“Then why are you risking all that by bringing me here? Don’t you understand what it is you’re doing to yourself?”
Her cheeks reddened slightly. She turned back to her Walmart bags and finished emptying them, putting more cans in the cupboards above my head.
“You need to listen to me, Kinsley,” I said, using a tone that normally worked with frightened animals and injured people. “You’re only making things worse for everyone. You have no idea what’s going on here. No one knows how deep all this goes! This isn’t just about me—you were right about that. But there are a lot of people out there who would do anything to keep their names out of it, including going after the people I care about. Do you understand that?”
“Tell me, Ox! Tell me what’s really going on here!”
A part of me wanted to. The idea of sharing everything I’d carried along alone for all this time was a beautiful thought. But I couldn’t. If she knew the truth, she’d try to do something to fix it and that would require her to piss off a lot of powerful people. I couldn’t let her do that.
I wouldn’t put anyone in that position.
“Does it have to do with your mother? Has she gone and gotten herself involved in something she shouldn’t? Or is it Oliver?”
“It’s not Oliver!” I nearly shouted it. “You stay away from him, understand me?”
“But, Ox, don’t you want your brother’s help?”
“He’s been put through enough!” I charged toward her, only the cuff holding me to the pipe keeping me from grabbing her. “The only thing Oliver knows is that I’m having trouble with a few investors. He doesn’t need to know more than that.”
“Is that true? Are you having trouble with investors?”
I groaned, leaning my head back and closing my eyes. “It is so much more complicated than that! You just… I can’t have you getting involved in all this! Don’t you understand? This is not what you think it is.”
She moved close to me, resting a hand on my chest. I knew she could feel my heart pounding there. It wasn’t her presence—though that was pleasant, even in the circumstances—but this fear that was taking root deep in my soul.
“Tell me what it is. How can I help you if you don’t tell me the truth?”
“That’s the problem,” I said, leaning down so that my lips were close to her ear. “You don’t want to know the truth. Trust me.”
“You keep telling me to trust you, but you won’t tell me anything.” She turned her head slightly so that her lips were near mine. “How can I trust a man who keeps everything so close to his chest?”
“You should believe that I know things you don’t, and trust that I’m trying to protect you.” I brushed my lips over hers. “Let me go, Kinsley.”
She moved closer to me, her hand sliding down my chest the same way it had done back at my office. Parts of my body came alive, standing up to attention from that simple touch. She had this power over me… I moved to pull her closer to me, but that cuff dug into my wrist again, reminding me that I was completely under her control.
But wasn’t I already under her control before the cuff?
“You’re too stubborn to save yourself, so I’m going to do it for you. Twenty-four hours. Let Chad Lindsay chase his own tail for a day. It serves him right.”
Alarm bells began to scream inside my head. “Chad Lindsay?”
“Yeah. You remember him?” she said, her breath hot near my throat. “The jackass you made look like a fool on that embezzlement case? He’s the one who filed for the warrant.”
“Fuck!” I swore under my breath, stepping away from her as the wheels began to turn in my head. “You have to stay away from him, Kinsley. Do you hear me?”
“He’s part of my unit. I see him every day.”
“He’s trouble. He will hurt you if you give him half a chance.” Fear made my shoulders tighten, made my whole body feel like a tightly wound wire. “Please, Kinsley, just let me go. All they want is to see me put away. Give them what they want, and they won’t hurt you!”
“Why would anyone hurt me?” She seemed really confused by my words. “You’re wanted for killing your father—something we both know is ridiculous. How could that lead to me getting hurt? No one will find you up here, and I will let you go in twenty-four hours. You can just tell them you went out of town on a case or something. No problems.”
“There is a problem because it won’t take Lindsay long to figure out that you gave me a heads-up!”
“Lindsay doesn’t know about us. No one does.”
“But they know we work together.” I stared at her, trying to get her to see things my way. “He’ll come after you.”
“Not that fast. It’s all right, Ox, I’ve thought this through—”
“How could you when you don’t know everything?”
“Then tell me!”
But how could I? I’d worked so hard to keep all of this—this incredible mess that my father had left behind for me to clean up—from hurting anyone else. If they took me down, so be it. At least they wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else.
Kinsley’s actions… She had just put herself in the middle of it. I couldn’t let that happen!
“Let me go, and I’ll explain all of it.”
She seemed to hesitate, seemed to consider actually doing it. But then she slowly began to shake her head. She stepped into me, kissed me lightly, and backed away before I could grab her with my free hand.
“Try to get some rest, Ox. I’ll come check on you in the morning.”
“Kinsley!” I bellowed, my throat growing sore after a moment of repeating her name in the loudest, sternest voice I could, but she never turned back. She just kept walking until the door was shut tight and the hard twist of the rusted lock clicked loud enough to be heard above my yelling.
“Goddamn, Kinsley!” I whispered under my breath. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”
Chapter 4
Kinsley
Akker was waiting for me when I arrived back at Caballo. He looked surprisingly awake and well-groomed despite the fact that it was now nearly three in the morning.
“Detective Salazar,” he said as I walked into the conference room where I’d asked him to meet me.
“Did you call the others?” I asked.
“Everyone’s on their way in.” He studied me for a moment, taking in the fact that I was wearing the same clothing I’d had on the last time he saw me. “Can you give me an idea of what’s going on?”
I took the arrest warrant from my bag and handed it to Akker. He regarded it with a measure of indifference mixed with curiosity until he saw the name typed into the pertinent lines. First, his eyes widened, and then a palpable tension washed across him.
“Is this a joke?”
“Do I look like someone who’d get half a dozen people out of bed for a joke?”
He stared at me for a long moment like he was actually considering the question. Then his eyes fell back to the paper.
“Why didn’t you have me call Oliver? He should be here!”
Akker rushed around me, but I quickly grabbed his arm.
“Ox doesn’t want him involved. Not yet, anyway.”
“Ox?” He seemed confused for a moment. “He hasn’t been arrested yet?”
“No.”
Akker’s forehead dissolved in two deep lines as he stared at me again, once again seemingly trying to figure me out. “Then where is he? And why are we here?”
“We’re here to prove his innocence.”
“His innocence? Well, hell, of course he’s innocent.” He waved the paper at me, like I hadn’t already seen it. “Murder? Ox would never hurt a living soul—unless the guy deserved it!”
“We have twenty-four hours. We need to get as much information gathered as we can, try to make head or tail of what’s going on here.”
“What is going on here?”
We both turned as Cheryl walked in. She was a little more disheveled than Akker, dressed in
flannel-style sleep pants, a long T-shirt, and pink slippers that were a size too big for her small feet. Her hair was sticking up in places, knots so thick that I could almost see them even though she was standing a good twenty yards from me. I’d hate to be her comb in the morning!
“Did you just roll out of bed?” Akker asked, some amusement in his voice.
“It’s three in the morning. How the hell do you look less than exhausted?” she countered.
“Good genes, I suppose.”
“Definitely,” Brock said, moving Cheryl slightly to one side as he came into the room, looking just as wide awake and groomed as his brother.
“I need coffee,” Cheryl groaned, heading to the refreshment bar set back in one corner, filling the coffee pot with water. “I won’t be able to function without a gallon of caffeine.”
“Caffeine’s bad for you, Red,” Brock said. “Dehydrating. You should try ginseng tea. Much better.”
“You have your tea. I’m sticking with coffee, thank you.”
“Did someone say coffee?” Skylar asked as she appeared in the doorway. “Black, no cream.”
“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” her husband, Prescott, said as he dropped a kiss on the top of her head to soften the critical blow. “I’m with Brock. Tea is much more refreshing.”
“It’s not refreshing I’m worried about. It’s the ability to keep my eyes open when I should be in bed!”
“That raises the question as to why we’re here,” Prescott said, his attention turning to Akker, a more serious look to him. “Why’d you call us all up here at this ungodly hour?”
Akker waved the hand still clutching the arrest warrant at me. “Ask Detective Salazar.”
Akker moved back, pulling a chair away from the table to sit. He turned and looked up at me, an apt pupil if ever I’d seen one. Brock and Prescott followed suit while the ladies finished making the coffee, the scent of it filling the room with its rich aroma the moment they opened the can where the ground beans were kept. The moment it touched my nostrils, I felt the weight of exhaustion fall on my shoulders. I should have been in bed hours ago and my body had finally remembered that fact.
“You’re here because I need your help,” I said quite simply. I figured it was best to start with the truth. “Ox is in trouble and I want to help him.”
The room fell silent, only the sound of the coffee pot working filling the big space. Cheryl sank into a chair and stared at me. The men looked at each other. Brock reached over and touched his brother’s arm, but Akker ignored him. Skylar, though, just stared at the floor as she stood by the refreshment bar.
What did Skylar know?
“A few weeks ago, I caught wind of an investigation instigated by a couple of lawyers into some of James Winn’s old cases. I didn’t think much of it until I heard a guy in my unit suggest that it had something to do with a lawsuit pending against Ox and Caballo Security.”
“Lawsuit?” Brock shoved Akker’s arm this time. “Did you know about this?”
“No.”
“I did,” Skylar said, her eyes still on the floor. “It had something to do with this group of cops who were the original investors or partners or something in the firm. Ox told me it was nothing, that it didn’t matter, that it was a nonsense lawsuit. He kept saying it would go away.”
“What does that have to do with this?” Akker waved the warrant in the air. “Why are they accusing him of murder?”
A collective gasp went around the room. I thought for a moment that Skylar might faint at those words. Prescott must have thought so, too, because he got up and went to her, carefully guiding her to a chair. Cheryl had a hand pressed so hard to her mouth that her knuckles were white, and Brock just stared at the surface of the table, clearly not sure how to react.
“I’m not sure how it all connects, but I believe there’s a detective in my unit who has it in for Ox. It’s his name on the warrant, and he’s the one I heard talking about the lawsuit. I think that some things came out in the depositions and that’s what they’ve based the charges on.”
“Who is he accused of murdering?” Brock asked quietly.
“His father.”
Silence fell once again. Brock jumped up and began pacing, rubbing his hands together almost compulsively as he did. Prescott had his arm around Skylar and was whispering softly to her. Cheryl dropped the hand from her mouth, but she clearly had nothing to say. Her almost porcelain skin was even paler than it had been, almost as white as the sheets on my bed.
“I understand this is all very shocking. The thing is, I’ve bought Ox twenty-four hours, but after that, he’ll have to give himself up to the police department or things could get much worse for him.”
“How could they get worse?” Brock demanded.
“They could get him on fleeing the jurisdiction, and our friendly police detective here”—Akker waved a hand at me—“of aiding and abetting.”
“Where is he?” Skylar asked. “Is he safe?”
“He’s safe,” I assured her, the memory of Ox handcuffed to that pipe floating through my mind. “He’s not talking. He refuses to tell me what he knows, but the more he protests that investigating this is the wrong thing to do, the more I believe it’s exactly what we should be doing. We need to stop this before he ends up spending years in jail that he doesn’t deserve to do.”
There were nods all around the table, making me feel for the first time all night that I was doing the right thing. It was a relief. An immense relief.
“What first?” Prescott asked.
“Well,” Cheryl pushed back from the table, “I think we should take a look at the police report on Ox’s dad, find out what exactly they think he did.”
“Those files are inaccessible.” I shook my head. “It’s an open case now.”
“We have our ways.” Cheryl patted my arm as she walked around me. “First, coffee—then work.” A few chuckles went around the table as she made a big show of filling a large mug with coffee before leaving.
“We should probably also take a look at the lawsuit,” Akker offered.
“I know where he keeps those files,” Skylar announced as she too stood, pulling her husband to his feet. “We’ll go find them, see what we can learn.”
“And someone should keep an eye on the people trying to find Ox,” Brock suggested.
I buried my hands in the shallow pockets of my blazer. “That would be Chad Lindsay.”
Brock and Akker exchanged a glance. Clearly they knew Lindsay’s reputation.
“I’ll take him.” Brock stood, stretching a little before striding toward me. “He’ll never know I’m following him.”
“Just… be careful.”
He patted my shoulder. “I’m good at what I do.”
It was odd being on this side of things. I knew from some of the things I’d seen that Caballo’s staff did things a little differently from the way it worked at the police department, but I’d never seen it happen. The cop inside of me wanted to shut Cheryl down, wanted to tell Brock to stay as far as possible from a cop who was just doing his job. But the other part of me, the part that trusted Ox, knew this was his best option. Sometimes you have to turn a blind eye when it’s in the best interest of the people you care the most about.
“That leaves the two of us.” Akker sat back, leaning his elbows on the edge of the table. “What do you have in mind?”
I shook my head, running my hands over my face. “I don’t know how I got myself into this thing, let alone how to proceed. I only know Ox needs help he was never going to ask for.”
“No, he wasn’t. But I’m curious—why are you the one who jumped in? How did you get yourself wrapped up in this thing?”
I shook my head, turning away as I found myself wondering what the answer to that question really was. Why hadn’t I just taken Ox to the police station? Why didn’t I let him face his own fate on his own? With anyone else, that’s probably what I would have done. I’d been on my own for a v
ery long time, trusting no one. That was how I survived in a world as cruel as this one was. But there was something about Ox…
“It’s been a long time since I felt safe. Ox makes me feel safe.”
A long moment passed. Then I heard the distinct sound of Akker getting out of his chair.
“Well, then, I suggest we get out of here. We have a lot to do.”
Akker strode toward the door, not stopping to make sure I was following. I did, of course. I followed him to the parking garage, retracing the same path I’d taken with Ox just a few hours earlier. Akker led the way to a tall SUV, gesturing for me to climb into the passenger seat.
“Where are we going?”
“To the source. We’re going to see Oliver.”
“But Ox said we should keep him out of this!”
“Ox is being charged with his father’s death. There’s no one who can keep Oliver out of that.” Akker started the vehicle. “It’s Ox’s job to protect his baby brother. We have no such obligation.”
I had to agree with that. I knew Ox would be pissed, but it seemed he was already annoyed with me for starting this whole ordeal. To hear him tell it, he’d be happier if I’d taken him to the jail and processed him.
That wasn’t going to happen. If he was determined to turn himself in, I wasn’t going to be anywhere near it. The last time a perp had come in who pissed off Chad Lindsay, the man had spent a week in intensive care. I wasn’t going to sit by Ox’s hospital bed when there was something I could have done to prevent it.
If Oliver was the answer… Lord, let Oliver be the answer!
Chapter 5
Kinsley
Oliver lived on a large piece of land outside the city in a makeshift cabin while he was building a house with his own hands. Ox had mentioned it once, his voice filled with pride when he did. Or maybe it was envy. Whichever, it was a little insight into the relationship the brothers had, the older one bragging on the younger one. Made me wonder what it would have been like to have siblings.
Then again, with the way things went down, it was probably better I was an only child.
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