Horrible idea, if anyone asked her. Which they didn’t. Moreover, it sounded like a libel suit waiting to happen. Or was it slander? Slander. Libel had to be in print.
Great, this anxiety was muddying even her legal thinking. She had to get out of here.
After setting up the answering service, she headed out the door and toward her mountain outing fate.
* * *
Just before she arrived at her apartment, a cat dashed out in front of her car. Camilla slammed on the brakes—the BMW did not need dead cat on it. And she didn’t like to kill things. Two very good reasons. Boy, this thing had good stopping distance. Just a few feet, and at residential speed. Not bad. She patted the dash and sighed for Veldon Twiss. Poor guy. Too bad he couldn’t just work hard, get a good job and buy a BMW the right way—with an enormous auto loan.
Camilla cringed.
Pulling into her parking spot at the apartment building, she looked over at the passenger seat. Avoiding the cat had made her stack of case files go careening onto the floor. Great. Please say none of the paperwork got mixed up into the wrong file. It was a stretch to shuffle them all back together, and she didn’t have time to straighten it out. Zane would be here any minute to pick her up in that awful truck, and she still had on her platform sandals and her narrow skirt. Not great for camping. Or for picking up spilled files, obviously. They kept fluttering back to the floor.
Suddenly, her eye fell on a photo she hadn’t seen before. Dropping all the other stuff, she plucked the picture out of the mess. Shoe Sales Report, came the heading. And there below was a photograph of the shoe Veldon Twiss wore at the scene of the crime, according to the footprint they had in evidence.
This sales report, though—where had it come from? She sifted through the other papers and found a cover letter. “Ms. Sweeten. Here are the sales statistics you asked for.” And then there was a signature from one of her paralegals, Maeve. Why hadn’t Camilla seen this?
Well, there were a lot of papers in this case. She’d tried to familiarize herself with all of them, but an avalanche can be hard to sift through.
Her eyes scanned the report.
Huh. That shoe, which the detectives claimed was a distinct and unusual make—wasn’t. Even though it was a man’s shoe with a weird pattern on the sole in the shape of a paw print, as though it were a child’s shoe, in fact, according to Maeve’s research, it had been sold in bulk. At WalMart. To the tune of six million pairs in Arizona alone.
Six. Million.
Oh, man. Chances were Zane owned a pair of them, if this was the case. Ew, and they were pretty ugly, too. Why did people choose ugly shoes? Unsolvable mystery of the universe.
These statistics blew a hole in one of the key building blocks of the prosecution. Camilla punched the dashboard, then gasped. “Oh. Sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.” She patted the spot she’d just smacked.
Great. If this was the case, maybe there was less rope to hang this guy. And he had to be hanged. At least figuratively. For her own little sweet BMW’s sake. Maybe there was something she’d missed in that blog of his. She’d found the Robin Hood references, and the brief mention of the Beemer Bandit, but she might have missed something in the comments. She whipped out her phone and checked the blog site. Huh. At least the defense attorneys hadn’t spotted this yet and made him take it down. If they knew about it, this thing would vanish in two seconds!
Aha. There. She pulled it up.
And just then, Zane pulled into the driveway. The purple road warrior had a definite roar, with that seductive rattle of the diesel engine. It made her insides get a little fizzy. If only the vehicle that housed that engine didn’t look like it was a monster truck in embryo.
Behind her, the truck’s door slammed. She just had to see this comment. They were taking forever to load—
“Hey, chickadee. My, but what chic shoes you have on for hiking.” His eyes snaked up and down her legs. Camilla tugged at her skirts. Seriously, when was she going to have time to shop for something more appropriate? She’d been an idiot when she let herself think above the knee—no, above the ankle—had any level of professionalism. “I’ve always been a sucker for women’s shoes. On attractive women, of course.”
Of course he had. Which reminded her. She ought to tell Zane about the shoe thing.
Or not.
“Just a sec.” She had to see what this strand of comments said on Veldon Twiss’s post about the Beemer Bandit. There were more comments on this post than any of his others, and she needed to read—
“Uh, no. Just a sec. Whatever it is, it can wait. The whole staff is already at the campsite. I’ve gotten three messages from Falcon asking where you are. Move it.” He aimed a thumb at his truck.
“Well, I’ve got to change, at least.”
“Change in the car.”
“Right.” She rolled her eyes and dug through her purse for her apartment key. As if she’d unclothe and re-clothe in his presence. “Give me ten minutes.”
“Two! You have two minutes. Now go! Chop-chop!” He was at her side moving her along with the strength of his arm. “Don’t make me lie to Falcon again.”
He lied for her? Well, it wasn’t ideal, but the sentiment did have a certain charm. She stutter-stepped up the stairs and into the entryway. “Just a second,” she turned around to say to Zane on the doorstep, but instead she found him grinning six inches behind her.
Her blood petrified. He was in her house. Oh, snap. Did she have any embarrassing articles of clothing strewn about on furniture? Were her dishes moldering in the sink? She sniffed the air—did it smell like rotten bananas in here? Oh, geez. This was not a good thing.
But Zane didn’t seem to care. He stalked past her, around the divider wall, and plopped himself onto the sofa. He had to move a pile of junk mail and an empty bowl with a spoon in it from last night’s dinner of cold cereal. Camilla despaired as she took inventory of the room. It looked like a Tazmanian devil and a whirling dervish had spun through the whole apartment and upended everything. Books had fallen off the bookshelves, no one had watered the wilting houseplants in weeks, and there was a miniature mountain of fast food wrappers and sacks on the floor to the right of the recliner.
“Oh, weird. I must have entered the wrong apartment,” she was dying to say. “A pack of fraternity boys raised by wolves lives here. Not me.”
Again, Zane didn’t seem to care. He eased back against the cushion of the dark brown sofa and leaned his head back. Good instincts. That was the most comfortable spot in the whole room. Maybe the whole house. He stuck a boot up on her coffee table. Well, that was taking liberties with propriety, wasn’t it. But it was a table she’d thrifted, so truthfully it didn’t matter. Besides, how could his boots harm it through the sedimentary layers of offers for Dish Network?
“What are you waiting for? I said two minutes.” Zane cracked an eye long enough to command her, and Camilla snapped to attention. It was just that seeing him there so casual and comfortable in her house—it should have jarred her. But it looked right instead. And she despised him for it. No, she despised herself for thinking it. With a huff she stomped off to her room and peeled off her clothes.
“Zane Holyoake,” she muttered under her breath while she rifled through her pants drawer to find a clean pair of jeans. “You are dangerous. You are ridiculously dangerous. It is ridiculous that you are dangerous.” There were no clean jeans. She’d have to salvage some from the laundry pile. She dug through and found a pair she liked a lot. She sniffed them. Ew. She shook them to air them out. They’d have to do. “You don’t even have a work ethic. I could never be with a guy who doesn’t have a work ethic.”
“What was that?” He was at her door, looking in. “You were saying something to me?”
Camilla glanced down. She’d managed to slide her jeans over her hips, but her shirt wasn’t buttoned. She clutched at it.
“Oh, sorry.” He put a hand up to his eyes, but he left his fingers apart an
d peeked through them. “I didn’t know you were changing.”
“Really? Come on.” Of course he did. He sent her in here specifically to change. Gave her two minutes as a deadline. “And no, I wasn’t talking to you.”
“You got someone else in here?” He leaned in and looked around. Why did he have to use the word “got” that way? It wasn’t correct English. Do you have. That would be correcter. Er, more correct. Oh, great. Bad grammar was contagious now?
“Move along. Nothing to see here.” She shoved him out.
“I totally disagree. There’s a lot to see here.” He grinned that wicked grin, and Camilla blushed. He hadn’t actually seen anything. She was wearing an undershirt beneath the button up. Layering—it was required for camping, right? In case of wide temperature swings in mountain climates. She needed her sweater, too. “Ooh, what’s that? Do you have a fly fishing pole?” He pushed the door open and came into her room, and did a go-toward-the-light float toward her best fishing rod. The nerve!
“Yo, pal. What do you think you’re doing? You never enter a woman’s bedroom uninvited.” And she did not invite him. Nor did she want him to see her rod and reel, relics from a different phase of her life.
“I just want to see this one thing.” With eyes fixed on the Orvis reel attached to the Headwaters bamboo rod leaning in the corner of the room, he pressed past her, deftly avoiding the piles of skirts and shoes and blankets on the floor. Oh, her bed wasn’t even made, she’d been in such a rush this morning to get to the office. Humiliation turned her whole body into an inferno. “Wow. Do you really fly fish?” Zane ran a light hand down the pole. Luckily he had the reverence not to pick it up.
Unfortunately, his eyes shot over and saw her picture at Horsethief Lake, the one of when she broke the state record. Great.
“Interesting. And look at that. A catch and release record. Impressive.” He reached up and took the photograph off the wall. “I mean, look at that. It’s not a normal rainbow trout, is it? That looks like a Gila trout. Aren’t they endangered?”
“Wow. If you know that, you really are a Boy Scout.” Emphasis on boy. It was not something she wanted him inspecting.
“Well, honestly, I didn’t peg you for the outdoorsy type. I mean, you’re the one who’s afraid to sleep on the cold hard ground.”
“I’m not. I mean, whatever. Fishing does not necessitate camping. Besides, it was just a one time thing.” Not true. She’d practiced casting and fly tying and wading and patience for years with her dad to get to the point where that photo was taken. When he retired he doused himself in fly fishing, and it was Camilla’s best shot at spending any time with him. But then, when college started, she let it go. And then he passed away. “I should probably just get rid of that picture. It’s not me anymore.”
“But it should be. Look at you!” He stared at the picture and then back up at Camilla. “You’re a rock star. Who can say they hold a state record for catch and release of the Gila trout? Uh, one person. And that’s you.”
“Not really. I was lucky. For that shot, at least.”
Zane narrowed his eyes a minute, thinking, and then said, “I don’t think you believe in yourself nearly enough.”
What was he talking about? Camilla believed she could do anything if she worked hard enough. She could get into a good law school, get a steady job, win cases, make the world a better place. “I’m pretty sure hard work and dedication can get me anywhere I ought to go.”
“No, no. I don’t mean it that way.”
“Then, pray tell, what do you mean?” How dare he stand in her bedroom and stomp on her ego? This guy. She couldn’t believe how much she had to endure from him. Why did Falcon insist on this date? She might have to give him a talking to as soon as the promotion was finalized.
“Sorry. I just think you are pretty amazing, and you might not have an accurate mental image of yourself.”
He did? She didn’t? Of course she did. Or did she? She opened her mouth to protest, hanging it gaping much like that of the poor Gila trout in her photo, but Zane interrupted her.
“Sorry. We actually don’t have time to discuss this. We can talk more on the drive. Do you got a jacket?”
Got. Yeah, she did got one. Whatever. Nobody was perfect. But the question was, what kind of imperfections were excusable on an everyday basis? Grammar? Probably—for most people. And it wasn’t like he was saying “ain’t.” Although, she did let fly with a few ain’ts here and there in her day. She shoved him away again, this time shutting the door, and finished doing up the buttons on her shirt. Zane. What did he mean she didn’t have an accurate picture of herself? What did the rest of the world see that she didn’t? She was short. Her hair could use more body. She tried hard at everything. What else was there?
Zane began knocking on the door—and didn’t stop.
“Fine. Fine! I’m coming.” She snapped up her sweater and headed out to the lifted, sparkly purple truck of her dreams. The bad ones. Where monster trucks really became monsters and ate her in her sleep. Yeah, tonight she’d be sleeping in the belly of this beast.
It took some real mountain climbing to get herself aboard the truck. “You have a name for this thing?” Thank goodness for handlebars.
“Not yet. I’m just babysitting it for a friend until he gets back from Afghanistan.”
“Is he in the war?”
“Garrett. He was a soldier, back when. But now he’s a civilian contractor.”
What did that mean? She heard it all the time and had no idea, which fact reminded her that her life could get pretty narrow sometimes. There were people out in all corners of the earth doing other things of great and small importance, and she had no idea what. She should.
Wait. So this wasn’t Zane’s truck after all.
“My buddy Garrett calls this thing Baby.”
Same as Camilla called her car. Whoa. “That’s a big baby. Probably needed forceps for it. Poor birth mother.”
“I told him to leave it sky blue, but he drank too much one weekend and hired a guy to do the sparkling purple night sky.”
“It’s…” How could she be diplomatic? She couldn’t. “…Memorable.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
The pronouncement hung in the air for a bit, and then both of them burst into laughter.
When Camilla caught her breath, she asked, “So you didn’t choose the paint job? Oh, I have to admit, this truck was saying things about you I’m not sure you’d want said.”
“Believe me, I know.” They pulled out of the driveway and onto the road.
So. This was their first date. It was coerced, sure, but it was official at last. And now that she knew Zane didn’t purposely lift a truck and paint it purple, maybe Camilla would let the date begin.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Voir Dire
Time flew as Baby took the mountain curves. Their idle chitchat wove a spell for fifty miles. Being lawyers, they could argue about anything: about which franchise of fried chicken tastes best (he swore up and down it was Church’s Chicken, and she would fall on her sword for the Colonel—what was wrong with Zane’s taste buds that he couldn’t tell superiority when he met it?), about TV shows from their childhood (she claimed Boy Meets World was much better than the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Zane almost pulled the truck over so they could duke it out.) But being lawyers, they could make all their points and then walk away with a handshake and no residual emotion. Mostly it was all for show. Except her disgust at his lack of respect for the Colonel. That might linger. But maybe he could be converted. A side by side taste test. That’s what they needed.
As they’d spiraled up one mountain and down the other side, Zane told her about his stint in the army, which was where he’d met the owner of Baby, as well as his good Prospector’s Inn pal Wyatt. Zane did one tour in Iraq.
“What was that like?” Camilla honestly wanted to know. She’d never been close enough to anyone who’d seen battle to ask that kind of a question.
&n
bsp; “It makes you appreciate what you have, especially people you can count on.”
Huh. That must be how he felt about Wyatt. And Garrett. She wondered—was she someone anybody could count on?
“We had a buddy die. Nolan. It jarred me, and I guess it kind of changed how I saw everything.”
“How so?” She didn’t ever think this guy, with his attitude of messing around all day, never trying, would have this other side. “Did it make you buckle down and go to law school because life is too short? And you wanted to make a difference?” Please, say yes. That attitude would match her own values so perfectly. She could totally see herself with someone who had that life view—even if he was slow to letting it take hold all the way through him.
Zane burst out laughing. “Law school because life is too short?” He laughed louder. “You’re kidding, right?” He kept laughing, to the point where all the warm fuzziness he’d made her feel started evaporating. “Oh, you are so sweet, Camilla Sweeten. I can never quite get enough of you. I never know what you’re going to say next.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and huffed in exasperation. “Okay, then. In what way did it change you—if not that?” He’d better astonish her with something good, or the rest of this forced date was going to be chilly for him. How could he laugh her to scorn like that?
“You were on track with at least part of it. I realized life is short. And I decided I couldn’t take everything trivial so seriously and I have to keep everything lighthearted. If I’m doing something, I have to enjoy it. I have to find a way to make it … fun. I know, court isn’t exactly a traditional barrel of ‘fun,’ per se, but it’s possible to make my own enjoyable circumstance.”
She frowned, “So why law, then? Why prosecution, of all things?” If not for justice, why pursue it? He was right about court not being the traditional top answer if on a game show like Family Feud the topic was “Name Ten Fun Things.” “It can’t be the money. We work for the county.” It’s not like the two of them were pulling in the same kind of salaries as people who hung out a shingle and ran their own practices or worked for a big firm.
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