by Nicole Helm
He supposed that was fair. Neither did he.
“I will never sleep with you, Grady Carson,” she shouted through her open driver’s side window.
He just raised a hand in salute. He didn’t think of “never” so much as a challenge as he considered it a curse. And there were already plenty of Carson and Delaney curses in the air.
Chapter Five
Evergreen Mining existed about thirty miles outside of Bent, and straddled Bent and Freemont counties with its sprawling compound in the middle of just about nowhere. Little boxlike things dotted the landscape as Laurel explained who she was and showed her badge to the security entrance.
Laurel didn’t know much about the company. No one in her immediate family or group of friends worked this far outside of Bent. She did remember the mine here getting in trouble a few years back for some safety regulations, but she hardly expected her accountant victim to have been involved in any of that.
At best, she’d find a link to someone who might have wanted Jason dead. At worst, it was a dead end and she’d have to start prodding Jason’s family. She sighed. She almost wished she knew that line of the family better, but as the son of her father’s second cousins, they were so far removed she barely even heard gossip about Jason.
Laurel was led to the office of Jason’s boss by a secretary. The secretary knocked on a door and then pushed it open, stepping inside and gesturing Laurel to follow. “Mr. Adams, the police are here to ask you a few questions.”
“Yes. Of course.” A well-dressed middle-aged man stood from behind a desk and held out his hand. “I’d be happy to assist you in whatever way I can, miss.”
“Deputy Delaney,” Laurel said, shaking his hand in return.
The man shook her hand, looking at her quizzically. “You’re related to Jason?”
Laurel forced herself to smile. “Yes, though distantly.”
“Ah. Well, have a seat. I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have. I do have an appointment with my foreman in twenty minutes that I can’t miss.” He smiled apologetically. “Regulations and all that.”
“Of course. I mainly just need a list of anyone Jason had routine contact with, and if you know of anyone he might have had a disagreement with or dislike of.”
“Well, our administrative staff is somewhat isolated out here, Miss Delaney.”
Laurel bit back the need to correct him. Deputy, not Miss, jerk. “Did he have a secretary or an assistant?”
“No. Jason was a satellite accountant, meaning he kept track of our accounting at this plant alone. He would have answered to the head accountant in our main office in Nebraska.”
Laurel continued to ask him questions, and Mr. Adams continued to give vague, unhelpful answers for twenty full minutes. Finally, Mr. Adams stood. “I have my meeting. Is there anything else—”
“I’d like access to Jason’s things. Did he have an office?”
Mr. Adams frowned but quickly smoothed it out. “Follow me, miss.”
Laurel scowled at Mr. Adams’s back, but followed him back out into the hallway and down a few doors. Mr. Adams pulled out a key ring and unlocked the door.
“Feel free to look around as much as you’d like. If you need to take anything, I’m afraid I’ll have to approve it. Jason did have access to some sensitive documents.”
“I’m sure copies can be made of anything that might aid me in my investigation.” Laurel smiled brightly at him.
Mr. Adams smiled thinly. “Of course. If you can’t find me, my secretary should be at her desk. She can also summon anyone else you may need to talk to. If you’ll excuse me.”
Laurel nodded and stepped into the office. It was small and cramped, and messy. She sighed. It was hard to find clues when you didn’t know what you were looking for. Long, frustrating hours of sifting through crap. Her least favorite part of the job.
But it was part of her job, so she got to work. She didn’t know how long she filtered through the papers on Jason’s desk before she finally found something of potential interest. A scrap of paper in a file with the name Jennings scribbled on it.
Considering Jason had been found by a Mr. Jennings, that seemed incredibly pertinent. A quick scan of all the papers in the file gave Laurel no clue as to why, but with some closer reading, she might be able to find something.
The door swung open and a man entered, stopping short. He was youngish. Maybe midtwenties, dressed like he didn’t belong in the administrative building. Jeans, a heavy-duty jacket and heavy work boots.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where’s Jason?”
Interesting. She supposed the appropriate thing would be to tell this man what had happened to Jason, but she wanted a little information first. Especially since Mr. Adams considered Jason so isolated.
“Hello. I’m sorry, who are you?”
The man frowned. “Jason get fired or something?”
“Actually...”
“You know what, never mind,” the man mumbled and rushed out the door.
Very, very curious. Laurel clutched the file and hurried after him, trying to make her strides look relaxed.
He passed the secretary, busting out the door with a hard push.
Laurel stepped up to the secretary’s desk. “Who was that man?”
The secretary didn’t even look up. “Hank Gaskill.”
Gaskill. Why did that sound familiar? Laurel pushed the file toward the woman, getting out her notebook and writing down the name. “Can I get copies of everything in this file?”
The secretary took the file and frowned. “This was in Jason’s office?”
Laurel raised an eyebrow as she placed the notebook back in her pocket. “Yes.”
“It shouldn’t have been. This is Mr. Adams’s file, and it doesn’t have anything to do with accounting or finances.”
A lead. A real lead, then. “Then I definitely need copies.”
The secretary nodded and turned to a copy machine behind her.
“Does Hank Gaskill come to visit Mr. Delaney often?” Laurel asked.
The secretary shrugged. “Lately they’ve gone to lunch together. Childhood friends, from what I could tell.”
Yet, Hank hadn’t heard that Jason had been murdered. Interesting. “Thank you.” Laurel got her card out of her pocket and handed it to the secretary. “If you or Mr. Adams or anyone thinks of anything else, please be sure to call me.”
The secretary handed over the copies and took Laurel’s card. “I will. Jason was so young. Such a tragedy.”
Laurel nodded and slipped the papers under her arm, heading back out to her car. Gaskill. Gaskill. Why was that familiar?
She walked to her car, turning over the events of yesterday in her mind, and that’s when it dawned on her.
Fred Gaskill. Clint’s friend she’d questioned yesterday.
Oh, damn that kid and his lies.
* * *
GRADY WAS IN a piss-poor mood as he opened Rightful Claim. He’d spent too much of his morning searching for Clint. The teen had, sensibly, left Grady’s bike at the ranch, but had disappeared after that.
Grady had a saloon to run and things to do, and his half brother was putting a dent in both.
“I take it you don’t have any ideas on how to bring him to heel,” Ty asked, pulling chairs down off the tables. Since Ty had basically just gotten back to Bent after a stint as an army ranger, he was going to be working at the bar until he decided what he wanted to do next.
“I’m washing my hands of that kid,” Grady muttered, putting cash in the register for the evening.
“Yeah, you’re so good at washing your hands of people.”
Grady only grunted. So, maybe giving up on people wasn’t exactly his strong suit. But that was because he always did some good. If Clint didn’t want some of that good, well, fine. Gr
ady would let him off the proverbial hook.
Soon as he got Clint cleared of murder.
The saloon doors swung open and Laurel stepped into the dim light of the bar. She was dressed exactly as she had been this morning, except her weapon was strapped to her hip.
The fact his spirits lightened enough he could feel a weight lift in his chest was kind of worrying, but he’d wrap that up in sarcasm and irritating the crap out of her.
“She deigns to walk through our doors, Grady. To what do we owe the unwanted nonpleasure?”
Something about Ty giving her a hard time bothered him in a way he did not care for at all. “Watch the bar,” Grady ordered gruffly.
He ignored the shock on Ty’s face and jerked his head toward the back. “Follow me,” he said to Laurel.
She pressed her lips together, but didn’t argue. So, instead of leading her to one of the back rooms or the kitchen or anything that might have been easy and safe, he led her upstairs to his apartment.
Her pressed-lips look had morphed into a full-blown scowl as he opened the door and gestured her inside.
“Do we really need to talk up here?”
“Private,” Grady returned cheerfully. He entered the apartment and turned to give her an impatient look.
She huffed out a breath but stepped inside. She wrinkled her nose. “Your bedroom isn’t even separate from your kitchen?”
“But the bathroom is separate, which is probably far more important.” He nodded toward the bed that took up a considerable amount of space in his kitchen/living/bedroom area. “You want to lie down on my bed? Tit for tat and all that?”
“Gaskill,” she said firmly, though he didn’t miss the way her eyes drifted to his messy, unmade bed. “Fred Gaskill is friends with Clint, and claimed he didn’t know anything about Clint’s whereabouts.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know anything about Hank Gaskill?”
“Fred’s older brother. Works at the...mine.” Which was where Laurel had been headed today.
“Friends with Jason. He popped into his office today while I was looking through Jason’s things. Skittered off like he was afraid.” Laurel frowned, a line digging into her forehead. “But he didn’t seem to know Jason was dead.”
“What does it mean?” What did it mean that one of Clint’s friends had a brother who was friendly with a dead man? It could mean nothing in a small, rural county. A coincidence. But Grady wasn’t sure he believed in those with a murder having gone down.
“I don’t know. I’ve got some more digging to do, but—”
“What kind of digging?”
“Police digging. Does Hank ever come in here?”
Grady didn’t care for the brush-off, but he didn’t press it. Yet. “A handful of the mining guys do occasionally. Not much else in the way of a place to hang out and get a drink for those who live on this side of things.”
“I need you to call me if they ever come in. Day or night. On duty or off. You call me.”
“What? So you can oh so subtly eavesdrop?”
“Maybe.”
Grady snorted. “Princess, everyone knows you don’t come into Rightful Claim, and this is time number two in a week. Make it a third, especially during working hours, the whole town might implode with the implications of a Delaney in a Carson establishment.”
“Carsons bank at Delaney Bank and shop at Delaney General all the time.”
“It ain’t the same, and you know that.”
Laurel blew out an irritated breath. “Regardless. You call me. Something is off with everything I witnessed today. Hank coming into Jason’s office, then files on his desk that shouldn’t have been. I can’t tell if the boss is just a patronizing, sexist douche or an actual criminal.”
“Maybe even both.”
She frowned. “He called me miss.”
“So, if I really want to piss you off I should call you Miss Deputy Princess.”
She rolled her eyes and made a move for the door, but Grady blocked it.
“Out of my way.”
“What’s the plan, Delaney?”
“The plan is for me to continue investigating per my job. If you see Hank or Fred Gaskill in your bar, or doing anything fishy, you call me.”
“And that’s it? My kid brother might be on the hook for murder and I’m just supposed to play lookout?”
Some of that pissed-off hard edge softened. “What else is there to do, Grady? I have due process to follow. You can’t go with me to search Jason’s place, and I can’t hand over evidence. Both of our hands are tied.”
“I really prefer to do the tying,” he joked even though he didn’t feel like joking in the least.
Laurel’s gaze slid to the bed again before she seemed to shake herself out of it. “Regardless. I need you to sit tight and watch. I need you to have some patience.”
Grady ran his palms over his beard. Hands-tied patience. When had he ever not balked at that? But no matter how many times he’d acted against all he’d been told to do, when he acted he did so knowing he was right.
The worst part of all this was knowing Laurel was right. He was no cop. He had no authority to arrest or try a murderer, and an eye for an eye wasn’t going to work.
“You get really quiet when you know I’m right,” she offered with a smirk.
The hands-tied frustration bubbling through him and that self-satisfied smirk of hers right next to his bed was the kind of terrible concoction that led to bad decisions.
Still, holding himself back in one arena meant holding himself back in another wasn’t a possibility. So, he stepped forward, and when she lifted her chin to meet his gaze rather than step back, he grinned.
“Do I, now?” he asked quietly, reaching out and taking one of those flyaway strands of her hair between his fingers.
She kept that haughty expression on her face, but he watched her elegant throat move as she swallowed.
“You don’t believe in the feud, but do you believe in the curse?”
“What curse?” she asked, clearly attempting nonchalance. But she didn’t meet his gaze when she asked.
“The one that says if a Carson and a Delaney even look at each other with so much of an ounce of kindness, or other nice things, the whole world goes to hell. Just like my favorite illegitimate Carson and his Delaney bride who died, and the Delaney girl who would’ve married the Carson boy if not for World War II, and then there’s your sis—”
That dark, irritated look returned. “There’s no curse. I’m being nice to you, aren’t I?”
He twisted her soft strand of hair in his fingers. “Could be nicer.”
Her eyebrows furrowed, but she didn’t pull away and he’d be damned if her gaze didn’t drop to his mouth. But when she looked back into his eyes, there was something he didn’t want to notice, even if he did.
A note of vulnerability to invulnerable Laurel Delaney. “What game are you playing, Grady? Because I’m not playing one.”
“No games. Just...” He leaned a little closer. “Chemistry. Admit it. Does it hurt so very much to admit it?”
Laurel stared at him for a few humming seconds. Seconds he thought she might have actually considered chemistry.
But then she shook her head. “You’re not funny.” She stepped around him, her hair sliding out of his fingers.
There were ways to stop her, sarcastic things to drawl her way, but he couldn’t get over the fact she didn’t seem so much irritated by him as something else. Something a lot softer.
Grady didn’t poke at soft. He might be his father in a lot of ways, but not that one. “Listen.” He turned to face her, frowning at the fact she already had the door open and was striding out of it. “I’ll give you a call if anyone from the mine shows up.”
She paused in his doorway and straightened her shoulders, but s
he didn’t turn around. “Great. Thanks.”
Then she was gone, and he was left in the same piss-poor mood he’d been in before she’d arrived.
Chapter Six
“This isn’t going to work.”
“Not with that attitude,” Jen said to Laurel, all too cheerfully. “This was your idea. Don’t start pooh-poohing it after all the work I’ve put in.”
Laurel sat in her sister’s tiny bathroom, second-guessing her plan. And then third-guessing it. Until the number got too high to count.
“I watched too many detective shows as a kid. It’s infected my brain and this is a terrible idea,” Laurel said dejectedly.
“No, the terrible idea is trusting Grady Carson.”
“Don’t start.”
Jen handed Laurel a small mirror and Laurel studied her reflection. The wig didn’t look ridiculous, and though she felt silly, Laurel knew that on the surface she looked like any normal twentysomething.
The problem was she’d never been a normal twentysomething. Her life since she could remember revolved around becoming and then being a cop. No parties, little dating. She didn’t go to bars or flirt with guys. Ever.
Plus, she didn’t think she’d be able to recreate any of the things Jen had done to make her look different. She was terrible with makeup, felt uncomfortable in decent-fitting clothes and didn’t know if she could jab the wig pins into her scalp with as much glee as Jen had done.
“People are starting to talk, Laurel. Murder is murder even without the feud. Add the Delaneys and Carsons, and my store is a veritable gossip station.”
“People have too much time on their hands, then. The murder has nothing to do with the feud.”
“Then why are you suddenly being seen all over the place with the Carsons?”
It was stupid to be caught off guard by that. Laurel knew how this town worked. The Delaneys didn’t go into Rightful Claim, ever, let alone twice in one week. And loud, disruptive Carson motorcycles did not make their way up to the Delaney Ranch. She’d been so focused on the case and clearing Clint, she’d been sloppy with anticipating how the town would react.