“About time,” Uncle Chuck said gruffly.
“Good. Now, I have to ask you something. Do you have a copy of the boundary map for your property?”
“Of course I do. It’s in my file cabinet out in the garage. Sloan knows where it is.”
“Let me change into boots. Then I’ll show you,” she said.
In the garage, with Cutter now out of the car and with them, she dug out the plot map. They spread it out on the hood of her uncle’s big sedan. The boundary was, as Sloan had said, roughly in the shape of an L, with the house and yard at one end of the long leg, the street where the leak had been at the other and the shorter leg protruding some distance westward.
“I didn’t realize it went that far over,” he said, looking at the western boundary.
“It used to be a rectangular plot, but Uncle Chuck’s grandfather sold a piece out of the side during the Great Depression. But he kept that top edge. Uncle Chuck said he thought the main highway was going to go in there, and he wanted the frontage.”
“Sounds like a smart guy.”
“Well, except for guessing where the state would put in roads, yes,” Sloan said with a grin.
He chuckled. “So there’s nothing up there?”
She shook her head. “They’ve left it natural. There are some beautiful old trees up there. It hasn’t been logged in a very long time.” Her brow furrowed. “I actually haven’t been over in that part for quite a while. It’s kind of difficult to get through. Lots of underbrush and a couple of blackberry thickets that are impassable.”
Cutter barked. They both looked.
“Not impassable for you, huh?” Sloan asked the dog.
“Probably not,” Brett agreed with a crooked smile. “Shall we?”
She would have much rather talked about what the future held for them, but by now she knew him well enough to know that in his own way, he was like the dog in his determination. He wanted the truth, and he’d pull every thread he came across to find it if he had to.
Chapter 33
“Damn.” Brett yanked his hand back, knowing he’d gotten nailed again by one of the fierce blackberry thorns. He glanced at Sloan, who said nothing. She didn’t have to. Her carefully neutral expression said it all.
“Okay, okay, you were right,” he muttered. “I should have borrowed your uncle’s gloves. Not that anything short of armor would stand up to these things.”
“Well, you did find treasure,” she said.
“What? The third old tire? Yeah, one more and I’ll refit my car.”
She laughed. His irritable mood vanished. That easily. At just the sound of that light, beautiful laugh. You are a goner, Dunbar.
They trekked onward. They’d spent three hours up behind the house, turning up nothing except the fact that his temporary repair had held and the puddle had been reduced to a barely wet spot. Sloan had shown him the old apple tree she used to climb as a kid and the cave-like place beneath a bent madrone tree she’d claimed as her own.
“I came here a lot in the beginning,” she’d said, staring down at the place her adult self no longer fit. “I knew they hated to see me cry, so I came up here when I couldn’t help it.”
And he hadn’t been able to help himself at the quiet, reflective words. He’d put his arms around her and simply held her for a long moment. She’d leaned against him as if she welcomed it, and the thought that he could actually give her comfort, even over an ache so long past, warmed him in a way he’d not felt in a very long time.
Although there was still ground to cover there, they had decided to move over and tackle the top of the upside-down L, where the trees were the thickest, while they still had good light.
“Can’t even see the house from here,” Brett said.
“We knew they couldn’t build easily here because of the slope,” she said. “But with the grading they did for the proposed highway, it would be the easiest way to bring in equipment and trucks.”
“Starting with a bulldozer for these,” Brett said, wincing as yet another thorn grabbed and tore at his arm.
So far they’d found the three old discarded tires, a rusted-out burn barrel overtaken by vegetation and, oddly, a flattened soccer ball in this section. They kept on, although Brett was beginning to feel this was one of his less brilliant ideas. It was rough going, and he figured he was slowly bleeding to death by droplets from all the thorn scratches he’d gathered. On his life list of thankless jobs, this was definitely a contender. Or would have been had it not been for the fact that simply being with Sloan moved it out of that category.
“Thank you,” he said after a while longer.
She looked at him. “For what?”
“For not asking if I have the slightest idea what we’re looking for,” he answered with a wry grimace.
She lifted a brow. “I assumed we were looking for anything that doesn’t fit. Doesn’t belong. Isn’t natural.”
Just that easily, she put it into words that made sense. “Exactly,” he said.
The trees were getting thicker as they went, some with a gap of only a yard or so between them. They brushed past a large fern, and he stopped. The explosion of feathers that lay on the ground told them some small gray bird had likely met its end here.
“Welcome to Mother Nature,” Sloan said with a sigh.
“She is what she is. Emotionless. But she’s also why it all works.”
“Except for us,” she said, sounding a bit wistful. “We fight it, get tangled up with emotions and our need to have reasons for everything.”
He turned to look at her. “Are you saying you want to stop?”
She studied him for a moment. “If I was, what would you say?”
“Then stop. You don’t need to get any deeper into this.”
“But you won’t stop.”
“No.”
“You’re like Cutter with that ball—you’ll chase it until you drop.”
He glanced at the dog, who was nosing the scattered feathers with interest. “Ordinarily I might object to being compared to a dog. But in this case it just might be a compliment.”
Cutter’s head came up sharply. For a moment Brett thought it was because they’d been talking about him, but he wasn’t looking at them. He was staring into the thickest stand of trees. His entire body was tense, his tail stood out straight behind him, and his ears were nearly flat to his head.
“Someone?” Sloan asked.
“I don’t think so,” Brett said. “He’s not growling.”
“But he’s got something,” she said as the dog suddenly bolted between two trees.
“I’d say,” Brett agreed.
They followed, although it took a bit more effort on their part to work their way through the brush and ferns that grew across most of the floor of this grove. They lost sight of Cutter as he pushed farther up the hill.
“Is that still their property?” he asked when he finally caught sight of the dog again, digging at something up in the distance.
“I think so. But we’re about as far as you can get from the house and still be on it.” She pointed. “Up there is where they were originally going to put the road. They did the surveys, even cleared out some places, but something happened and they changed the route.”
It took them another minute or two to get to where Cutter was, about midway between two tall evergreens. He didn’t know what they were, only that they were very different kinds of trees, one with long draping branches trailing green that reminded him of juniper, the other bare of any foliage at all until its top burst out into the clear a good fifty-plus feet above them.
The dog didn’t even glance at them. He was intently focused on whatever he was digging at.
“Well, at least it’s not a puddle this time,” Sloan said.
&n
bsp; “Thank goodness for that. I don’t relish the thought of another shower with a mud-caked dog.”
She gave him a sideways glance, then looked quickly away. He wasn’t sure what her expression meant, but it kept him from teasingly adding, “Now, with you, on the other hand...” He wondered if the same thought had occurred to her. He hoped so. But it was probably best he not say that just now.
They watched, Brett wondering if the dog was going to demand assistance again. But he seemed focused simply on his digging.
“Are you going to miss him? When they come back, I mean?”
He glanced at the dog. “Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s a...big personality.”
She smiled. “It was nice of you to offer to watch him.”
“It would have been,” he agreed. “But I didn’t.” He nodded at the dog. “He decided.”
He explained then about what had happened after the wedding. How Cutter himself had changed the plans. When he finished, she was staring at the dog. But she was smiling.
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that until now,” she said. “I might not have believed it before.”
“I know that feeling,” he said. “There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t have believed about him before.”
There was a rustle in the trees above them, and he glanced up. It took him a moment to spot the squirrel, who apparently wasn’t happy about their presence. He wasn’t actually chattering at them, but he looked as if he might start at any moment.
Probably start throwing things at us. He—
Sloan sucked in a sharply audible breath, almost a gasp. His attention snapped back to her.
“Brett,” she whispered.
But she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at Cutter. Or rather, where he was digging. He shifted his gaze.
“Damn.”
He took a step closer. Just to be sure, although he already was. He almost couldn’t think, the pieces were crashing into place so swiftly in his head.
He crouched beside the hole. Pulled Cutter back.
“It’s all right, boy. I’ve got it now. Don’t dig anymore.”
The dog, somewhat surprisingly given how he’d been going at it, obeyed. Which was a good thing, Brett thought grimly, since all of a sudden they were dealing with a crime scene.
Cutter had uncovered a hand.
Chapter 34
“This changes everything,” Brett said, reaching for his phone.
“I know,” Sloan answered, looking away from the hole. She reached down and stroked Cutter’s head. The dog was sitting quietly, letting out only a brief whine, as if he was distressed by what he’d found. She’d heard search-and-rescue dogs suffered stress when they found only bodies and no survivors, so she supposed it was quite possible.
Sloan shivered, although she hadn’t been cold up to now. The thought made her get out her own phone to look at her weather app. “It’s supposed to rain tonight. Heavy.”
He nodded. “I’ll need to get the crime-scene guys out here fast.”
“Brett?”
He paused before he could hit what was obviously a speed-dial number.
“Is this it? The reason for all this?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand, nor did he put her off. But then, he never did. “No proof of that. Yet. But...”
She knew what he was saying. That his instincts were saying what hers were, that this indeed was the reason behind all of this. He turned back to his phone, which rang. He looked at the screen, then answered.
“Rafe. Things just got impossibly complicated.” He listened for a moment. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he said then. “Especially right now. Your four-footed buddy just found a body.”
He gave Rafe the basics, listened for a moment, then was done. Before he made his call, he looked at her.
“I take that back. There’s one thin thread and a lot of circumstantial links.”
“What doesn’t surprise you?” she asked, guessing it was the thread.
“Mr. Muscle has a record.”
“Rams Emmet?”
He nodded. “Manslaughter, ten years ago. Charges were dropped when the eyewitness disappeared. They investigated for a possible link but couldn’t prove anything. Body was never found.”
She stared back at him. Then, slowly, shifted her gaze to the makeshift grave.
She heard him calling out the necessary responders but wasn’t really tuned in to what he was saying. She was too busy trying to keep her mind from getting ahead of the facts.
One thin thread, Brett had said. Not proof. But he thought like a cop. He had to, had to think about going to court and proving the case. Had to think about clever lawyers and judges with opinions that were supposed to be kept out of the system but too often weren’t.
She only had to think like a person who knew from long, sad experience about smoke and fire and the lust for power that turned some people into dark and evil things.
“Who do you think it is?” she asked when he’d finished his calls.
“If we’re really lucky, there will be ID in there.”
“Would they really leave that?”
“Probably not. I said really lucky.”
Something about the way he was staring at the body told her.
“You know,” she whispered.
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
“You mean you can’t prove it. Yet.”
“For a cop that’s just about the same thing.”
She knew it was a jump, but she asked anyway. “Do you think it’s that eyewitness?”
He looked up, then at her. “Careful,” he said. “You get set on an idea, you end up fitting the facts to that theory instead of letting them lead you to the truth.”
“But you have an idea,” she said. She was certain of it.
“And I’m keeping it on a leash,” he said. “For now. At least until we get an ID on this victim.” He glanced back down the hill. “Call the house. Tell Tim we’re probably dealing with a murder. Not a fresh one, by the looks of it, but still...”
Tell him so he can be on alert, to protect your family. He didn’t say the words, but she heard them anyway. She made the call, half expecting to get questions she had no answer for. But it turned out she was worried for nothing. Deford listened to what Brett had said, answered simply, “Got it,” and hung up.
Cutter growled. Sloan’s breath caught as she felt an electric sort of shock jolt through her fingertips where she’d been stroking the dog. The dog had gone rigidly alert. He stretched his head out toward the area she’d pointed out earlier as the original site for the highway. She saw his nose flexing as he sucked in whatever scent had set him off. He looked at them, then back, as if he desperately wanted to break into a run but something was holding him back. As if he was torn between wanting to race toward whatever had caught his attention and putting himself between them and whatever it was.
Brett reached for Cutter, and the fingers of his free hand curled around the dog’s collar.
“Easy, boy,” he was saying softly as he stared in the direction the dog was looking. “I got the message. Stay with me now. I may need you.”
Amazingly, the dog settled. The growls continued but lower. His head moved slightly, as if he could see what was out there, could see it moving. The growl became a snarl. All thought of Cutter being merely an exceptionally clever house pet vanished at the sight of those bared teeth. She glanced at Brett. He was reaching for his weapon. This man was, in his own way, as much a protector and a warrior as Jason had been.
You’re doomed, girl. This is the only kind of man for you. Get used to it.
Cutter exploded into a fury of barking and snapping. The dog clearly wanted fervently to be free. Brett set himself against the pull. And then froze.
A tall blond man stepped out of the shadow of the trees. His own lethal-looking semiautomatic pistol was pointed at them. Suppressed, she thought, then gave herself an inward shake. What a ridiculous time to remember Jason’s explanation that it was a suppressor, not a silencer, because silencing a weapon was impossible.
Ramsey Emmet. As if speaking of him had conjured him out of thin air.
Her gut contracted, and it took everything in her not to let her knees give way.
“Hands,” the man ordered.
“Well, well,” Brett said, ignoring the command and keeping his hand on the gun behind his back. “I was just talking to someone about your rap sheet.”
The man frowned. “That’s sealed.” Then, clearly irritated, he ordered again. “Hands, Detective. One of them holding your weapon by the barrel.”
“Manslaughter, eh? Short step from that to murder.”
Sloan couldn’t be positive from her angle, but she thought the man’s gaze flicked to the grave for an instant. And he didn’t protest or pretend he had no idea what Brett was talking about.
“He was in the way,” he said dismissively.
Something suddenly occurred to her at his words. Brett had said the manslaughter case was ten years ago. He’d also said this wasn’t fresh. But while she was no forensics expert, this body didn’t look as if it had been in the ground for ten years.
“In whose way?” Brett asked. He sounded so calm, she thought, as if he had guns pointed at him every day.
Idiot. The possibility is there every day.
“None of your business. Mead’s a fool. And now you’re in my way.”
Was he saying the person in the grave had been in someone else’s way? Her mind made a crazy leap. She had no love for politicians on any side of the aisle, not after her sojourn in DC, but this seemed out there even to her. But looking into this man’s flat reptilian eyes, she could believe it.
And he worked for the man who would likely not have been sitting in the governor’s mansion had his surging opponent not quit and vanished.
Operation Power Play Page 23