “I understand,” he assured her. No mother should have to bury a child. He couldn’t imagine the pain of it. It was unfathomable.

  “She has always said Jeff did not take his own life.” This time, her voice was dull, and when he studied her, he saw signs of her sleepless night shadowing her lovely face.

  “Has she any—”

  “Proof?” she interrupted. Marlee shook her head forcefully. “No. Not one shred. Don’t you think if there were any indication of anything untoward in the death of Henry Masters’s son, a more extensive investigation would have taken place?”

  The edge in her voice surprised him, but Ben was careful not to let it show. “No. I have no doubt.”

  “He would have spent every last penny he had on an investigation if there had been even a hint of something concrete, but there wasn’t. My brother put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”

  Her voice was flat and emotionless, but when he searched her eyes, he saw only the anguish of the helpless there. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said gently.

  She tried to smirk and couldn’t quite pull it off. “You didn’t know him, Sheriff,” she began.

  “Ben,” he interjected.

  Marlee inclined her head, accepting his invitation to use his given name. “He was an ass,” she said, a wicked light sparkling in her eyes. “Your typical spoiled, entitled prince of a small town.”

  Her blunt assessment made him warm to her even more. “But he was your brother and you loved him.”

  “From the moment they brought him home from the hospital,” she said without hesitation.

  “So you came here this morning to tell me...what?”

  Marlee uncrossed her legs and bit her lip as she slid up to sit on the edge of the seat, rubbing her flat palms together between her knees. “I came here to tell you my mother might be a fragile flower hell-bent on drowning her grief, but I’m not.”

  “I can see you aren’t.”

  “Yet my mama and I agree on one thing—I don’t think my brother killed himself.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “I feel it in my gut,” she said evenly.

  He blinked, then shook his head. “Didn’t I hear you’re an attorney? I’d think the whole thing about evidence would have been covered in even the most basic law class.”

  She nodded and then stood. “It was. And I don’t have any evidence. At least not yet.”

  The door opened, and they both clammed up as Lori backed her way into the office, a tray of coffee cups perched atop the doughnut box. “The place was packed,” she called out without looking up. “Everyone’s talking—”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Marlee said with a short laugh.

  Lori drew up short, then set he
r load down on the nearest desk. “Oh. I didn’t realize you were coming in here.”

  “I stopped by to pass a couple messages from the family to Sheriff Kinsella,” Marlee answered smoothly. “Today is my first day as chief legal counsel at Timber Masters. I thought I’d get a jump on things.” She tugged the hem of her tank down over her hips. “I’d better get my run in before I’m late punching in.”

  Ben had to use all his strength of will to keep his eyes glued to her face. Her expression was one of calm friendliness, but the intensity in her eyes told him she didn’t want to air her suspicions in front of Lori.

  “Yes, thank you.” He cleared his throat, desperate to buy some time to figure out what she expected him to do with the groundless suppositions she’d dumped on him. “You’ll call if there’s anything more I can do?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Doughnut?” Lori offered, opening the box in invitation.

  Marlee peered into the box, then tossed a triumphant glance over her shoulder. “Are those cream-filled?”

  He scowled to indicate he wasn’t buying the wide-eyed innocent bit. “Weren’t you going for a run?”

  She narrowed her gaze, and he realized a fraction of a second too late that she believed his reminder to be a challenge.

  “Oh, Sheriff, if there’s one thing I learned in law school, it was how to eat on the run.”

  With a smirk, she plucked one of his precious cream-filled pastries from the box and bit into it as she waved her thanks to Lori and hustled out the door.

  Chapter Six

  Marlee smiled as her father’s longtime secretary, Mrs. Devane, came out from behind her desk to greet her with a handclasp. “So good to see you, dear. We’re excited to have you on board.”

  She wasn’t on board, but there was no way Marlee could say so to poor sweet Mrs. Devane. The woman had been guarding the executive offices of Timber Masters since Marlee’s grandfather ran the place. She settled on something innocuous but polite. “Good morning, Mrs. Devane. I’m happy to see you too.”