by Lexi Blake
Henry passed her the muffin and started to pour her tea. His eyes briefly found her breasts, and he sighed as though enchanted by the sight. “All right then. He probably isn’t the one who broke into your cabin.”
She took the tea mug. “You’re looking through my e-mail to try to find the crazy gentleman?” Wow, that was sexist. “It could be a female. Females can be every bit as crazy as males.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, baby.” He turned back to the computer. “And yes, I’ve been combing through your e-mails to see if anyone had sent you threatening letters. I was surprised at the volume.”
She’d kind of gotten used to it. People tended to not like it when she protested their businesses or housing developments or zoos. She’d become accustomed to nasty e-mails and letters and the occasional phone call. “I get it a lot. I ignore most of it. Except for the box that looked like a bomb. I had to call the sheriff for that one. But the Farley brothers promised me that it was so poorly constructed, it would never have actually gone off. They’re super smart. They’re just kids, but they were much more informed about bomb making techniques than their elders.”
“Someone sent you a bomb?” Henry was looking at her, and the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped again.
Maybe she should have kept that part to herself. She choked a little on the muffin. “Uhm, like I said, it wasn’t a very good bomb. I also have gotten the occasional box filled with poop. Those didn’t explode, either, thank god.”
His face was flushed, his jaw a hard line. He seemed to take control of himself, his voice so much softer than his expression, as though he was working hard to try not to scare her. “Nell, sweetheart, I’m going to need the names of the people who sent you those packages.”
“Oh, they don’t tend to leave a return address.” Henry seemed a bit naïve. Nell munched on the rest of her muffin. He probably didn’t get a lot of threatening letters as an academic.
“But the sheriff tracked them down, right?”
“Law enforcement is pretty laid back here. It’s kind of a no-harm-done thing.”
Henry said something about harm under his breath, but Nell didn’t catch all of it. His eyes closed briefly. “All right, then. We’ll start fresh. Do you know where the skinny kid lives?”
“Logan or Seth?” They didn’t like to be called kids, but she was sure that was who Henry was talking about.
“Seth.”
“He’s spending winter break with his grandfather. He lives on the outer edge of the valley. Logan’s place is two doors down. You can’t miss Logan’s place. Teeny and Marie like gnomes. They’re kind of everywhere. Seth and Logan will be either there or at Seth’s place. They’re pretty much always together though.”
“Good.” Henry stood up. “I think Bill told me he has a couple of snowmobiles. I would like to have a talk with the young man. I think he might know a thing or two about tracking someone down with a computer.”
She passed back the napkin. “Thanks for the breakfast. It was delicious.”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had any yet.” The temperature in the room shot right back up. Henry was staring at her like she was the best-looking muffin in the world. “How sore are you, baby?”
Just like that her heart tripled. One look from Henry and her whole body went soft and willing. “I’m good.”
He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it aside. “Excellent, because I’m very hungry. Spread your legs and let me have some breakfast. I need some honey.”
Nell lay back and started the morning out right.
Chapter Seven
Bishop hopped off the snowmobile and stared at the small cabin in front of him. It was covered in snow, but someone had painstakingly shoveled the walkway from the front porch to the driveway. Three cars were parked along the circular drive—a tiny VW bug, a big-ass SUV, and a truck that had seen better days.
And everywhere he looked, he saw the evidence of the aforementioned gnomes. Their pointy red hats stuck up out of the snow. Bishop would bet that during the summertime, this yard was filled with flowers and ceramic gnomes would rule the valley.
A memory from his childhood washed over him. His mother had kept a small garden in the back of their house. The tiny home he’d spent his first years in had been in a trashy part of the town he’d grown up in, but she’d been proud of it. She kept it clean and she’d made a little playground in the back for him. It hadn’t been much, just a ratty old swing set she’d bought secondhand and had to clean rust off of, and a sandbox she’d dug herself. He would sit there and watch her as she worked in the garden. His mother’s hands had been callused from work, but she’d been the tenderest woman in the world.
Nell’s hands were callused. Nell worked.
Bishop took a long breath and banished the unwanted memories. He wasn’t sure why they had surfaced. He’d grown up in the heat of Houston. He’d never seen snow until he joined the military. But something about the cabin in front of him took him right back to that time when he’d been safe and warm and loved.
“Hello! Can I help you?” A small woman peeked out of her door. She was thin and warmly dressed, her graying hair in a neat bun. She had a slightly hooked nose, giving her an almost birdlike appearance, but the woman in front of him wouldn’t be a hawk or an eagle. She was a little dove. “Come on inside. It’s freezing out here. I have some cider warming.”
He nodded her way, pocketing the keys to the snowmobile Bill had given him not twenty minutes before along with his promise to watch after Nell. He made short work of the distance, eager to be inside. This world was too cold, too white. Even dressed and away from the resort, he still felt a bit naked, as though all that pristine snow couldn’t cover up the fact that he didn’t belong here. A man needed camouflage to survive, and there was none to be had in this town. This woman proved it. She noticed a strange man in her front yard and invited him in for cider.
He thought about giving the older woman a stern talking-to. He could be a serial killer. He could be an Amway salesman. He could be anyone. But it wasn’t his place. If Logan’s mom wanted to get herself horrifically murdered, then that was her business.
Damn, that cider smelled good.
Bishop pushed through the door of the cabin. There was a small wreath hanging on the door. Underneath was a painted sign declaring this home to be the Green-Warner Homestead. Bishop wasn’t sure if the woman currently heating up cider was a Green or a Warner, but she turned in the kitchen and motioned him in the door.
“Come in. Come in and sit a spell. That was a nasty storm last night, wasn’t it?”
The cabin was warm inside, a fire raging in the fireplace illuminating the space. Bishop shrugged out of his coat, settling it on a peg beside the door. “It seems that way to me. I’m not from around here. This could be perfectly normal and I wouldn’t know.”
The older woman placed a mug on the bar and gestured Bishop to join her in the kitchen. “We get one or two big storms a year. My wife and I like to refer to this as snuggle weather. So you’re Bill’s friend. Mr. Flanders, isn’t it? Where are you from?”
Perhaps the lady wasn’t looking to be murdered. He’d forgotten that small towns thrived on gossip. It was on the tip of his tongue to say Houston. It sat right there in Bishop’s brain that he could talk about his house in Houston and how the cabin reminded him of his childhood. But that was Bishop’s childhood. Not Henry Flanders’s.
“I’m originally from Ohio.” It was a suitable Midwestern state. His accent was flat and could be mistaken for any number of Midwestern states. “Now I work at a small university in Washington State.”
“A professor! How very nice. My name is Teeny Green. I suspect you’re looking for the boys. Logan told me he helped you out yesterday.”
Bishop was fairly certain Logan hadn’t mentioned that the help he’d provided came in the form of a bar fight.
The boys in question had started to walk down the hall. Bishop heard the door open and
then the low conversation between friends. Logan emerged first, a smile on his face. The smile abruptly disappeared as he realized he wasn’t alone in the cabin. Logan took one look at Bishop standing at the bar, turned, and started back down the hall.
Seth Stark didn’t run. He put his hands on his lanky hips and attempted to stare Bishop down. “What are you doing here?”
There was a small gasp that came from Teeny Green. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the young man. “Seth, surely your momma taught you better manners than that.”
Seth didn’t back down at all. “My momma is from the Upper East Side. She doesn’t believe in manners.”
Teeny Green simply stared the young man down. After a few moments of maternal judgment, Seth sighed. “I’m sorry, Miss Teeny. Mr. Bishop, how can I help you?”
It was obvious the kid didn’t want to help, but he wasn’t going to be given a choice. “I have Nell’s computer contents on a thumb drive. I don’t have the time to go through every lead. I rather suspected that you might have some software that could cut that time down for us.”
The minute the word “software” came out of Bishop’s mouth, Seth lit up. “Hell, yeah.” There was the sound of a foot tapping against the floor. Teeny Green didn’t seem to like swearing either. “Sorry. What I meant to say was yes, Mr. Flanders. I can certainly help you with that.”
A brilliant smile came over Teeny’s face. “Well, you boys go on back to Logan’s room. I’ll bring you some cookies when they’re done.”
Bishop wondered for a moment if he’d gone down a rabbit hole. Seth turned, walking back toward the room he’d first come out of. Bishop grabbed his mug of apple cider. There was no use in wasting it. It smelled delicious, and now that he thought about it, the cookies smelled pretty good too. If he had to spend time in teenage hell, at least there were cookies.
Seth opened the door to Logan’s bedroom, and Bishop followed. Logan’s room was a temple to the chosen object of his worship. Posters lined the wall, making a tapestry of superheroes and villains, all in vivid colors. Comic books. At the last group home he’d been in, one of the boys his age had had a collection of comic books. Chris Johnson. Bishop hadn’t thought about Chris Johnson in ten years, maybe more. Though they’d been the same age, Chris hadn’t spent as much time in the system as Bishop. He’d tried to share those comic books, but by then Bishop knew there was no such thing as a superhero.
A wide-eyed Logan sat on the bottom bunk. “Dude, did you tell my mom? Because I told her we helped you out with directions to the library. I totally did not mention the bar. I’m not supposed to go to the bar. Not just that bar in particular, but any bar. I get to go to juice bars, but not if they sell alcohol.”
It was obvious his parents kept Logan on a tight leash. “I didn’t mention the unfortunate incident. Here’s the hard drive, Seth. Now, what do either of you know about threats against Nell?”
“Are you talking about the shit bombs?” Logan giggled and then his mouth turned down. “Could you not tell my moms about the cussing?”
“Yes, I am talking about bombs of all kinds.” Did anybody take this seriously? “You know most people get scared when someone sends them a bomb in the mail.”
Seth was already sitting at the small desk, his hands flying across the keyboard. He never looked up, and Bishop realized that this was Seth Stark in his natural environment. The kid’s whole attitude had changed the minute he sat in front of that keyboard. “From what I heard, Will and Bobby said it was a lame attempt. And the bomb wasn’t full of shit. Nell has received packages of crap, but the bomb was full of…well, it was full of bomb stuff. I don’t know what really, but it wasn’t shit.”
Yeah, the kid was trying to pretend, but Bishop was pretty sure he knew exactly what he was talking about. “You should be careful or the feds will show up on your front doorstep this time.”
Logan snorted. “Dude, that happened by the time he was ten.”
Seth shrugged. “I was a curious kid. Can we get back to the problem at hand? Okay. I’ve narrowed the search parameters down to three names.”
“How the hell did you do that?” Bishop had come to get a list of anyone who had sent her a threat. He’d expected to spend days combing through her e-mails and placing potential suspects on a list.
Seth turned back, a superior grin on his face. “I built out an algorithm that matches up names, dates, and then searches the Internet for any information on those names. It then places the potential suspects in order of probability of violation. I have various filters for money lost, position at the beginning of the protest, position at the end, how many keywords they used in the various e-mails.”
Bishop could imagine what those words were. Words like “murder” and “kill” and “rape” and “die.” He’d read a couple of those e-mails, his blood pressure threatening to hit new heights. He had to be careful about his tone and the words he used himself. “And this thing works? I’ve never heard of software that works like this.”
Seth shrugged, an oddly arrogant gesture. “That’s because I wrote the program. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. And it won’t tell us who did the crime. It merely gives us a list of suspects in the order of probability. And here’s our list of suspects.”
There was a low hum as the printer started up and began to work. A single sheet came out, and Seth handed it over with the smirk of a person who knew how good they were at their job. “What would take the police several weeks, I managed to do overnight.”
“Overnight? I just gave you the e-mails.”
Seth snorted. “Oh, I hacked her e-mail server after we finished our Battlestar Galactica marathon.”
“Dude, you can’t tell my moms about that either.” Logan seemed to have trust issues with his moms. “They told me I couldn’t commit any felonies or I won’t get the deputy job and I’ll end up having to work at Stella’s. Stella scares me, and I’ve seen what Max Harper can do to someone who gets his order wrong.”
“Why won’t you just let me pay for your college?” Seth’s eyes rolled. “Dude, my parents won’t even notice that the money’s gone.”
A stubborn look settled over Logan’s face. “I’m not a charity case.”
Ah, rich boy and poor boy had some issues themselves. Bishop understood what it meant to not have money. He’d gone into the Army when he’d aged out of foster care because he’d had no other place to go. At least this Logan kid had a home. Bishop understood pride, though. He wouldn’t have taken a handout at Logan’s age either. Sometimes all a man had was his pride. He was pretty sure Logan shouldn’t go into law enforcement though. He seemed really attached to his mothers’ apron strings.
“All right, man.” Seth conceded easily as though he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth in the first place.
“I’m going to start working and save some money and I’ll get there on my own. Now who’s on the list? Who wants to hurt Nell?” Logan asked.
Bishop looked down at the sheet of paper. There were twenty names on the page along with an assigned risk percentage. No wonder the feds had been interested in the kid. This software wouldn’t make cases for them, but it could, when the right information was present, point the way to a list of suspects. He immediately decided to focus on the top three names. They were the only ones with a risk assessment of over sixty percent.
Jim Miller, Mickey Camden, and Warren Lyle.
“Why no women?” Logan asked, looking over Bishop’s shoulder.
It bugged him, but he couldn’t do what he would normally do which was to pop whoever wasn’t respecting his space. Killing a kid for getting too close might break his cover. If Logan’s moms didn’t even want him to curse, they would likely object to his quick, though painless, death.
“Do you know how few women actually plan out killings?” Bishop doubted the perpetrator was a woman. It wasn’t that women couldn’t get pissed off and tear through some shit, but they rarely did it over business.
“Women tend to be moment-of-passio
n killers,” Seth explained. Logan stared at him. “Sorry, I watch a lot of TV.”
Yeah, Bishop bet the kid did. “I need to take a look at these guys.”
“Do you want me to print out their dossiers?” Seth asked.
“You’re kidding me.” He needed this fucker out in the field. He could get his jobs done in half the time, force Seth to do his paperwork, and sneak off to spend time with Nell.
He couldn’t think like that. Not even in a joking way. He would have a brief time with Nell and then he had to do what he did best—disappear. It could be dangerous for her if he kept up a relationship with someone like Nell. It would be far too easy for one of his numerous enemies to follow him and find out that he had a weakness to exploit. No. Once he left Bliss, he would never come back. Everyone was safer that way.
But before he could leave, he had to make sure she was okay by taking care of whoever wanted to hurt her this time.
There would be a next time, a voice in his head was whispering to him. He could save her this time, but she wasn’t about to give up the crusades. Women like Nell got more active—not less—as time went by. Sure, she would eventually get married and probably have a kid or two, but she wouldn’t give up trying to change the world, and there were a lot of people out there who were perfectly happy with the world the way it was.
Nell would always be in danger.
“So do you want me to print it, Mr. Flanders?” The Stark kid was looking up at him, a curious expression on his face.
“Yeah, yeah sure.” The printer began humming again, and Bishop was left feeling unsettled.