Undercover Holiday Fiancée

by Maggie K. Black

  “You identified yourself as a cop,” he said.

  “Of course I did. I had to rescue multiple people, report a crime in progress to the authorities and fight for my life against a Gulo gang member. So, yeah, I was going to pull on everything I could to get through.” Her arms crossed over her badge. “And your minute is down to thirty seconds.”

  He let out a long breath and ran one hand through his hair. It was a lot shaggier than he liked, not to mention a bit of white had started to creep in at the temples right before he’d turned thirty-six. Then he ran his hand over his beard. That had taken some getting used to, too.

  “I’m undercover—”

  “I got that. You’re Coach Henri.”

  “And a teacher at Trillium College,” he said. “And you’re here because of the payara investigation, aren’t you?”

  “Not officially,” she said. “But I won’t deny I’ve been very curious. Gossip’s running pretty thick that Butler’s botched the investigation so badly so far that some people think he’s corrupt.” Her tone implied she wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t sure what Butler had done to earn such loyalty from her.

  “And you’ve been hanging out here because you thought he could use your help?”

  Something flashed in the depths of her eyes. “Well, I’m guessing you think you could, too, considering you kept calling me.”

  “Maybe,” he said. He crossed his arms, too. “I’m undercover, trying to find who’s been making payara. Yes, I wanted your input. But, no, that doesn’t mean I wanted you to barge in and snoop around. All I wanted was to go out for a simple coffee—”

  “Because you’re so good at showing up for coffee.”

  Yikes! She was still upset about that? Yes, he knew last time they’d spoken, months ago, he’d made plans to meet up with her at a diner. But then he’d gotten a new, immediate assignment and it had seemed easier just to leave than to go through the messiness of explaining he didn’t know when he’d be able to talk to her again. Looks like he’d made the wrong decision.

  “I apologize for that. Standing you up was a mistake.” Asking her out in the first place had been an even bigger one. What had he been thinking? A woman like her was way out of his league, and the nature of his work made it all but impossible to form real relationships. “I could give you a long explanation, but it would all come down to the fact that I had a new case to start and had to disappear. If you want a longer explanation it will have to wait for another time. You’re a cop. I’m a cop. All that matters now is dealing with the mess we’re in.”

  She didn’t answer, but she also didn’t argue. He took that as a signal to keep going.

  “Yes, a baggie of payara was found in the hockey team locker room garbage can a few months ago,” he went on, talking as quickly as he could. “It contained thousands of dollars’ worth of pills. It’s like nothing our drug guys have ever seen before. And, as you know, a drug can’t be properly banned until its exact chemical compounds are analyzed and made illegal, which means anyone arrested for dealing it is at risk of bouncing. I’m told it feels like a superhigh burst of adrenaline and endorphins without a crash afterward, which makes it popular with students and athletes. Also makes people aggressive, highly suggestible and wrecks their impulse control.”

  “So, it’s your job to figure out how the drugs ended up in a small little town like Bobcaygeon?” she asked.

  “The opposite. Bobcaygeon is the source. We’ve never busted anyone with more than a few pills on them. So a great, big baggie-full turning up in a sports center locker room is the biggest break we’ve had in the case. We suspect one of the third-line players you rescued left it there. The assistant coach had them skating laps the night the drugs were found. There was no payara in the locker room when they walked into it and thousands of dollars of it in a baggie in the garbage can when they walked out—”

  “By who?” she interjected.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. And he should. He’d cracked much harder cases in much shorter periods of time. “Either nobody knows but the one guy who threw it there, or the others have chosen to keep it secret to protect each other. I don’t know which. Police apparently couldn’t get them to crack, so I went in undercover to try to build a relationship with them.”

  Light dawned in her eyes. “No wonder people think Butler is corrupt if there’re only four possible leads and one of them is his grandson Brandon.”

  He almost smiled. This was the Chloe he’d missed. The one whose brain was so quick and sharp he could almost feel it sharpening his. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Third Line and none of them strike me as criminal material. Not to mention I still have no idea where in town the drug lab is or who’s making the drugs.”

  “Why do I get the impression this is urgent?” she asked.

  “One way or the other, my cover job finishes after Christmas. I’m supposed to start a much larger gang-related investigation in the new year.”

  “Wow. Ticktock.” Chloe slid past him, filling his senses with lavender and wood smoke. She always smelled far better than any cop had business smelling. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “The fact that everyone knows you’re a cop is going to complicate matters if we’re seen together.” He ran his hand over the back of his neck. Further complicating matters was the fact that he had a picture of them together, smiling and hugging like the happy couple they sometimes pretended to be, displayed prominently on the desk in his office at Trillium. Fictional relationship ties were an important addition to an undercover persona, and he’d happened to still have the photo around from an undercover case they’d worked together. Thankfully she didn’t know about that. “You go out there and do what you do. I’ll wait a few minutes and come out after you. Then hopefully we can meet up later and talk further.”

  A smile curled at the corner of her lips. “And what exactly do I do?”

  “You know. You say the right things. You make everything work the way it’s supposed to. You fix things.” He didn’t know how to explain it, let alone define it. She was just smart about seeing the bigger picture stuff. He tended to fight in the moment.

  “And how do you expect me to explain to the police how a mild-mannered teacher and hockey coach took out three Gulos?” she asked.

  “One has a dislocated shoulder and mild concussion from trying to throw a bad punch that didn’t land quite where he expected.”

  “You should be thankful you didn’t dislocate your shoulder again,” she said.

  Despite himself, Trent chuckled. “Another was accidentally shot by his buddy whose aim was off, and a hockey coach kindly checked his wound and told him to put pressure on it. The third was already pretty badly roughed up in a fight with a brave and beautiful lady cop. All I did was make sure he tripped while running down the stairs after her. They were all very clumsy.”

  “Real cute, Trent.” Her lips pursed and he could tell she was impressed, despite herself. “But if you ever call me that again, I’m decking you for real.”

  His face paled as his brain caught up with what his mouth had said. He’d called her beautiful. She had to know she could make a guy’s tongue forget how to form words just by walking into a room. But why had he said it? “Sorry.”

  “Fine. But don’t ever let me hear you call me Lady Cop again. It’s Detective Brant. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Relief swept over him. Her hand slid back to her pocket. It was that move people made when trying to check something was still in their pocket, and it was the second time she’d done it. He could feel his detective instincts buzzing at the back of his brain.

  “You were right,” she said. “I was here working out because I’d heard about the payara and I wanted in on the investigation.

  “When I trained under Butler, he was so sharp. I can’t begin to imagine why he hasn’t solved the payara case y
et. But I’m putting my name in for a detective sergeant’s job this spring and don’t want the fact that I trained under Butler wrecking that for me. Hopefully, I can help clear him. If not, maybe I can confront him in a way that’s respectful of his long career.

  “Either way, I’m asking you, Trent, cop to cop, to find me an official role on the case. Nothing undercover or in your way. I can chase leads, conduct interviews or review evidence. Whatever you need. Just let’s call our bosses and get me officially assigned to assist you from behind the scenes.”

  He laughed. It was a reflexive, defensive move and one he immediately regretted. Hadn’t she heard him? He was down to his last week before this entire assignment had to end. And now he was supposed to ask for a provincial officer to be assigned to his federal case and find something for her to do? “No. Sorry. I’m not bringing someone else in officially at this stage. I want unofficial advice from you, nothing more.”

  Chloe took a step back and pulled out a cell phone. “I took this off one of the Gulos.”

  Trent felt his heart stop. She was holding a drug dealer’s cell phone right out in front of his nose, and he needed it. They both knew how easily he could slide his hand around her slender wrist and take it from her, and that if she were a hostile, or a civilian, or someone other than Chloe Brant, he just might. Instead he watched as her fingers tightened around it.

  “You know as well as I do, I’m under no obligation to hand this over to you,” she said. “I could log it through the OPP and let you make an official request for the data, which we both know could take a while to go through. After all, I haven’t received official confirmation of anything you’ve told me. All I’ve got to go on right now is trust. Nothing more—”

  There was the crash of glass doors shattering. Loud voices shouted in the hall behind him, announcing police presence. Chloe slid the phone back into her pocket. “I’ll find you and we can talk later.”

  She stepped out into the hallway, her badge held high.

  Trent counted slowly backward from a hundred. Then he stepped out into the hallway. A cop stood in front of him. She was young, blonde and wearing a bulletproof vest. She pointed her weapon at Trent. “Hands up! You’re under arrest!”

  THREE

  Trent raised both hands above his head.

  “I’m Coach Travis Henri,” he said, giving his undercover name. “I’m the Trillium College hockey coach. Who are you?”

  “Constable Nicole Docker.” She didn’t even blink. “Hands behind your head.”

  Trent held his tongue and complied, letting her cuff his hands behind his back and then lead him into the main foyer. With each step he fought the urge to remind her that she hadn’t told him what he was being charged with or informed him of his rights. It was his job to figure out where the drugs were coming from. Incompetent cops weren’t his problem. Not unless they were making or selling payara.

  “Constable, let him go!” an authoritative voice barked to their right, accompanied by the sharp sound of footsteps. Trent looked up. A tall, uniformed man in his late sixties was striding down the hallway. It was Staff Sergeant Frank Butler. “And get those ridiculous handcuffs off him!”

  Trent watched the staff sergeant approach as the female officer removed his cuffs. Butler was an elder by cop standards, with short-cropped white hair, a healthy outdoor tan and the kind of athletic build that looked like he could easily take on men a third of his age and win. But he was jittery, too, with a slight but telltale shake to his limbs that Trent usually associated with people who had something to hide. “It’s Coach Henri, from Trillium, right?” he said.

  Trent nodded. “That’s me.”

  “I’m Frank Butler, Brandon’s grandfather,” the staff sergeant said. He stretched out his hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.”

  The handshake was a little too firm and Trent couldn’t help but notice that Constable Nicole Docker had seemingly evaporated.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you,” Trent said. Despite nodding to each other at hockey games, Trent and the staff sergeant had never actually had much of a conversation. That was on purpose. Trent had learned long ago that when he was trying to maintain a cover, the less time he spent talking to local cops the better.

  “I apologize for all that.” Butler frowned. “I imagine that was your first time in handcuffs. Must’ve been quite the shock to the system.”

  Trent laughed. It was a safe, noncommittal response. He’d been handcuffed and arrested more times than he could count. It had usually been as part of his undercover work. But the first couple of times he’d been an out-of-control teen, just on the edge of the Wolfspiders gang’s grasp and dealing with the fact that his twelve-year-old sister had been killed when he’d failed to show up to walk her home from school.

  “They were under orders to be on the lookout for someone matching your description,” Butler continued. “We saw someone in a mask and mistakenly thought it was a threat. But Detective Brant explained that it was all just a silly misunderstanding and that you’d been trying to help. Next time, keep your head down, stay out of trouble and leave matters to the professionals, all right?”

  “Understood,” Trent said. He wondered if there was a reason Butler was pushing him away from the case, beside the fact that he presumed he was a civilian. “Brandon and the other third-line players got out okay?”

  “They did, thankfully,” Butler said. “Thank you for telling them to hide.”

  “You must’ve been worried sick,” Trent said.

  “To be honest, I had no idea he was even in there until he came running out the front door. The young men are saying you stayed behind to fight the gang members?”

  “Well, they jumped me, so I fought them off the best I could.” Trent chuckled self-consciously. “Guess my inner hockey brawler came out. I was a bit of a fighter in my youth. Not the kind of stuff I’d ever tolerate from my players, but handy in a situation like that. My dad always said I was all instinct and no common sense. Told me I’d get myself killed one day.”

  That was more truth than he liked admitting, but he’d always believed truth made the best cover. His dad was a farmer who hadn’t quite known how to handle his second eldest son. What he’d actually told him, more times than Trent could count, was that if he didn’t learn to take a breath instead of flying off the handle, he’d get himself or somebody else killed. Then, a teenaged Trent would come within an inch of shouting back, “You mean like I killed my sister?” before running off and doing something stupid like punching a hole in the barn wall.

  He shook off the ugly memory.

  “One of the masked men asked me if I knew where he could score some drugs,” Trent added. “The name sounded a bit like ‘pariah’ or ‘piranha.’ But, like I told him, I honestly have no idea what that stuff is made of, let alone where to get it.”

  “Just remember to leave things like that to the police in the future,” Butler said again. “The last thing we need is civilians running around the place trying to be heroes. Now, if you can please head outside, somebody will take your statement.”

  Dismissed, Trent walked outside. Cold, wet air hit him like a wave. The sun would be rising soon, but snow was now pelting down in sheets. Emergency vehicles and camera crews filled the parking lot. People huddled together in pockets around a tall fir tree decked in Christmas lights. They were so shrouded by winter gear and emergency blankets he could barely tell who was who. More specifically, he couldn’t see Chloe anywhere.

  A slender hand came out of nowhere, grabbing him firmly by the arm and pulling him under an overhang. He blinked. Chloe had pulled the furry hood of a jacket up over her head. It framed her face perfectly and made her look years younger. Wisps of red hair flew around her face. The overall effect was kind of adorable.

  “You infuriate me, Henry,” Chloe sa
id. “You really do. You’ve been calling me for days and you didn’t once think to mention what you were calling me about? Why were you even calling me if you didn’t want me involved with this investigation?”

  He was beginning to think it might actually have been because he’d missed her.

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m undercover at your old college. Bobcaygeon is your hometown. You worked with Butler and you live half an hour from here.”

  “Trillium is not my college.” She frowned. “It’s just a community college I happened to go to, before getting into the police academy. Bobcaygeon is not my hometown and owning a house somewhere I crash at between cases isn’t the same as living there.”

  Well, obviously that bothered her. But he had no idea why. “So, you’re not from here, then?”

  “I thought you knew me better than that, Cop Boy. I’m not from anywhere.”

  “Cop Boy? I can’t call you Lady Cop, but you can call me Cop Boy?” Despite himself, she’d just made him laugh. Yeah, he had missed her. He’d missed this. The light teasing. The verbal sparring. The sense that he always had to be on his toes around her. “How can you possibly be from nowhere? Everyone’s from somewhere.”

  “Not me. My little sister, Olivia, and I grew up in the back of a station wagon, squished between suitcases. I don’t know if our dad’s intentionally a con artist, or just the kind of man who’s really good at temporarily hiding the fact that he’s a jerk and convincing people he’s good at things he’s not. But he has the kind of attitude problem that makes him think that nobody is ever treating him well enough. His charm makes him great at landing jobs. But his sense of entitlement makes him terrible at keeping them.

  “So we’d land somewhere new, get settled in, live there for a few months, and then he’d get into an argument with someone and back into the station wagon we’d go. Bobcaygeon happened to be where I was for the last three months of high school and I entered Trillium because moving twice in grade twelve had killed my ability to get a student loan for university. That doesn’t mean I belonged here.”