Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4)

by Rosalind James

  His smile was just a warming of his eyes. He was still feeling fierce, she could tell. And she loved him fierce.

  “Might be the best game of pool I’ve ever played,” he said. He adjusted her sweater, covering her breasts. “But right now, I think we should take a shower and climb into your bed for a while.”

  “We need to check my car, though.” She had to get it together. She was shattered. Destroyed.

  “And we will.” He ran the back of his hand down her cheek, the gesture so tender it nearly brought tears to her eyes. “But I’d sure like to hold you first.”

  After that, she couldn’t refuse. She took him upstairs, and they took a shower, and she soaped him up, and he did the same to her and kissed her a little more, too. When they’d dried off again, they climbed into her bed, pulled the covers up over themselves, and lay together, listening to the cold wind whistling in the pines outside.

  Jim didn’t talk, and neither did she. He seemed satisfied to hold her close in the dark, and she lay with him, one hand on his broad chest, her bare legs intertwined with his. She felt his heart beating under her cheek and thought, Memorize this moment. Hold it forever. If memories were the only thing that lasted, this was one she needed.

  After a while, she must have fallen asleep, because she woke to find him gone. It didn’t feel as warm without him, somehow.

  She was sitting up in bed when he came back into the room, said, “Turning the light on. Look out,” and switched on the lamp by the bed. He was dressed again, and he handed over her underwear and bra, which he must have picked up from the family room.

  “Since I can’t spend the night with you,” he said, “we should probably go look at your car now.”

  “Right.” She still felt flustered and sleepy and much too vulnerable. She realized that he was looking at her breasts, since she was sitting up naked with the sheet over her lap, so she got busy putting something on.

  He said, “Remember that thing I said about how hard it was to leave you?”

  She smiled with an effort, fastened her bra, reached for her underwear, and said, “Just because I’m putting out.”

  His face hardened. “Don’t say that. It isn’t true.”

  “Joking.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  She’d felt so good before, but now, she didn’t know what to say. Instead, she got out of bed, pulled her jeans from the drawer and pulled them on, added a thicker sweater and warm socks, and said, “OK. I’m ready to look at the car.”

  He sighed. “Hallie—”

  “It’s OK.” Too much vulnerability tonight, in every way. Her feelings were too exposed right now, too tender. She couldn’t bear to look at them too closely, much less have them touched. “Let’s go.”

  He didn’t pursue it, to her relief, just went out to the garage with her. While she pulled on her coat and hat, he grabbed his from his car, together with a Maglite a good foot long.

  It didn’t take him long to find the device under her car. He pulled it out, examined it, and said, “Same as mine. Got to be a tracking device.”

  “And there’d only be one reason for that,” she said, trying to be as cool and professional as he was. “To catch us being in the same places, hopefully someplace where we’d rented a room by the hour. But even that might not be enough evidence, I’d think.”

  “No. What they’d really want would be a camera—in your house or maybe even mine—or a bug. Cameras would be a tricky proposition to install, though, and anyway—my house wouldn’t make sense. I wouldn’t be likely to take you there, not with Mac living with me. And here, they’d have to know which room you were sleeping in, and they’d have to hide them. Bugs, on the other hand—that’d be easy.”

  “Oh.” She remembered everything they’d said in her family room, and shivered.

  “Who’s been in the house these past weeks?” he asked.

  “You. Your mom and Cole. Eileen. And Anthea. That’s all. And I’ve got the security cameras and the alarm.”

  “You been checking the footage?”

  “Every night. Nobody’s come.”

  “Eileen . . .” he said slowly.

  “No. She wouldn’t.”

  “Not even for money? Good money just to do something simple, like dropping a pen behind a bed and picking it up again a month later?”

  Hallie was already shaking her head. “She wouldn’t. I have her dog. I’ve seen her with her son sometimes when she brings him to visit Cletus on Thursdays, and she’s . . . getting stronger. All she wants to do is raise her kids. I’ve taken some of the money pressure off, and she’s doing better. She’s a good person. I’m sure of it.”

  “Even good people can do bad things under enough pressure.”

  “But she’d be nervous with me. She’d feel guilty, and she’d show it. Instead, she’s more relaxed.”

  “We’ll ask her anyway,” he said. “You can go with me. That’d be better. She’d have a hard time lying to me with you there.”

  “All right,” she said reluctantly.

  He sighed. “Hallie. This is what you do. It’s police work. You check things off. You think—this probably isn’t it, but you check anyway. And it’s still a possibility, it’s just a five-percent possibility instead of a fifty-percent one. And then you keep narrowing down, keep testing until you’ve knocked out more of those possibilities and you’re left with one. Then you figure out how to catch that one. And right now, I’m going to check over the car for that listening device, too. Just in case.”

  He did that, going under the dash, into the glove compartment, under the seats, examining every pen, every seemingly innocuous item. “I’d say no,” he said when he was done. “Not without a whole lot of time to hide something, to sew it into the upholstery or wire it behind the dash. Which, if your car’s in your garage and then in the teacher’s lot at the school, he probably wouldn’t have. And anyway, you haven’t talked to me on the phone from your car, have you?”

  “No. This conversation we’re having right now—this is the closest.”

  “And we’re not saying anything other than—” He cleared his throat and spoke louder. “That whoever is doing this is a scumbag, and I’m going to track him down and make him wish he’d never been born.”

  She had to smile at that. “Good job.”

  “Thanks. I liked it.” He hit the switch for the garage door. “Let’s go check out your mailbox.”

  The storm had worsened, and they had to walk through four inches of snow. “Not sure we’re going to see much,” he said when they were standing in the blowing white fury at the bottom of the drive, and he was shining his flashlight in vain up the light pole, and then into the pines on one side of the drive. “I should’ve done it when I got here, but I’ll admit, I got sidetracked. Mailbox is clear, but that’s about all I can tell.”

  “I came down and looked earlier,” she said. “Before it got dark. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Well, good work. I’ll swing by when I’m back on duty on Monday and check it out better.”

  “Without coming in,” she cautioned.

  “I get it. But right now—let’s go back up and talk this over. And then I’ll leave.”

  When they got back into the house, she asked, “Do you want something to eat?”

  “Cup of coffee would be good.”

  “Will you be able to sleep?”

  “After two scotches and some of the most smokin’ sex I’ve ever had? Yeah, I probably will.”

  That was nice to hear, anyway. She made him coffee, and tea for herself, while he went back to her bedroom and bathroom and down to the family room again, too. “To check behind the bed and the couch,” he said. “Just in case.”

  He came back a few minutes later and reported an all clear. “Eileen’s been vacuuming under your bed, so you know. Not so much as a dust bunny under there.” They sat at the breakfast bar with their mugs then, and he said, “Right. I can bring out a bug detector and look for audio bugs or more G
PS trackers, just in case that wasn’t the only one. So we know what we’re dealing with. Or better yet, get DeMarco to come out with me and do it. Make it official, and give me a good reason to be here, one nobody can question. But—obviously, this has to be about the will. You’re not allowed to leave town, and you’re not allowed to have sex with me. They tried to make you leave town and you didn’t, and now they’re trying to catch us having sex.”

  “Obviously.”

  “First question. Who could benefit by cutting you out? Cole. My mother. Your aunt. Your uncle.”

  “I can’t believe it’s Cole or your mother.”

  “Neither can I. Especially after what happened in Bob Jenkins’s office.” He described the scene to her, and after he’d finished, she sat a minute, drumming her fingers on the counter and thinking.

  “So not your mother,” she said at last. “Absolutely no way, not that I ever thought there was. And the letters, the tracking devices—those don’t seem like Cole, not with what I saw from him. Which leaves my aunt and uncle.”

  “Either of them,” Jim said. “Or both of them together. We have to consider—doesn’t have to be them together. Which could explain some things.”

  She looked at him more sharply. “Like what?”

  “OK.” He set his coffee cup down and ticked off on his fingers. “When I went over there to talk to them about somebody trying to steal the guns, Dale pretended at first like he’d forgotten that I was going to sell them for you, and then he said, ‘Well, they’re gone, so no point.’ Both of those things couldn’t have been real. Either he remembered that I was selling them and when I was picking them up and taking them up to Spokane, or he didn’t. Faye, though—she thought I was saying that you’d changed your mind and you hadn’t sold them at all. She really didn’t know they were gone, I’d swear. And then Dale was real quick to suggest that the theft must have been random. He said he didn’t know that somebody’d tried to steal them, but he was mighty interested in knowing if I’d gotten a look at the people. And he said them, too. He knew there was more than one. So—from that, I’d say it could’ve been him, and it couldn’t have been her. I’d say she didn’t know.”

  “But the letters,” Hallie said. “That sounds more like her than him. And unless it’s the two of them together, it can’t be two separate people doing the letters and going after the guns and leaving the tracking devices.”

  “No,” Jim said. “It can’t. Not realistic. But if they’re in it together, why wouldn’t he tell her about the guns?”

  “Because she’s got a big mouth?” Hallie suggested. “And he doesn’t. But another thing about Faye that makes it less likely she’s in on it—she’s been so quick to tell me, over and over, that I’ve been seen with you. Like she’s pointing it out, warning me. Which is nasty, but counterproductive. If it was her—especially if she was sneaky enough to pretend she didn’t know about the guns—she’d want me to be seen with you, and she sure wouldn’t be warning me that I’d been noticed. She’d be offering her house for a rendezvous or something, and filming it. She’s about as subtle as a wrecking ball. And Dale—he suggested to me that nobody really tried to steal the guns. That you made that up. After I told him you suspected my father’s death wasn’t an accident. He was trying to say that you did it. Which makes it sound like him again.”

  Jim’s face went still. “You told him that. And that’s what he said?”

  She shifted a little on her stool. “Yes. I did. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Letting them know that I was telling people about the letters and that I was being careful. That I knew everything.”

  She recounted what she could remember of her conversation with her uncle, and Jim said, “That makes it sound even more like Faye isn’t much of a possibility, and Dale is. And if you’re talking about somebody crawling under a car, figuring out where to put a GPS, tailing me enough to put it on my truck this past week, finding some lowlife guys on pretty short notice willing to earn a hundred bucks for some late-night burglary—that sounds like Dale, too. Sure doesn’t sound like her.”

  “So how do we prove that?”

  He sighed. “We don’t. Not officially. I can report this—the devices under our cars—but none of it adds up to much, other than a pattern. Not enough has actually happened to warrant a full-scale investigation, though I’m sure I’ll get some help.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Well, Mac had a suggestion. We could put the devices on another rig. I could put mine on my service vehicle, since I drive it home at night, and you could put yours on . . . I don’t know. How about a school bus? Goes to the school every day. Might fool them for a little while. But on the other hand—if we know they’re watching, but they don’t know we know—that gives us the upper hand. You’d have to be OK with that, though. With knowing they’re watching. Could feel bad.”

  “And we’d have to make sure we didn’t both drive to the same place. Which rules out this affair of ours, unless we took off the devices and left them in our garages for a couple hours. We could do that.”

  “Mm. I’m still a little leery about that possible listening device, too. Be careful. Check your purse and your laptop bag every day, especially if you’ve been with your aunt and uncle. Keep them cleaned out. It can be a pen, a key fob—anything.”

  “Oh, man,” she complained, “you don’t know what you’re asking.”

  He smiled, but persisted. “And don’t let anybody into the house.”

  What if there had been a bug in the family room? She trembled, thinking about it, realized what she was doing and couldn’t believe herself. “You remember when you told me how most people feel when they find money in your jacket pocket?” she asked him. “That it’s theirs?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I think that’s me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay, even for millions of dollars, and now I’m worrying that somebody’s going to bust me and I’m not going to get it. I’m falling into my father’s trap.”

  He didn’t say anything right away. He took his time and thought about it. “Or maybe that’s not it at all,” he finally said. “How much of the money have you spent?”

  “Well . . . the family room.”

  “Uh-huh.” He took a sip of coffee. “Ten grand?”

  “Seven. Seven thousand dollars.” She shifted uncomfortably on her stool. “And I bought those cowboy boots you like, too. Just like my dad. They weren’t cheap. And some more clothes.”

  “Uh-huh. You bought some furniture and a few clothes. And how much have you saved or given away?”

  “Not enough.” That was the problem. “Given away, I mean. I gave away the money for the car. You know that. That was more than thirty thousand. The rest of the money for the guns, the money for staying . . . I haven’t done anything with that yet. I get another thirty thousand at the end of November. Almost eighty thousand in all. I’m trying to decide.”

  “Uh-huh. Decide what?”

  “Where it goes. I don’t know. Maybe I’m holding on to it because I want it. I can’t tell. But I can’t tell what I’d do with it. It’d be nice to feel financially secure—really secure, I won’t lie, but—the only thing I’d really like is a house. A different one. A more . . . homey one. I’d like to trade this house for a real house.”

  And a real family to live in it with me, she didn’t say. A baby. She wasn’t confessing that.

  “Sounds to me,” he said, “like you aren’t staying because you want to be a multimillionaire. Sounds to me like you’re staying because you’re sick of the bad guys winning just because they’re more ruthless and they have no limits. Sounds to me like you’ve decided good girls can fight, too. Nothing wrong with that. All that makes you—” He smiled at her from over the rim of his cup, and his eyes were so warm. “Is a badass.”

  She laughed, although it was unsteady. “Some badass.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Smoked me at pool, took off my clothes, teased the hell out of me? Yeah, that’s some ba
dass stuff. Surprised me, I’ll tell you that. So—you watch, you’re careful, and we’re careful. But the good news is—whoever this is, they haven’t done much so far, have they? You’re almost three months into this deal, and everything they’ve done has been pretty tame. Pretty lame, actually. Which makes me think that, if it really is somebody who stood and watched your dad die, they didn’t give him that push I was thinking. Nothing’s been violent. More like—trying to nudge things along. Cautious. Wussy. Which would be your uncle all the way.”

  She sighed, suddenly feeling so tired. “My uncle. You know—I don’t have that much family.”

  He set his hand on hers on the counter, then threaded his fingers through hers and held on. “You’ve got Cole now. You may have lost one, but you’ve gained one.”

  She looked up at him. “You think I’ve gained one?”

  “I think you’ll find that you have.”

  “So we just—leave this?”

  “Yep. We do. We investigate around the edges, and that’s all we do. If they think they’ve got us marked, and all they have to do is wait for us to make our mistake? They can relax, and they won’t be doing anything else in the meantime. Which means they won’t escalate.”

  NARROWING IT DOWN

  When Jim told DeMarco his plan on Monday, the detective wasn’t exactly ecstatic.

  “I don’t like this,” DeMarco said when Jim showed him the device and told him about the one on Hallie’s car. “You’re too mixed up in it, and sounds like your brother’s a suspect. Having you be part of the investigation—that’s coloring outside the lines all the way around.”

  “I won’t be investigating,” Jim said. “You will be.”

  “Yeah, right. You aren’t going to lean on anybody. And you want her to come, too? That’s all-the-way irregular.”

  “But more effective,” Jim argued. “Anyway, it’s not like we’re going to get somebody into court for putting a GPS device on a car. I’ll let you lead, and she won’t say anything.”

  That earned him another skeptical glance.