“I’m going to head to the station and look into some of the information you’ve given me. If you think of anything else you think might be relevant, here’s my number. If I don’t answer, leave it on voicemail and I’ll get right back to you. We’re going to do everything we can to bring your little girl home.”
“I know you will. That’s just—no guarantee,” Pat said. “But this is Rockford Falls, right? I mean, there hasn’t been a—a homicide here since, what?”
“Don’t even think like that,” I said gently but firmly. I needed to keep them from going off the deep end. “I’ll let you know as soon as we know anything.”
I went back to my truck and headed to the station. On the way, I dialed Laura’s number. It was barely 4:30, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that her voice was heavy with sleep, husky and intimate sounding.
“Hello? Chief?” she mumbled.
“Vance, we’ve got a missing person case. Get up and meet me at the station as soon as you can get there,” I said gruffly.
“I’ll be right there. Just let me—get dressed,” she said. I tried to pretend that her husky voice didn’t go straight to my cock, so I cleared my throat.
“See you there,” I said, and hung up. God, she sounded like pure sin. Something dark and primal curled in my gut. I let my mind drift for just a second as I made the familiar turn toward the police station. How it would feel, warm and tangled up in sheets, nothing but the darkness around us, waking up with Laura Vance in my arms. I let out a long breath and tried to push that thought away and calm my cock down. I was rock-hard and needed to cut that out. I had to focus on finding this kid, not drilling my new officer. Waking up with Laura Vance, I told myself, would look very much like opening my eyes to find her brother Damon’s shotgun trained at my forehead. I shook my head. If I needed to imagine my best friend going nuts and acting like Yosemite Sam to get my mind off boning his sister, I could do that.
Right now, I needed all my skills and all my training to solve this case, even though I had a hunch it was like trying to stop a runaway train. As a cop, we’re never supposed to entertain a preconceived notion, never oversimplify. I’d just seen too may headlines and knew too many firsthand accounts of young women taken and hurt or killed by their exes. Intimate partner violence was so prevalent that I was having a hard time seeing past what I thought was the most probable scenario. I had to get out of my head and figure this out. Maybe Laura could help with that perspective.
7
Laura
Mrs. Rook handed me a cup of coffee, strong and bitter and I was grateful for it. My still-wet hair was pulled back tight and pinned up, and she directed me to the staff bathroom where I found a uniform in my size hanging on the back of the door. When I came out, dressed and ready down to my regulation boots, she grinned at me.
“Are you some kind of wizard? I only got you my size yesterday,” I said.
“I have my ways. I also met my son and his wife for dinner in Overton and picked up a standard size for you at the supplier in town.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Chief’s waiting on you. He’s been here about twenty minutes, and he’s pawing the ground,” she said.
I nodded in thanks and took a long drink of my coffee. My quick shower had helped wake me up, and I was alert and on my game. Cops can’t afford to luxuriate. We might miss a key detail because we’re half asleep. So when I entered Brody’s office, I was alert to his mood, his frustration and urgency, and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. He looked up from a legal pad in front of him and met my eyes. I felt the impact of his eye contact like a blow to the stomach, rendering me breathless. His stare was intense, and he let his breath out before I did.
“Have a seat. I’ll give you rundown,” he said.
“How bad is it? You said it was a missing person,” I said.
“Becky Simms, senior in high school, just turned eighteen,” he said. “She was studying at a friend’s house and didn’t come home. Friend says she left on foot as planned in plenty of time to make curfew. No leads except she broke up with her boyfriend recently.”
“Okay, do we have anything else to go on? Do you know where the boyfriend is?”
“Not yet. I’m going to bring in the rest of the team and organize the search.”
I followed him out into the main room of the station and stood at his left as he called three men over to us. They looked to be at varying degrees of exhaustion. One looked particularly rumpled.
“Carl, I’ve been out to the Simms house and interviewed the parents. I appreciate you going around the neighborhoods by the friend’s house to look for her. You need to go home and get some rest. Your shift was over an hour ago. I’ll keep you in the loop.”
“Thanks, Brody,” he said, and with a nod in my direction, he shuffled toward the parking lot.
The two other officers on duty looked familiar. I knew one of them used to run track and was a year or so ahead of me in school, but I didn’t remember his name. The other one was Bobby Brewer who used to date Rachel for a while before he got married a few years back.
“Bobby Brewer, Clint Dobbs, you remember Laura Vance? She’s signed on as our newest officer. She’s come home after four years on the Charleston PD. She made national headlines cracking a cold murder case last year and she’s had some accolades from the governor. So you better stay on your toes, boys,” Brody said.
“How’s your daddy doing?” Bobby asked.
“He’s hanging in there. How’s your baby? Didn’t you and Cassie have a baby here a while back?”
“She’s two now,” he grinned, “and we’re expecting a boy in the spring.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Good to have you home,” he said, “and it’ll be nice having a woman around. We don’t have enough throw pillows and curtains around here yet, and I bet you make a great pie.”
I rolled my eyes at him, “I should’ve remembered you were a joker, Brewer,” I said. I smiled to let him know I thought his crap was funny, but I was being careful about my smart mouth around Brody. Clint Dobbs was shyer, not likely to joke around.
“Welcome aboard, Laura,” he said. “I hope you can help us out on this one. The Simms girl used to babysit for my son,” he said. “She watched him all summer last year. This year she was working the cash register at the pharmacy. But she was real good with Cole.”
“We’ll find her, Clint,” I said. “No matter how long it takes. You know I used to get in trouble for doing Sudoku and stuff in class. I can’t leave a puzzle unfinished. So we’ll get on this, and we won’t quit till she’s found.”
“Brewer, Dobbs, go out by the high school and search all downtown. Find out if anyone saw her. Get the security footage from both convenience stores. Vance, you’re with me. We have some local hangouts to search.”
Surprised that he hadn’t put me with one of the other guys and taken a more senior officer along with him, I nodded and followed Brody to the cruiser. The sun was starting to rise, the sky lightening to a purple-gray as we headed out.
“You’ll see not much has changed in Rockford Falls, but the teenagers have a couple new tricks up their sleeve since we were that age,” Brody said. “In the last couple years, some of the high school hookups happen out by Winters’s farm. Since the old man died and the kids haven’t sold the farm yet, some kids figured out it was unoccupied and started using it. Back in our day it was the hill out past Pearson’s where you could see the falls in the distance.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said before I thought. “I never went out there. I was a good girl.” Then I caught myself, “Sorry, Chief.”
“Don’t be. You used to have one hell of a smart mouth. I wondered why you grew up so stiff.”
“In Charleston we joked around a lot, roasted each other pretty savagely. I wasn’t sure if that was in violation of your workplace culture.”
“Vance, we don’t have a workplace culture. This is Rockford Falls. We got a
coffee maker and a secondhand fridge. We do poker night once a month and a toy drive at Christmastime. You grew up with most of us. We’re not delicate, and we’re not gonna cry if you bust our balls. In fact, it’ll make us feel better if you do.”
“Noted,” I said. That made me feel a lot better. I was perfectly able to keep things professional, but I missed relaxing and goofing off with my coworkers on the force in Charleston. We’d had an easy rapport and a history of some damn near vicious pranks.
“You can relax now. Maybe I’ll try and relax too. Since I haven’t had a woman on my force before, I’ve been antsy that I’ll say something that isn’t appropriate to say around females.”
“Didn’t seem to bother you when you asked me in the interview if some ex with a magic dick was gonna lure me back to the city,” I said with a snort. He laughed. Thank God, he laughed.
“And that’s the girl I remember. God, you were relentless with Damon. Anything he said at the dinner table, he got a solid burn from you. You were so damn quick, and so mean but hilarious. Poor bastard never had a chance,” he said with a half-smile.
“My personality is not for everyone.”
“Maybe if they have a stick up their ass, kid,” he said, dismissing anyone who didn’t like my big mouth as an uptight jerk. I smiled at that.
“So before you were old and decrepit, you used to seduce all the cheerleaders by driving them up to look at the falls?” I teased.
“Maybe a couple of them,” he said, “it’s got a pretty view.”
“I’ll bet,” I smirked, still holding back on the retorts a little. My first instinct had been to say ‘oh a nice view of some perky tits’ but I hesitated to mention tits in the confines of the cruiser with Brody. Especially since mine had decided to strain against my uniform, the nipples hard, ever since he met my eyes in his office, so intense that he might as well have licked me between my legs. Not that I was going to sit in a police cruiser beside my boss and think of spreading my thighs as I leaned back on his messy desk and watching him fall to his knees before me. No. Definitely not. Because for some reason, my body lit up around him very inconveniently.
“Need to roll down a window?” he said, interrupting my thoughts.
“What?”
“You look a little flushed. Too hot in here?” he said.
“No I just—had too much coffee I guess. Got a little overheated,” I babbled, sounding stupid.
But it was better than telling the truth. He was Damon’s friend. I wouldn’t exactly like it if Damon marched into the diner and told my bestie Rachel he wanted her to suck him off. I’d smack the shit out of him and threaten to feed him a bar of Irish Spring when I was done. I shook it off.
“Here we are,” he said, indicating the overgrown pasture that had some tire tracks and a few beer cans littering the grass.
We got out and looked around. I picked up trash and put it in a plastic bag once we figured out there were no signs of a struggle or any indicator of a crime.
“We found out about this place two years ago when a girl called to report underage drinking that was happening at a party. Turned out her boyfriend was there with her friend and she got mad. Gave us a valuable tip though. Most of the time it’s harmless teenage stuff. Drinking cheap beer and dancing in the headlight beams to loud music. Hooking up in the cars. But it doesn’t hurt to check the hangouts,” he said.
I blinked, refusing to think about being in this field in the dark, the headlight beams painting the grass and our bodies yellow as we danced.
“So fast forward ten years and add on a cover charge and you’ve got the club scene in Charleston,” I said wryly.
“Probably has better lighting.”
“And more expensive booze, but the idea’s the same. It was a simpler time, Brody. And places like this were fun as hell.”
“I thought you were a good girl, staying at home and studying all the time,” he teased.
“Yeah, that was bullshit,” I shrugged. “I popped many a Keystone with Rach and some of our other friends. And I know I went out to that hill with Tanner when we were dating my junior year.”
“Tanner Belt? That asshole?” he said incredulously.
“What’s wrong with him? You were out of school and married by then,” I laughed.
“Yeah, but everybody in town knew he was a no good little shit. And you gave it up for Tanner Belt up on the hill?”
“I gave it up in the concession stand after a football game before that, Brody,” I said, rolling my eyes.
He eyed me, “That little particle board hut with the popcorn machine that burned everyone that ever touched it? How did you possibly?”
“Well, we didn’t touch the popcorn machine,” I laughed. He shook his head.
“And now I gotta keep from thinking about that. It’s like a logic puzzle—where would all the arms and legs go in a space that small with a third-degree burn risk belching out the stink of old grease and taking up half the room?”
“Maybe for your birthday I’ll draw you a diagram,” I snapped, eyes mischievous. It was his turn to turn a little red and look away.
“I don’t think a diagram’s a good idea. One of my little league kids could find it and that’s a talk I don’t wanna have.”
“Come on, some of those boys don’t have a dad. You could do the birds and the bees talk,” I laughed.
“No thanks. I like coaching them. I don’t wanna be chased out of town with pitchforks. We got a game day after tomorrow. All that rain last spring moved our season late. We didn’t get started till the middle of June, if you can believe it.”
“So much for spring training,” I said, “so how many games you got left?”
“Five. But the new uniforms are in. Normally we’d get those back at the start of the season, but with the weather the way it was, some of the parents were out of work for a while—farms and road crews and stuff—so we put it off. We try to keep their costs down, obviously, and we did some fundraisers. The kids are gonna love these uniforms.”
“Damon showed me a picture. They look great,” I said. “He really seems to like coaching. He was always nuts about ball. Did you play? I don’t remember.”
“When I was a kid, but I wasn’t that into it. I mainly like working with the kids. They’re something to look forward to when it’s been a bleak time at work nothing but the same junkies robbing the same store over and over or getting their kids taken away again. This team though, these are some great kids, and some of them come from some hard backgrounds. But they love playing together, and they try so hard.”
“It sounds amazing,” I said.
My ovaries were melting. Listening to a big, burly cop talking about how much he loved working with kids. He would’ve made a great dad. Damon had mentioned to me once when I was home at the holidays that Brody and Missy had wanted kids but it just never happened. Then she got sick. I figured that must be a sad issue for him, and I didn’t bring it up. He seemed devoted to his players, and it was sweet. Some of them needed a dad figure, and it gave him some children to teach and dote on. It was a good solution, very practical, I told my screaming ovaries. Quit freaking out, don’t churn out an egg or something stupid just because a mega hot guy was going on earnestly about his little league team. We drove to another hangout spot. When we passed a convenience store, I asked if we could stop in.
I needed an iced coffee to cool me off, and I dodged to the bathroom. My damn panties were soaked. I needed a cold shower, or a bag of frozen peas to put on my hot, aching core. I unbuttoned my shirt for a second in the bathroom because my nipples were straining against the fabric. I would’ve worn a perfect size six if it weren’t for my rack that overflowed every C-cup and my ass that was round and muscular from my circuit training. Everything about me seemed too much right then. Too voluptuous for my buttoned-up uniform, too sexual to act like a cool professional, too damn horny and overheated to be normal. I ran one of those brown paper towels under cold water and dabbed off my neck and ches
t where I was sweating. I splashed my face and glared at myself in the mirror, at my wide, fevered eyes that made me look a little unhinged. I buttoned back up and bought a couple of iced coffees. I took one out to the chief.
“Here,” I said, “this will keep you awake.”
“Do you think it’ll cool me down?” he said, with a little bit of a sheepish chuckle. This guy? Sheepish? It was killing me. “I think my A/C may not be working right. It felt humid in there, a little overheated,” he said. I nodded, and our eyes caught for an instant. The way he looked at me wasn’t as detached and oblivious as I needed to think he was. He took a drink of his iced coffee and looked around, “Is it already hot outside? This early?”
“You lived here all your life and you’re surprised about the heat?” I said.
“Sometimes it slaps you in the face,” he replied. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Thanks for the job,” I said. “I want to find this kid. You think it’s the ex, don’t you.” I wasn’t asking. He gave a nod that can only be called grim.
“You think he hurt her,” I finished. He met my eyes and he looked miserable. There was no other word for it. “Do you have any reason to think that?” I asked, my stomach bottoming out at the thought.
“No, just a hunch. Or just expecting the worst. Seems about right; some promising kid pays with her life for telling her boyfriend no. Isn’t that what it’s like everywhere?”
“It sure as hell was in the city. And I didn’t tell you, for all my commendations from the mayor and stuff, I also had a major disciplinary incident a year ago.” I said. I wondered how to tell him what I’d done to that guy without having to pretend to be sorry about it.
“I saw your file,” he said, his tone clipped. “It’s against regulations. That’s why you had to be disciplined. No one is above the rules, not even us.”
Hot Cop: A Brother's Best Friend Romance Page 5