Carly didn’t open up.
Not fully, not ever and not even to the people closest to her.
And she wanted that to change.
Starting with Noah.
“I don’t let anyone make me coffee because when I was ten my mother died of arsenic poisoning,” she started, jumping right into her personal hell. “The doctors didn’t know why she was sick until after she died and realized she’d been poisoned slowly for weeks. The detective on the case figured out that it was something she ate or drank every day, and anyone who knew my mother knew how much she loved coffee. What I knew was that my father always made it for her.” She took a small breath. “I don’t let anyone make me coffee because my father used it to kill her. He took something she loved and used it as a weapon to punish her for his own unhappiness. Then I helped put my father in prison for life and was placed in foster care until the most wonderful couple I’ve ever known adopted me. The reasons I went into law enforcement, why I became an expert in biological weapons and why I drink coffee every day are all the same.” She took a deeper breath this time. She’d never admitted what she said next to anyone. Not even her adoptive parents or Alana.
Noah let her take her moment, attentive and solemn.
“I do everything I do to remember and honor my mother. I try to help people and find justice for those who couldn’t, I became an expert in an awful subject to try to keep people safe from it, and I remind myself with every cup of coffee that you shouldn’t stop trying to love life just because there are people out there who only want to destroy it.”
There it was.
She’d given her most-guarded secret to a man she’d only known a week.
Noah’s expression was impassive. She’d had no idea how he would react since she’d never told anyone about her parents before.
He must have realized that.
“Why did you tell me this?”
The truth wasn’t done with Carly yet. So she gave it to him straight.
“You just feel right.”
Whatever the answer he was searching for, that seemed to do the trick.
Noah took her chin in his hands and dipped low for a kiss so tantalizing that Carly nearly went weak in the knees. Warm was the best way to describe Noah, followed by solid. He was a force. A quiet strength that reached out to every part of her body. That strength moved from his hands to his tongue as it swept across her lips and deepened their kiss.
It felt absolutely right.
Carly made a noise against him, unable to hide her pleasure at the move. He reciprocated the feeling by wrapping an arm around her and pulling her flush against his body. They stayed like that for a few moments, enjoying the tight and rhythmic embrace.
Until they wanted more.
Noah took a step back, lips swollen and red. His eyes betrayed him as they listed in the direction of the bedroom.
Carly, filled with heat that went from below her waistline all the way to her cheeks, found herself grinning.
Noah seemed a little uncertain.
Had she gone too fast in an already accelerated timeline?
“I can’t offer you champagne or walks along the beach right now, and I can’t offer you beers and dive bars, either,” Noah said. “But I can do my best to show you a good time, if you want it.”
If Carly hadn’t been ready before, she sure was now.
In answer, she took his hand.
Then she led him to the bedroom.
* * *
SUNLIGHT POURED IN through the curtains and warmed the side of Noah’s face. It took him a few seconds to realize what that meant.
He’d slept past the sunrise.
Something he hadn’t done in a long time.
Normally that would have started his day off with an uneasiness. Like he’d already wasted the morning by sleeping through it.
Not today.
The reason he was still in bed was in part from an exhausting few days, but mostly because of what he’d been doing in the time between the sheets leading up to falling asleep.
He’d been afraid to touch Carly for fear of hurting her or reopening any of her wounds. Carly, however, had not shared that fear. They’d split the difference of concern for a night filled with passion, care and heat.
Now Noah awoke feeling good.
Feeling...right.
The bed dipped down a little next to him. He rolled over to find Carly looked as guilty as sin and just as delicious. Her golden hair caught the morning light while his shirt engulfed her upper body. Her legs were bare, and she’d brought a plate of cookies to bed with her. She looked apologetic.
“I was going to eat these in the kitchen but then I got nervous that Gina or your dad would walk in and see me without pants and with obvious bedhead so I brought these in here but then I was cold so...” She held up one of the cookies he’d made her the night before. “I’m sorry for bringing cookies into your bed.”
Noah laughed. A real, genuine belly laugh. He propped himself up against the headboard and swiped one of the cookies.
“Just for future reference, cookies in bed? Something you never have to apologize for.” To prove his point, he took a huge bite of his own tree-shaped cookie. Unlike the mostly from-scratch stew recipe he’d begun the night before, these were the easy fifteen-minute frozen kind of cookie. But boy, they tasted good.
Or maybe it was the company that made them taste like a piece of heaven.
Carly laughed but nodded. She took a bite of her cookie as she slipped her legs back under the sheets. On reflex, Noah moved his free hand to rest on her thigh.
It pulled a quick smile from the woman.
Then her brow creased.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, instantly worried. After they’d finished their nighttime activities they’d spent some time in the shower together. Then, Noah had been careful to re-dress her cuts. “Are you feeling okay?”
Carly sighed but nodded.
“Yeah. I feel fine. I mean, I feel sore and some things still sting, but it’s not bad. I think sleep really helped.”
“Then what’s on your mind?”
Carly took another bite of cookie. As she chewed, she looked like she was working through answering that herself.
“I guess I just keep coming back to the chair,” she finally said.
“The chair?”
Carly readjusted so she was facing him. He moved her legs so there was room for them to lie across his lap. She might have been half-naked in his bed, eating a plate of Christmas cookies, but in that moment Carly Welsh looked every bit the FBI agent working a case.
“The chair in David Lapp’s basement. It doesn’t make sense.”
“How so? Rodney Lee sure seemed like a man who wouldn’t mind trying to torture someone.”
“See, that part makes sense from what we know of him. Rodney was obsessive and abusive and seemed to be prone to impulse and aggression. But bolting a chair to the floor in someone’s basement and putting restraints on it? I mean, I get him trying to muscle information out of David and needing a way to keep him from escaping, but the chair just screams premeditation. Thought. Finesse.” She looked down at her wrists. There was some rope burn around them. Noah had put some ointment on them before they’d gone to bed. He’d had to hide how angry it had made him to see and feel physical evidence of how close Carly had come to dying. Even now it made his blood pressure rise.
“But the setup in the barn had the same feel,” she countered herself. “It was theatrical. Like tying someone to the train tracks, when shooting them would be so much faster and easier.”
“But shooting someone doesn’t make a statement. At least, not like what I saw in that barn.”
“That’s what I also don’t get,” she hurried to say. “Rodney Lee, as far as we know, has been all about finding Talia. What statement was he
trying to make? And to whom? My team? ‘Hey, I’m a guy with a seemingly endless supply of anthrax who can derail an investigation by killing a federal agent.’” She shook her head. “And that’s one more thing that’s really bothering me.”
She put the cookie in her hand down, completely focused.
“One really good way to not have the FBI, or any law enforcement, crawling around town here in the first place is to not spread fields’ worth of anthrax randomly. And certainly not send a tape of you kidnapping a guy to his mother to use as leverage against her to then use to get her to help kill the FBI agent you brought to town in the first place!”
Carly let out a frustrated breath.
“I have to admit, when you put it like that it sounds like Rodney wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“When I put it like that he doesn’t even sound like the sharpest tool in the superstore. I mean, I’ve had cases where not every loose thread is tied up, but this? It feels like it’s reverted back into a ball of yarn.”
“Maybe the team found something last night. Weren’t they all waiting on one thing or the other?”
“I’m waiting on an update from them.” She averted her gaze to the half-eaten cookie. She wasn’t done with the ball of yarn yet. “David and Talia have to still be here, right? There had to be some reason Rodney was sticking around.”
Her tone turned thoughtful. It matched her gaze as it moved to his.
“Why did you stay?”
“Why did I stay?” It was a question he’d heard over and over again, yet one he’d never answered. For a while that had been because there was no one he wanted to know the answer, but now?
Hadn’t Carly just shared her past with him? Hadn’t she let down her guard and let him in? Could he do the same?
Did he want to?
Yellow house, Noah. The dream for your life. Why you walked away. The freedom and peace you wanted. You already thought it once.
Carly’s brows pulled together. Her face fell a little.
She knew he was debating telling her and it hurt.
Noah opened his mouth, to say what he wasn’t sure, but her phone on the bed next to them blared to life.
The moment was over.
Carly put the plate down and pulled her legs off of him. When she answered her phone, she was all business.
“What’s going on, Max?”
Noah couldn’t hear what the agent said but, judging by Carly’s expression, it was a bombshell. She flung herself out of the bed and started moving around to find her clothes. He followed suit, trying to pick up on the conversation, but could only catch a few words here and there.
It wasn’t until he was dressed that Carly ended the call and found him in the kitchen.
“Rodney Lee didn’t make sense because he wasn’t the one pulling the strings,” she nearly sang. “He had a partner.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Dylan, adult son of real estate developer Caroline Ferry, never checked into the rehab facility in Florida.”
Aria was using the rental SUV to block the cold wind that had picked up since Carly and Noah had arrived at the Ferry Mansion. She had her bulletproof vest on and badge pinned to it. She looked like a woman not to be tested. Small was the package, but mighty was the strength.
“The team is inside sweeping the place, but Dylan isn’t here. But we do have several updates for you,” Aria continued. “Headquarters did a lot of the work on this one. Opaline finally got the info from the rehab facility, and Amanda and Alana were able to spot the van from the casino cameras with the same plates we were looking for leaving and going back to the parking garage. Opaline couldn’t get a good shot of his face, but Rodney was seen both times leaving through the lobby right after. Not the smartest crayon in the box.”
Noah next to them smirked.
“Not the sharpest tool in the superstore, either.”
Carly snorted, then asked the most obvious question she could think of.
“How do we prove that Dylan connects with Rodney?”
Just because Dylan seemed like a perfect fit for the crime—motive, means and missing alibi—didn’t mean he was guilty of it.
Aria was ready with an answer. A nice change of pace for the case.
“Well, Axel started thinking that, if Dylan was in town, there was a good chance he’d been going to the casino and maybe that was how he met Rodney.” Aria pulled her phone out and went to the photo gallery app. When she found the picture she wanted, she held it up. “Amanda starting matching posts Rodney was tagged in on social media by Rob Cantos to security footage from around the same time at the casino. She got a hit from two months ago.”
The picture was of two men standing outside of the casino’s front sidewalk talking and smoking.
“That’s Rodney,” Carly confirmed, pointing to the man on the left.
Aria pointed to the man on the right.
“And that’s Dylan. When he was supposed to be in rehab.” She took her phone back but kept on. “Max ran with the info and went to the floor of the casino to start asking around using the photo. Turns out not only were both men regulars, they were regularly seen together for the last six months. Right around the time that the deal with his mother fell through is when their friendship seemed to start.”
“So they definitely know each other,” Noah said. “What did Dylan’s mother have to say?”
Both Carly and Aria turned to him, surprised.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep. You’re the agents.”
Carly shook her head.
“No apology necessary.” She gave him a look that perhaps wasn’t smart to share in front of Aria. It felt smoldering, but Carly couldn’t help it.
Noah as a detective was an interesting, and stimulating, thought.
Aria smiled wide and bounced her gaze between them. Suspicious, and then somewhat excited.
Thankfully, she didn’t say what she was thinking and, instead, answered his question.
“Caroline had no idea that he wasn’t in rehab and when we told her the first thing she did was call her accountant. Turns out she’s missing money, much to her second surprise.”
“How much are we talking?”
“According to Alana, more than enough to procure a ridiculous amount of anthrax powder on the black market if you knew the right people.”
Carly raised her eyebrow at that.
“And Ms. Ferry didn’t notice that much money missing?”
Aria lowered her voice even though they were out in the drive.
“You know how we thought that she was really rich before? Triple that number in your head and you’re in the ballpark.”
“So a large amount of money draining from one of her accounts isn’t going to pop up on her radar for a while, since she already has more than that,” Carly finished.
Aria made a finger gun.
“Bingo.”
“But, because of the seriousness of the case, Rihanna was able to get us a warrant before we knew any of this?”
A lot had happened while Carly had been sleeping. If she didn’t trust her team, that would have made her skin crawl. Missing out on helping to solve the case already had Carly fighting a feeling of anxiousness. Though even she had to admit that she’d needed to take a temporary back seat after running into Rodney Lee twice.
“Yep,” Aria answered. “And since then the evidence is going from circumstantial to in the direction of damning. Wanna guess what we just found in the Ferry wine cellar?”
Carly didn’t try. She was nearly vibrating in anticipation.
Answers were starting to feel as good as Noah had the night before.
Almost.
“Hit me,” she said.
Aria didn’t disappoint.
“A bolt gun with no bolts and fibers in a package that use
d to hold rope. CSI will have to compare it to the rope in David’s basement and the one used on you but—”
Carly interrupted with a rush of adrenaline.
“It’s too much of a coincidence not to be a match.” Carly turned to Noah. “That’s why it was bothering me. Dylan was the one who set up the chair and the trap in the barn, not Rodney.”
He smiled, almost like he was proud.
It was oddly satisfying.
Aria continued with their expert profiler’s opinion.
“Axel said based on what he’s seen and read on Dylan, he’s a lot craftier, a lot smarter and has a lot more anger in him than we originally thought. He thinks losing the dude ranch deal might have made Dylan snap and that we’re looking at a man who wants to punish those who he thinks have wronged him. Not to intimidate or use it as an opportunity to get the deal going again.”
“Poisoning the community is a slow, malicious way to do damage and savor the fallout,” Carly hated to say. “It’s definitely a longer-lasting punishment.”
She thought of her father.
Noah’s jaw clenched. So did his fist at his side next to her.
“How does Rodney fit into that plan then?” he asked after a beat.
Now that Carly knew there were two suspects and not just one, she was putting together a theory in record time.
“If Opaline had not kept digging into his rehab, we might not have looked twice at Dylan past our initial contact. Everything else that we had on Rodney was enough to close the case, even with loose threads. Rodney attacked and tried to kill me twice, the second time with anthrax, admitted he had connections to get it, and might have had an ax to grind with the Amish community thanks to his hatred of David. You said it yourself, though, Dylan was craftier and smarter than Rodney, and we all know that Rodney is obsessed with Talia to the point where I bet if he was offered a way to find her, he’d do almost anything.”
“So you think Dylan used Rodney for his connections and then was planning on letting him take the fall,” Noah spelled out.
Carly nodded.
“If you’re determined to follow through on something you know is going to pull severe heat from the law, then you’re going to want to make sure someone else gets burned. Not you.”
Toxin Alert Page 16