Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “What kind of question is that?” Jace demanded. “You know I’m not. I just wanna know who did this and how they managed to lure him down here. He wouldn’t have done it with no reason. It had to be something he felt was important but something he didn’t find threatening. He never pulled his service weapon.”

  Logan looked to the body. Sure enough, Sal hadn’t even unsnapped his holster. “There was no threat,” he murmured.

  “Not as far as he was concerned. Just who are we dealing with here? Val hasn’t found anything? Hawk, Doc, any of them?”

  Logan looked toward the house, his expression stormy. “I’m about sick to death of Senator Collins and his reticence,” he announced.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “It’s for the best.”

  “Stop telling me what you believe is for the best. Can you do that, please? All this time, all these years, you’ve been telling me what’s best, William. Look where that’s gotten us.”

  “You don’t honestly believe I’m to blame for any of this, do you?”

  Kara winced at her father’s question and waited for her mother’s response. Should she go in and try to make peace? No, because they’d shut down the second she came into view. She’d walked in on the middle of enough arguments to know that for sure.

  It had never been like this. Her mother had never been so… harsh. Sharp. Her words were like knives trained on their target, slicing and stabbing. She didn’t bother trying to soften them the way she normally did.

  It was too late for that. Too much had already gone wrong for Laura to be soft and submissive.

  Sal did that. His murder drove home a lot of points which maybe nobody wanted to see before then. Up until now, the threat had been invisible—maybe a hoax, maybe a sicko getting off on freaking out innocent people.

  Now, there were no maybes. This wasn’t a joke or a game. The person or people responsible weren’t only trying to get a rise out of somebody in the public eye.

  They’d spilled blood. Sal’s blood. But why Sal?

  Kara squeezed her eyes shut, her back to the wall outside her father’s office. It didn’t do any good—all she saw was Sal’s smiling face, his familiar eyes crinkling at the corners when he teased her, when he knew she was wrong about something but was kind enough to be gentle about telling her so.

  He was always so kind. Probably why she’d gravitated toward him—her and Krista both. Kids understood things older people didn’t. They knew how to look straight through a situation and get to the heart of the matter without worrying about social niceties or giving somebody the benefit of the doubt.

  They saw who people really were without trying.

  She’d seen Sal as the loving, kind man he’d always been, stern when need be, tough when called upon, but sweet at his core. And she had loved him.

  And he was gone, and maybe it was supposed to be her in his place.

  He’d been on the beach. What if somebody had lured him down there? What if it was her they were supposed to be luring, and they’d caught his eye instead? What if they’d brought a boat onto the beach?

  She’d already shed so many tears, but a few more trickled out from under her eyelids anyway.

  Did it hurt him? Was he scared? He shouldn’t have died alone. He should’ve had the people who loved him at his side. Even if it was only her, he deserved that much.

  To think he was supposed to be on vacation and had come back for her. To protect her. She wasn’t even worth it.

  Her dad went on, unaware that she was standing outside the door and listening to every word. Whoever had built that house didn’t care much for giving the owners privacy because the walls were thin enough that she’d been listening in on conversations her entire life.

  “If they can get to Sal, with all his skills, they can get to you and Kara. I won’t have that.”

  Was her mother laughing? It wasn’t like her to laugh at a time like this. Maybe she was really starting to lose it. Maybe whatever pills she was taking to get through this were starting to eat away at her. Kara had seen that happen before, had gone to school with kids whose parents were barely more than ghosts who floated through life either on booze or pills. Or both.

  “You won’t have it? Since when do you have a say in any of this, William? You put us on this course a long time ago, and look where it got us.”

  “This is my fault now? There are maniacs running amok, and it’s my fault they’re targeting us?”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Laura’s whisper was razor-sharp. “Don’t pretend this has nothing to do with you.”

  “If you’re accusing me of having something to do with this, you’ve gone completely out of your mind!”

  “If you weren’t always grandstanding and rubbing people the wrong way, this might not have happened! Can you honestly tell me you haven’t made enemies over the years? You go and you go, and you don’t give any thought to the consequences. All you’ve ever thought about is your ambition. Everybody in Washington knows you’re angling for the presidency—I’ve heard you talking to Kenny and Bruce about it.” His most trusted advisors. This had to be serious.

  The presidency? Was it true? Like life wasn’t already insane enough. At least she was older and wouldn’t have to grow up in the White House under scrutiny that would make her childhood look like a walk in the park.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” Kara couldn’t see her father, but she could imagine how he looked. Head thrown back, eyes peering at his wife over the bridge of his nose the way he always looked when he was on the defense and knew somebody was onto him.

  “Oh, please,” Laura laughed. “Now isn’t the time, William. I’ve let a lot of things slide over the years for the sake of our daughter, our marriage, your career, but enough is enough. Those guys Sal brought in will never find who did this so long as you stand there, pretending to have no idea who could be behind it. The sooner you start telling the truth and stop pretending to be the white knight in all this, the better for everyone.”

  “Watch what you say,” he warned. “You don’t know half of what you think you know.”

  “I know enough,” she assured him. “I know you want to get me out of here not just to protect me. You want to shut me up. You want to make sure that when the people responsible for this are uncovered, I won’t know the degree to which you were involved all along.”

  It was enough to make Kara sick, listening to her parents talk to each other this way. The worst part was wondering how much of it was true. Was her father lying? Had he lied all along?

  Was he responsible for what was happening?

  Heavy, determined footfalls echoed in the kitchen, coming toward the hall where she eavesdropped. She didn’t bother scurrying away. Why should she? She wasn’t a child, and this wasn’t a game. So what if somebody found out she’d been listening?

  It was time for a lot of things to come to light, apparently. If she could start the ball rolling by being upfront and unapologetic, so be it.

  Logan came into view, and Kara wouldn’t have wanted to be on his bad side just then for anything in the world. She’d give up her entire trust fund if need be so long as it kept her on his good side. His snarl wasn’t intended for her, but the sight of it chilled her just the same.

  When he realized he had an audience, his expression eased a little. “I didn’t expect you to be standing there,” he said—loud enough to be heard in the office.

  The conversation in there ceased immediately. Wonderful. Now they knew she’d been there all along.

  She was a grown-up, and terrible things were happening. It was time for honesty. She threw back her shoulders and opened the door to find her parents on opposite sides of the room, facing away from each other. Their body language spoke volumes.

  Logan stood behind her. He’d been on his way to speak to her father clearly. “Senator, we’ve replaced the cameras pointed toward the beach. Whoever took them out did a thorough job.”

  “Which meant they
had to know exactly where the cameras were located, and exactly how to disable them without being seen.” Laura glared at her husband over her shoulder. The look on her face chilled Kara even worse than Logan’s furious expression had.

  She blamed him. She blamed it all on him. She might even have hated him. Kara hadn’t entertained childish beliefs for a long, long time, but her maturity didn’t make knowing her mother hated her father any easier to process.

  “Mrs. Collins makes a good point,” Logan allowed. It was painfully obvious that he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “It’s clear that whoever did this had a working knowledge of the beach: the privacy afforded there, the sightlines from the house, the positioning of the cameras, all of it. They did their homework.”

  “Which is precisely why you need to get out of town.” Her father turned to her, pleading silently. Her mother looked at her too, with something very different written on her face.

  And there she was, stuck in the middle of these two. How was she supposed to win in this fight? She didn’t want to fight at all. She wanted them to be united, to act as a team. Not to pull her in opposite directions.

  “I… I don’t know what you want from me,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing under the weight of their glares. “I just want this to all be over with, but doesn’t it seem like whoever’s doing this would know if we left town?”

  “Not if we went about it the right way,” her father argued before turning to Logan. “Right? Couldn’t we spirit them out without anyone knowing? Can’t you, you know, hide them somehow?”

  “Hold on just a moment.” Logan held up his hands, looking from one of Kara’s parents to the other. Maybe he’d be the voice of reason in all this. “I think we need to take a step back and cover what my team does and what it doesn’t do. Yes, we can more than easily arrange for protection in situations like that—but we’re also involved with keeping you safe, your home, all of it. My team would be stretched too thin by that sort of arrangement. We’d have to take all of you.”

  “I can’t possibly leave. I have too much work to do here.”

  “Of course he does.” Laura rolled her eyes. “Even when his family and his life are in danger, he has too much work to do.”

  He spun on her, snarling. “Not all of us were born the way you were!”

  Kara’s eyes flew open wide. Never, not once in her entire life, had she ever heard him say anything like that. Yes, he made a big deal about having grown up in a working-class neighborhood to working-class parents. That was part of what she’d always thought of as his shtick, the thing he used to make himself look more real, more approachable.

  And maybe he really did want to be a good, helpful public servant. Maybe he really did care about the people he fought for, the ones whose salaries he wanted to raise, the ones whose housing costs he wanted to lower.

  Maybe he resented the money her mother had been born with—which meant the money his daughter had been born with too.

  Only Logan’s hand on her arm was enough to keep her centered. Only that was enough to keep her from screaming at both of them or at the world at large, at everyone and everything in it. When had everything stopped making sense? When had everything gone crazy?

  “This isn’t what you need to be discussing right now,” Logan murmured. “Not in front of Kara, at least.”

  “I can handle it,” she lied.

  “Just the same,” Logan said, staring at her father, “unless everyone can go, no one should go. Undoubtedly, whoever is behind this will find a way to learn where your wife and daughter are located.”

  “I don’t need protection. Send the entire team with my family. Leave me here. I don’t care.” Her father’s voice was starting to rise, to tighten. “Protect them. Them! Not me! I have my guards here. I’m fine.”

  “Like Sal?” Kara whispered. “Like he was? Dad, this isn’t anything to ignore, you know? Now’s not the time to be a hero. If they could get to Sal, they can get to you, too.”

  “What Logan and his team need to also focus on is finding who did this,” Laura added, glaring at her husband. “So that it stops. And they’d probably have an easier time of it here than they would on the other side of the country.”

  “So long as we have all the information we need.” There was no missing the way Logan stared at her dad.

  Everybody seemed to think he was hiding something.

  Was he?

  Chapter Twenty

  “What can you tell me about him?” Jace settled down across from a pair of guards he’d first met on arriving at the house. Had it only been a few days since then? It felt like a lifetime.

  The younger of the two, a tall ginger named Greg, shrugged. “What’s there to say? He was the best, the sort of guy whose opinion you don’t question, whose expertise you stand down in front of.”

  “But he never held it over anybody’s head,” the second guard was quick to interject— Peter, who wore a wedding band and looked like the sort of guy who ran marathons for fun. “He was a leader, you know? A true leader doesn’t feel like they have to lord their expertise over others. They extend a hand to help others up.”

  “Sure. Not everybody knows how to lead that way. I know I always responded better to commanders who commanded respect versus those who demanded it,” said Jace.

  “Exactly.” Relief washed over Greg’s face, like he was glad to be understood.

  “He wasn’t even supposed to be here now,” Peter murmured. “He was on a fishing trip upstate until this whole thing happened. The threat. As soon as the senator reached out to him, he was on the first flight back. He considered the Collinses his family. Kara, especially. Both girls.”

  Jace sighed. “Were you with the senator when the crash occurred? Were you part of his security detail?”

  “I’d just come in a few months before then. I didn’t spend much time with the girls, with Mrs. Collins. I was with the senator much of the time. Sal was with the family more often than not.”

  Jace frowned at this. “Is it typical for the family of a recently elected senator to need protection in that manner? I mean, round-the-clock protection?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Peter shrugged. “This is the only detail I’ve ever worked.”

  “Same here,” Greg agreed.

  Jace made a mental note of finding out more about this. Was it typical? Why did Laura and the girls need protection even in those early days? Was William overly protective for no reason?

  Or was there a very good reason?

  “You knew him well,” Jace observed, looking to Peter. “Would he have wandered onto the beach for no reason?”

  “Not while wearing a suit and shoes, with his tie in place,” Peter replied without hesitation. “There had to be a reason for him to go down there. Nobody watching the video feed saw any reason to go down there.”

  “But he did,” Jace muttered. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle in front of him, but a handful of the pieces were missing. There was no hope of solving a puzzle with missing pieces.

  “It would have to be important,” Peter added. “He wouldn’t have wandered. He had a job to do, even if Kara wasn’t here at the time. He wanted to protect William and Laura, too. He felt like he’d already failed.”

  “What? Failed whom?”

  “Krista.” Peter shrugged, his hands spread. “He failed her. He failed the senator that night.”

  “He didn’t do anything. He had nothing to do with the accident. He wasn’t even there.”

  “Had he been? Had he been driving instead of the senator?” Another shrug. “Who knows what goes on in the mind of a person when they’re grieving? And he was, most definitely. He loved both those girls. He never had kids of his own. You know how it is.”

  Jace didn’t exactly know how it was, but he could imagine taking care of the girls and their safety when their father was away, working. Sal must’ve grown close to them, must’ve come to think of them as his own in a way.

  Yes, it was perfectly natural
for him to grieve Krista’s death and to ask himself if there was anything he could’ve done.

  He opened Sal’s wallet, lying on the table between him and the guards. When was the last time he’d seen anyone carry photos in a wallet? Nowadays, people stored their photos in their phones, on their computers. They didn’t need to carry physical copies around with them.

  But Sal was clearly a member of the old school. He’d only used a smartphone because the rest of the senator’s personnel did. Jace guessed the man had never touched social media or anything related to the current times. He did his job. His vacation had consisted of fishing, alone, in a cabin in the woods.

  He was just the sort of person who’d carry a wallet-size photo of twin girls, roughly three years old, both of them beaming their cheesy, little girl smiles for the camera.

  The wear at the corners of the photo spoke of the number of times Sal had touched it. How many times he’d looked at them, remembering what was lost, what he believed he could’ve saved.

  Another question. Was there anything about the accident that brought up red flags, enough to make Sal question William’s story?

  “What do you remember about the accident?” Jace asked. “I mean, I’m sure it was a terrible time all around. I’m sure it was awful for the entire family and for the security team.”

  “Absolutely. I mean, whenever a kid’s involved…” Peter shuddered.

  “Was there an uptick in security at that time? I mean, did it seem like the senator was more concerned than usual around the time the accident took place?”

  Peter sat back in his chair, a smirk twisting his mouth. “You have some theories?” he asked, almost laughing.

  “Not theories, per se,” Jace corrected. “I’m trying to cover all the angles. There are a lot of angles that didn’t get covered—I think we can agree on that.”

  “You’re saying the accident wasn’t investigated as thoroughly as it could’ve been?” Greg asked, looking from one of them to the other. “Do you believe this is connected somehow?”