Death is in the Details

by Heather Sunseri

  “And yet, whatever this newly discovered evidence was… this exculpatory evidence… it was enough to convince the commonwealth’s attorney to drop all charges.”

  “What did Ethan say to you?”

  I shook my head while pressing my fingers into my tired eyes. “Nothing. I didn’t really give him the opportunity.” A chill moved along my arms, and I rubbed them.

  “Come here, kiddo.” Finch pulled me in for another squeeze. “I’m sorry he’s out, but you need to stay away from him. If he’s smart, he’ll stay far away from us and this town.”

  I nodded into his chest. I hadn’t known who I would find at the Spotted Cat. At least that’s what I was telling myself. And I sure hadn’t been prepared for him to run after me and try to talk to me.

  I pulled back from Finch. “I’m gonna go. Sorry I came so late.”

  “You never have to apologize for that. You want to sleep in the guest room?”

  “No. I need to get home to Gus.”

  “You know you’re welcome here anytime.”

  I nodded. “I know. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Finch grabbed a leash off the hook hanging just inside the kitchen. “I’ll follow you out with Miss Sally, here.”

  I stepped out onto the porch. “I almost forgot. The FBI agent you met at the Reynoldses’ wake… He showed me some photos tonight of another arson scene. A dog was killed, and wore tags that came from your clinic.”

  Finch’s gaze narrowed, then he shrugged. “I’m sure vaccination tags from my clinic are spread all over the county.”

  “This one was over in Midland. You have any clients who bring their animals from Midland?”

  “I’m sure I do.” He smiled. “I’m a damn good vet. People come from all over to have their beloved pets cared for by the most charming veterinarian within a hundred miles.” He gave my shoulder a light punch. “I’m sure Mr. Justice will be by to talk, and I’ll help him in any way I can. But like I said, evidence of my veterinary prowess can be found all over Kentucky.”

  I scoffed. “Humble much, big brother? But yeah, you’re right. I’m being silly.”

  Eight

  I lay in bed that night remembering every detail of the day I first met Ethan. He had just moved to Paynes Creek with his father.

  I entered Miss Miller’s English class on the third day of eighth grade. My best friend Amy and I had been inseparable all summer. We stumbled into the room, laughing, and found our seats next to each other just as the bell rang. Miss Miller was writing something across the dry erase board when I noticed the new boy. He was sitting on the opposite side of me from Amy. He was thin, with long legs, and his navy, Chuck Taylor–covered feet stretched out in front of him. He looked relaxed, not nervous like most newcomers would feel. His hair was short in the back, but his bangs hung messily across his forehead.

  I nudged Amy with my foot, then lifted my head in the boy’s direction. She lifted her brows in recognition of the cute boy. We weren’t that into boys yet—at least, not in an obvious way—but we liked to talk about them when they weren’t around. And this one was an interesting addition to the school. We hadn’t had anyone new in our tiny town in a long time.

  When the bell rang after class, I grabbed my books and stood. I was about to follow Amy out the door when Tabitha Blake, a bitchy cheerleader, walked over. She shoved me backward and out of her way, knocking my books out of my hands. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there, Faith.” She continued on over to the new boy. “Want to walk me to my next class?”

  The new boy just stared at her. No smile. His dark brows stayed straight. There was no humor in his eyes.

  “Are you mute?” Tabitha said. I could only watch as she went from acting like a confident flirt to a dramatic bitch.

  He studied her for one second more, then let his eyes drift slowly in my direction. He took a step over to me. Bending down, he picked up my books and handed them to me. “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  Tabitha blew out a frustrated growl, then spun around and stormed out of the room.

  Amy, who had been waiting for me, burst out laughing. She ran up to the new boy. “That was amazing. I’m Amy. This is Faith. You just moved here.”

  “Yeah. My dad and me. I’m Ethan.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ethan.” Amy bumped me.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Good to meet you, Ethan. And thanks for that.”

  “No problem.” He grabbed his books and headed for the door. Just as he was about to leave, he turned back. “I’ll see you around, Faith.”

  Nine

  I spent the entire next day hiding from reality—cleaning my home and working on a couple of side projects. My phone rang a few times during the afternoon, but after verifying it wasn’t Chief Reid or someone from the station, I ignored the calls, paranoid that Ethan was attempting to reach me.

  At around six in the evening, I lit two candles and poured myself a drink, and I was about to settle in with a sexy paranormal romance novel about witches and vampires when an unwelcome knock sounded at my door.

  Sighing, I rose and opened it.

  Luke stood just outside. Concern was etched in the trenches of his forehead, and there was a stiffness in his jaw—though it relaxed when he saw me.

  “Something wrong, Agent?”

  “Don’t you answer your phone?”

  “As a matter of fact I do… when I recognize the caller and feel like talking to people.” I shrugged. “I didn’t feel very social today.” I stood in the doorway, looking down at him. He was a good-looking guy, muscular in all the right places, with a thick head of dark hair. This was not a man who was going to go bald any time soon. I almost chuckled at the thought. Why did I care if he went bald? Besides, he’d still look good with no hair.

  Down, Faith. The bourbon must have been kicking in.

  “You have another one of those?” He nodded toward my drink.

  “Another one of what? The cup or what’s in it?”

  “Both.”

  I stepped back, giving him room to step up into my tiny home. When Gus rubbed against his shins and wove in between his legs, he stooped down and said hello, giving her a scratch behind her ears. One point for Luke. Anyone who liked Gus and wasn’t greeted by an angry hiss passed the first test, a feat not often accomplished.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, standing.

  Gus sat and began licking her hind leg.

  “Gus. I rescued her.”

  “Gus is a ‘her’?”

  “I named her before I took her in to Finch to be fixed. He informed me that I had the sex wrong.” I shrugged. “The name had already stuck. It’s short for Asparagus.” When he gave me a strange look, I explained. “You know, from Cats, the musical?” I gave my head a shake when he still looked confused. “Never mind.”

  He looked around my trailer, then faced me with a curious grin. “This is not at all what I expected when I heard you lived in a trailer out in the country.”

  “An Airstream,” I corrected.

  “A what?” he asked, then seemed to understand. “Oh, yeah. A specific type of trailer. But this…” He looked around again. “This is amazing. Cozy. Decorated. Not at all what my grandparents took me camping in when I was a kid. And certainly not the tornado magnet double-wide us city slickers envision when thinking of Kentucky.”

  “Thank you. I built it myself.”

  “You what?” An eyebrow shot up as he considered me.

  “This is a 1969 Airstream that I gutted and remodeled. Everything in this ‘trailer’—as you like to call it—was carefully selected or custom-built and installed by me,” I tilted my head side to side, “with a little help from two very special people in my life.” Namely my uncle and Finch, but I wanted to be vague to throw Luke off-balance, make him wonder if I had a romantic someone or two in my life.

  “It’s very impressive.”

  I pulled down a sterling silver julep cup from a cabinet, added
an oversized ice cube from a mold in the freezer, and opened the bottle of bourbon I had chosen for the evening.

  “That’s an awfully fancy cup.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a bourbon worthy of fancy.”

  “How did a woman living in a trailer come to own expensive barware? Did you inherit them?”

  I couldn’t stop the grin that lifted the corners of my lips. “I turned tricks to pay my way through college. When I made a little extra, I put it toward barware worthy of a one-hundred-fifty-dollar bottle of bourbon.”

  He cocked his head. “You were not a prostitute.”

  I gave him a sardonic smile in answer, then drizzled a couple of ounces of bourbon over the ice.

  “Also, that bourbon cost one fifty?” His voice rose an octave. Either he’d surmised I was joking about turning tricks, or he didn’t care.

  I nodded. “Does that make you want the drink even more now?”

  “It kind of does.” His eyes lit up like a kid on his birthday.

  When I handed Luke the drink, his fingers grazed over mine and seemed to linger a bit longer than necessary. I lifted my eyes to meet his, then drew my hand back. “What brings you all the way out to my home, Agent Justice?”

  He set the bourbon aside, almost as if thinking better of accepting the drink. His face was more serious. “Why didn’t you tell me that you went to see your brother?”

  My spine straightened, and I tried to bury any outward reaction on my face. “Finch? I haven’t even seen you since then. And I had no idea the FBI would be interested in when and if I saw my brother.”

  “You know I’m talking about Ethan.”

  “Uh… no, I didn’t.” Except that I did. “Ethan is not my brother. He was my stepbrother… until he killed his father and my mother. Then he simply became the man who murdered my mom.”

  “Fine.” Frustration coated the word. “Why didn’t you mention that you’d seen Ethan Gentry when we spoke last night?”

  “Because it simply didn’t come up. And because I was still trying to recover from the shock of seeing Ethan.”

  “So you were shocked? You didn’t know that he was working at the Spotted Cat?”

  I took a drink of bourbon and considered Luke for a long moment. “I’m only going to ask you one more time: why are you here, Special Agent Justice?” I spat the words “Special Agent” to remind him that he was here, inside my home, in an official capacity. And that he probably shouldn’t be enjoying my bourbon if he planned to interrogate me.

  “You know I’m looking into Ethan’s case, and that we’re watching him. And when I found out that one of my agents had seen Ethan arguing with a woman that fit your description outside the Spotted Cat, I got… concerned.”

  “You got concerned,” I deadpanned.

  “Yes. And curious.”

  “Ahh,” I said, unable to hide my patronizing tone. “You were curious about how I knew that my former stepbrother was working at the Spotted Cat.”

  “Yes. So tell me, and we can get back to enjoying our drink.”

  I tipped back my glass of bourbon, maybe to prove that I didn’t need his permission to have a drink. “Well, like I already said, I was surprised to see Ethan at the Spotted Cat.” Since it seemed we were going to have a conversation whether I liked it or not, I grabbed Luke’s bourbon, squeezed past him, lingering as I passed—my chest facing his—and took a seat in one of the booths at my kitchen table. I gestured for Luke to have a seat across from me. He did. “I get the impression you’re a good investigator, that you ask a lot of questions whether they seem relevant at the time or not. And since you alluded to hearing things about me, I assume you asked around at the precinct, and are well aware that I called the station last week to report that someone had broken into my trailer and set a fire on my property.”

  He looked in the direction of my fire pit, which told me not only did he know about the fire, he knew exactly where my fire pit was located. And as it was dark out right now, there was no way he’d just happened to see the pit on his way in. “I read the report, and yes, I talked to some people.”

  “And you heard the officers around the station debate my sanity. Maybe I built the fire myself, and then forgot that I’d moved some things around my home. Maybe I called it in to get attention.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard the talk.” Luke had the decency to look embarrassed that he’d listened to petty, station-house gossip. “But I didn’t believe it. What does that have to do with the Spotted Cat?”

  “Another fire was set a few mornings ago.”

  “Here?” Concern was back in his expression.

  “Yes. And they broke into my trailer again.”

  “What? Did you call it in?”

  “Call it in? To the same police officers who are laughing behind my back? You think those guys would have rushed out here to protect and serve me?”

  “Why do you care what they think?”

  “It’s not that I care. I just don’t like being talked about. I’ve been gossiped about for most of my life.” I closed my eyes for a beat, then gave my head a little shake in an attempt to push back the memories. It was no use, of course. “Anyway, after the latest fire was set, I discovered a matchbook from the Spotted Cat. It was just lying there beside one of the log benches.”

  “So you thought you would just go to the lounge, and what? Listen to some jazz music and hope someone you recognized strolled in and admitted that they got off on building bonfires on your property and rummaging through your things?” Luke’s voice took on an edge.

  I angled my head while letting a grin play at the corners of my lips. Luke sounded protective. “Are you angry with me, Agent? That’s cute.”

  His eyes narrowed at the word “cute.” “Why aren’t you taking this seriously?”

  “I’m taking it very seriously. I reported it the first time. The police told me since they found no evidence of an actual crime, they could do nothing for me. Said it was probably just a couple of high school kids playing a prank. That I probably had left my door unlocked.”

  “What days did these fires occur?” He pulled a small black notebook and pen from his pocket.

  “This past Wednesday and a week ago Sunday. Both were set in the early morning hours. Around four a.m. each time.”

  “That’s awfully exact,” he said.

  “I have an awfully exact memory of things that happen to me.”

  He seemed to let that go. He was jotting a quick note as I spoke, then looked up and met my gaze. “Those are mornings after two of the house fires were set—the Midland fire and the Reynolds fire last week.”

  I lifted my drink to him. “Yes. Coincidence?”

  “I’m an FBI agent. I don’t believe in coincidences until they’re proven to be.”

  “One of those fires was two counties over.”

  “True. They also occurred after Ethan was released from prison.” He reached out a hand and traced the condensation running down the julep cup. “Care to tell me more about him?”

  “Is this still a professional call, Special Agent Justice?”

  Luke lifted the bourbon I’d fixed him and took a sip. After swallowing, he closed his eyes, clearly savoring the taste in his mouth. When he opened his eyes, he locked on to my gaze. “The moment I accepted this drink, I went off the clock.”

  “Good. I don’t want to talk about Ethan. I’ll be happy to tell you about him in the light of day when I’m sober.” When I can be more careful with my words.

  He took another drink, then examined the cup. “So that’s what one-hundred-fifty-dollar bourbon tastes like out of sterling silver.”

  “I found that cup at an estate auction. Won the bid on three julep cups that day. I was bidding against some old man who owns an antique store in town. He was pissed when I won, but congratulated me after and invited me to coffee to explain to me exactly what I had purchased.” I shrugged. “He and I became great friends that day.”

  “Didn’t you already know what you were
purchasing?”

  “At three hundred dollars apiece? Of course I knew what I was purchasing. But it gave him a great big belly laugh when I explained that I just wanted some cups for my moonshine that wouldn’t break when I moved my trailer around.”

  Luke laughed at that—a warm, kind laugh. The kind a woman would love to hear every single day of her life.

  “So tell me,” I said. “Where does Luke Justice live when he’s not chasing criminals?”

  “I technically live in a townhouse outside Quantico, Virginia. My unit is based out of the academy there.”

  “You’re with the Behavioral Analysis Unit.” I had thought about applying to the academy once upon a time, but thought better of it.

  “I am. Technically, I’m part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes. I usually investigate arson, but I’m also a forensic psychologist and help with serial killer investigations.”

  I stood as he spoke, walked to the kitchen, grabbed the bottle of bourbon, and brought it back to the table. As he went on about how he traveled the country to consult with state and local police and fire departments on investigations, I poured us both more bourbon.

  “Sounds like you enjoy your job, Agent.”

  He reached across the table and placed a hand over mine. I looked up, surprised.

  “I liked it better when you called me Luke,” he said. “It’s nice not to be at a bar or restaurant, and in someone’s home instead.”

  I pulled my hand back and tapped my cup to his. “Here’s to you not being the workaholic I thought you were.”

  He, too, pulled his hand back, but not before flashing a look of disappointment. “This doesn’t mean I won’t be back tomorrow to question you further about Ethan, but for tonight…”

  “For tonight you’re going to enjoy my expensive bourbon.”

  “Oh, I think I’m enjoying much more than that.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, Agent. I’m not going to sleep with you.” I kept my eyes on his as I shifted slightly in my seat.

  “Your eyes and your body language tell a different tale.”