Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  “I know. It was in the dark. Never mind. Minor. I’m thinking a week, and I’ll be fine. Or light duty. I can do light duty.”

  He sighed. “Get me a doctor’s report. Consider continuing your leave somewhere more peaceful. I’d like to get you back without further damage.”

  Good luck with that. Sinful wasn’t going to get more peaceful unless she made it that way. She hung up, got out of bed, managed to get herself, with only a little bit of swearing, into a dress, since that was the easiest, put the sling on again, and followed the sound of the electric drill, closer now.

  Jace was attaching something to the sill of the kitchen window. A motion sensor. She leaned against the doorway, waited for the drilling to stop, and asked, “How’s it going?”

  He turned and set the drill down on the counter. “All good. No worries.” He frowned at her, every bit of his dark intensity showing. “The cops are coming out later. Are you sure you should be out of bed?”

  She sat down at the kitchen counter. “I’m sure.”

  Today, Paige found, she rated higher than Patrolman Wilson of the red hair and freckles. When the black-and-white pulled up to the cabin, Sergeant Worthington was at the wheel.

  Jace let him in, since Paige was on the couch. She’d swung around to sit up straight, though, and she’d put down the ice pack she’d had pressed to her face. She wanted to look professional. Serious. As serious as a woman in a blue lace dress and a fat lip could look, anyway. She’d thought about changing again. Way too hard, though.

  “How’re you doing?” Worthington asked, taking a seat on the recliner while Jace sat beside Paige.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Could be worse. What did you find out?” She and Jace had discussed telling him about the Lily-switch, and had dismissed the idea. It was what Jace had said. The power of surprise. Not to mention drawing enemy fire. Whatever Lily said, Paige was trained to handle that, and Lily wasn’t.

  Worthington scratched the back of his head. “I’m guessing the power was shut off to the gym using the master breaker, since it wasn’t just the lights. Equipment, climate control, everything. It wouldn’t have been hard to find the right switch. The master’s red. When the power got turned back on, that switch had been tripped. Of course, it doesn’t mean it was switched off at the box, but it’s likely.”

  “If it had been a short,” Jace said, “they wouldn’t have been able to turn it back on and have it stay on.”

  Worthington gazed at him in a not entirely friendly fashion. “Can I ask, sir, how you’re involved in this?”

  “Oh, I think you know. Call it male protective impulse. Goes pretty far in some of us.” Jace’s blue eyes shone hard as blue stone, and the testosterone was running so high, you could practically take hold of it.

  “I understand you have some military background,” Worthington said.

  “Some.”

  “This would be a good time to point out that you’re not a police officer, and this is a police investigation. We don’t take kindly to vigilantism around here.”

  Jace hadn’t raised his voice, and he didn’t now. Instead, he sat back, folded his arms, and said, “I’ll leave the investigating to you, then, and handle the protective part of the deal.”

  Worthington apparently decided not to pursue that, which was probably wise. “So,” Paige said, trying to make her expression Lily-like and admiring, which wasn’t easy with a swollen lip, “you said the power was probably turned off at the box?”

  “Yes,” Worthington said. “Which is between the locker rooms, in a recess. Again, not hidden, and not impossible to know about.”

  “Who turned it back on, do you know?” Paige asked, still going for “innocent.”

  Worthington shifted. Just a little. And Paige thought, The butt can’t lie. Deceptive people shifted position. They couldn’t help it. They controlled their faces, mostly, and their hands. Their lower bodies picked up the tension. “That was the owner,” he said.

  “Oh. Your sister Jennifer,” Paige said, keeping it neutral.

  “Neither she nor anybody else we asked told us they saw who flipped the switch off,” Worthington said, “but all it would take was a clear couple seconds and some nerve.”

  “And premeditation,” Jace said, and Paige looked at him and tried to convey, Shut up. He seemed to get it, because he did.

  “And then what did they do?” she asked Worthington.

  “We found an item that could have struck you,” Worthington said. “A hand weight, the kind women use. Five pounds. It was under a bench, fairly near your cubicle. Could have rolled there. Could’ve been left by anybody, of course. Or not.”

  An item that could have struck you. Not the item we think the perpetrator struck you with, which would have been how Paige would have put it. Distancing. Lessening. The missing money, not the embezzled funds. Or the bad thing that happened, not the rape. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “That sure makes sense.” She wondered if she’d taken the Lily-act too far. Apparently not, because she saw Worthington relax. “Were you able to find any fingerprints or anything?”

  No shifting now. This part, he could be straightforward about. “Rubberized surface. Doesn’t hold a print. And nothing on the breaker panel, either. Jennifer’s fingerprints on top, which they would have been, since she turned it back on. Everything else smudged. We’ve been able to get a list of everybody people remember being in the locker room when the lights went out. Ladies from the yoga class, a few women changing to leave. We’ll check them out.”

  “But I guess,” Paige said, “that doesn’t help too much. Not if the person switched the lights off and then came in. It was probably twenty seconds later that I saw the light, which was right before the person hit me.”

  Worthington cleared his throat. “The memory can be unreliable, ma’am. Very difficult to estimate accurately in that situation.”

  “Ninety seconds,” Jace said. “From the time the lights went off to when… Lily came out of the locker room. And in the first few seconds, there was a flash of light. Could have been somebody moving in the distance. Circuit breaker box to the women’s locker room? How many meters?”

  Worthington stared at Jace for a long few seconds, then said, “How do you know it was ninety seconds, sir?”

  “Because,” Jace said, “I counted them off. I’d say that flash I saw was the person who’d flipped the breaker finding the locker room entrance, or why wouldn’t they have used that light to help out in some way? Instead, the light went off. Or it went into a room with the person, and the door shut behind it. Which would mean somebody who wasn’t in the women’s locker room at the beginning.”

  “Maybe you have an opinion, sir,” Worthington said, “on what they did next.”

  “Well, no,” Jace said. “I don’t. Or I should say that I have two. If they were somebody who had a reason to be in the locker room, I think they dropped that weight after they hit Lily, moved away from it, banged around some in the dark like everybody else, and took off their clothes.”

  “Took off their clothes,” Worthington repeated.

  “Easiest thing in the world,” Jace said. “The lights come on, and she’s half-naked, just like everybody else, stumbling around looking for her phone and her bra.”

  “And what would your second idea be, sir?” Worthington asked.

  “Well, the other one, obviously. That they left the locker room again and were standing around outside it. Or even turning the lights back on. Oh, wait. That was Ms. Turner.”

  “Yes,” Worthington said. “It was.”

  “Do you know who was in the locker room just before the lights went out?” Jace asked Paige.

  “No,” she admitted. “I had the curtain closed. I was getting undressed for at least thirty seconds. Anybody could have come in or gone out.”

  “Was that usual for you?” Worthington asked. “Being in that cubicle?”

  “No.” She knew why he was asking. Because he knew it wasn’t usual. He wondered if
she were making this up. If she’d hit herself in the head, maybe, to gain sympathy? Or… what? “I have heavy periods. I prefer to be modest at that time of the month. I can’t wear tampons, you see, and sometimes, I have to change my pad unexpectedly. I get clotting,” she decided to throw in. “They can be large. It gets pretty messy. Drippy.”

  Worthington cleared his throat again, consulted his notebook, and Paige could feel Jace trying not to laugh beside her. “Thank you,” the sergeant said. “That’s about what we’ve got, but we’ll keep working it.”

  “One minute,” Jace said when Worthington appeared to be about to stand up. “I’m concerned about the possible link between Paige’s attacker and the person who’s been targeting me. Somebody watching me would know that I’d spent the night here. The last letter referenced my not ‘waiting for them,’ if you remember. The person threatened a knife at her throat.”

  “We’ve considered that,” Worthington said stiffly. “Of course. We’re following that up, in fact. We put a trace on the initial call to you.”

  “This morning,” Jace said. “That’s when you did that.”

  “Do you have a problem with that, sir?”

  “No,” Jace said. “I’m just glad you finally did it. Where did it come from?”

  “A public phone. Local. Unfortunately, there’s no security footage available in that location, and nobody remembers seeing somebody using the phone a week ago. If you do get any more messages, though, or any other contact, please let us know right away.”

  When he left, Jace shut the door behind him, looked thoughtfully at Paige, and said, “He’d rather believe that, anyway. Which means I hope you’re right. I hope this is one person, and it’s my person. Because that’s the one he’s looking for.”

  “Yes. And everything he said about what happened to me was just that. What happened to me. Like… disembodied. The switch ‘was tripped.’ I ‘got hit’ by a weight. If it’s his sister, if it’s anybody invested in my selling, anybody who might be involved with his sister or that she might know about, he doesn’t want to know.”

  “I agree,” Jace said. His grin started slowly, then grew.

  “What?” Paige asked. “It’s funny now? How?” She hadn’t imagined that tension in him. He’d been holding himself back. He’d wanted to explode.

  “Changing your pad,” he said. “Clots. Drippy clots. Maybe you should’ve described them better. ‘Quarter-sized.’”

  He was laughing, and she was trying not to. “Liver-like,” she suggested. “Dark red. Hemorrhage. Men are such babies. I thought he was going to throw up. And by the way, it’s not true. In case you were worried.” She picked up her ice pack again, but it had melted.

  Jace grabbed it, still smiling, and said, “Switching it out. Hang on. And no worries. You can’t put me off that easily.”

  When he came back with the cold pack, she said, “We should go to the meeting tonight. You and me.”

  He switched gears just like that. “Shock them, maybe? Get the town behind you?”

  “Maybe. And maybe more. We should make a plan.”

  When they pulled up outside the county building, the parking lot was more than half full. Jace unrolled the passenger side window all the way and told Tobias, who was hanging out with his head in Paige’s lap again, “Tobias. Stay.”

  “I still think it would’ve been better to leave him at your house,” Paige said, stroking the dog’s silky ears while he looked up at her with his soulful brown eyes. “In case your stalker shows up over there.”

  “In which case,” Jace said, somehow managing to pretend she hadn’t already said that twice, “I’ll still be glad I brought him with me instead. Let’s inventory what I’ve got here. I’ve got you, I’ve got my dog, I’ve got my truck, and I’ve got my gun. Yeah, that’s everything important.”

  “Montana’s going to beg you to apply for residency if you keep talking like a country song,” she said, and he laughed. “You’re not afraid he’ll jump out with the window wide open?”

  “No. I told him to stay. He’ll only jump out if somebody comes along and mucks about where they shouldn’t. Then he’ll make them sorry they tried.”

  “Making a car bomb isn’t exactly hitting somebody in the head. Talk about escalation.”

  “Better safe than sorry. ‘There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.’ The bloke who said that was a soldier. Well, an airman. Nearly as good. Also, we’re doing some more of that deterrence. And do you want to stay out here and have a chat about my dog, or would you like to go inside?”

  “I want to go inside, of course. I know this is a good idea.”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding much too patient. “It is. That’s why you thought of it.”

  “I’m just balking at the thought of going out of my way to look weak, now that we’ve come to it.”

  “But it won’t be you doing it. It’ll be Lily, who isn’t in the business of projecting authority. If you’re going to carry on being Lily, you’d better get some practice. Sorry to say it, but you’ve slipped up a fair few times so far.”

  “Right,” she said, and opened the door.

  He said, “Bloody hell. What did I just say? Wait for me to come around.”

  “Oh.” She did, and reminded herself, Lily, when Jace lifted her down with both hands around her waist like she weighed nothing. Then she wrecked it by saying, “You could at least pretend you aren’t enjoying getting the chance to do it.”

  He laughed. “As you’re pretending you aren’t enjoying having me do it, I’d say we’re even.”

  “Points,” she said, and he grinned again, said, “I know,” and got out the walking stick he’d made for her.

  “I still say it’s overkill,” she said, even though it actually did help.

  “No. You’re wounded, but brave. Work on it. You have about two minutes.”

  The meeting was in the commissioners’ chambers, which were set up auditorium-style, with a rectangular table on a dais up front. They’d left their entrance until five minutes before the meeting was set to begin in order to maximize the impact, and it was working. At least, a buzz started and grew as Paige limped down the aisle on her stick, her left arm in a sling, her upper lip still swollen, and the bruising on her face now a violent red. A woman a little older than she was, whom she hadn’t seen before, stood up and said, “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I was just going to call you to see if you wanted to go to the craft fair in Kalispell, and then I heard. Your poor face.” She held out her arms, stepped forward, then hesitated. “Are you huggable?”

  “Not really,” Paige said. “But thank you. I’d smile, but it hurts.” Good thing she hadn’t had to go to the craft fair. She was sure that would’ve been a major fail. When she looked at crafts, she didn’t think, I could make that. She didn’t even think, I could buy that. She mostly thought, Who cares?

  Hailey was there now, too, saying, “I can’t believe you actually came.”

  “I told you I would,” Paige said.

  “I know. And I told everybody you were going to, like you asked. Sweetie, you’re so brave. But first the shop, and now this? Why would somebody do that?”

  She was about to go off again, Paige could tell. Jace said, “We’d better sit down. Meeting’s about to start.”

  “I’m glad you’re with her, anyway,” Hailey told him. “There’s nothing like having a big, strong man around to make you feel safer.”

  “That’s so true,” Paige said in as Lily-like a tone as she could manage. “I’m thanking my lucky stars that he’s here to protect me.”

  Jace put a light hand on her lower back and whispered in her ear as they made their slow way down the aisle, “All right. That may have been going too far.”

  She didn’t answer, because she was looking around. Most of the parties in question had shown up. Good. Raeleigh the motel owner, with a man who must have been her husband. The gas station guy. Jennifer from the gym, of course, and her husband
. Sergeant Worthington standing near the back with another cop, prepared for trouble. None of them looked thrilled to see her, and neither did most of the other hundred or so souls in the room.

  Paige found the kind of seats they’d planned on. Front row, on the aisle. Nice and visible. She got herself sitting down, which didn’t feel fabulous, and told Jace, “I always wonder what they think a big, strong man can do that a twelve-gauge can’t. Nothing says, ‘Argument’s over’ like a shotgun.” Which Jace had gone out and purchased today, too. Ostentatiously.

  Up on the dais, the commissioners were doing some rustling. Over to one side, Brett Hunter gave Paige a wave. A “Hi, how’re you doing” thing, not a “Sorry you got beat up because of my project” thing.

  “I’d think it was him,” Paige told Jace, not waving back, “but it would be way beneath him to get all passionate like that.”

  “It’s business to him, that’s all,” Jace said. “People like that don’t want to get passionate.”

  “I don’t get it,” Paige said.

  Jace gave her that almost-smile that was more of a deepening of the lines around his eyes. “I know you don’t. That’s part of your charm.”

  Nice, but then the commissioners were talking. About the project, about feasibility studies and sewer and water and the Forest Service and land use, and Paige may have zoned out some. Finally, the chairman, a heavyset gray guy with jowls, said, “I’m pleased to see that Lily Hollander has come tonight. We were all sorry to hear about what’s happened to you,” he said to her.

  Four of the five commissioners looked like they were either sorry, somewhat sorry, or might consider being sorry at some future date. One of them looked nothing like sorry.

  “Who’s that guy?” Paige whispered to Jace. “The one who especially hates me?”

  He could read the name plate, apparently, because he said, “J. Knightley. Mean anything?”

  “Oh. My shoplifter’s father.” Somebody had said her name, though she couldn’t remember who. “You must have eyesight like an eagle.”