A pack, we’re like brothers and sisters. It’s not the same as fathers, mothers, and children. That’s what Roscoe had. Me? I had uncles.
I shivered against a gust of cool wind, the word resonating inside my head for a moment. Uncles.
“Come on, Roscoe,” I whispered. “Let’s wake your owners up, huh?”
Barefoot and naked, I tiptoed up to the front door of the house and ordered Roscoe to sit and stay. Then I pounded on the door. “Speak, Roscoe. Can you do that? Speak.”
Roscoe obeyed, his bark surprisingly deep and resonant.
“Speak, Roscoe!” I ordered again, backing away as the lights came on in the cabin and I stepped into the grass. “Speak!”
Roscoe barked again, his tail wagging uncontrollably.
“Good boy!” I hissed, laughing a little as I broke through the trees, the pine needles scratching and abrading my skin. “Stay!”
A middle-aged woman wearing a flannel robe and carrying a shotgun opened the front door as I disappeared from view of the cabin, and began to quickly shift back to my larger, furrier form. “Roscoe? Oh my God, is that you?”
The rapid change hurt like hell, but I knew I’d at least be able to sneak away in the darkness more effectively than I would if I was human.
“How did you—who was that knocking, boy? That couldn’t have been you, could it?”
Roscoe barked happily in response.
“Whoever you are,” called the woman. “Thank you for bringing my boy back home!”
Hidden further back in the trees now, my tongue lolled from my mouth again as I panted happily. Poor guy was back with his family. Even though I didn’t have one like his, with someone waiting up for me to get back from being lost, I was still glad for him.
No one needed to be without a family. Certainly not Roscoe, even if he was a labradoodle.
I turned back into the woods and headed off into the forest, loping through the bushes and brambles and over the mountainside to find the rest of my pack. Maybe they’d have picked up the trail of some prey, maybe not. But, whichever it was, they were the closest thing to family I had. Which was more than a lot of people can say.
Chapter Two – Ashley
The big wrought iron gate with the letters “MM” stuck on the front slowly opened the way to my father’s small mountainside estate. When the gate was open far enough, I pulled the Audi through and drove down the paved road to the small five-bedroom cabin my father, Martin Maxwell III, owned for his winter ski trips.
I would’ve driven one of the other, nicer cars down to Enchanted Rock, but my father must have had them taken in for pre-winter service checks before I came up here a couple days earlier to see my friend Sheila. But the Audi was still fine, even if it wasn’t my first choice.
The glowing blue of my headlights painted the trees in a surreal light as I curved back and forth on the road. I caught a glimpse of green eyes shining back at me from the darkness. Maybe deer or raccoons, I wasn’t sure which. I slowed when I saw them, not wanting to run any of the little critters over or, in the case of the deer, wreck the car. It was an SUV, but everyone always told me I needed to be careful on these roads.
I pulled up to the cabin, with its big picture windows in front, heavy oak double doors, and homey rustic feel to it. I circled the car around in the driveway, clicked the automatic garage door opener, and pulled it into the empty spot nearest the door before shutting off the engine. Clutch bag in hand, I climbed out as the door’s electronic motor grumbled to life and began to lower, my low heels clicking in the emptiness of the concrete-floored room. With the other three spots empty beside me, the room seemed a lot larger than normal, almost unsettlingly so, as it stretched off in the stark light of the neon overhead light.
All this? The fifty or so acres it sat on, the cabin, the long drive? The car I’d driven up in? All of it belonged to my father, one of the biggest hedge fund managers in the United States, as he was so proud to tell everyone. It had really impressed most of my previous boyfriends. No surprise there, to be honest. The majority of them had come from families friendly with my own.
I know what most people thought. Rich girl dating rich boys, all of them just angling to get married to keep the money in the family. But it wasn’t like that. At least, I didn’t think so. It was just that we all attended the same parties, the same gallery openings, the same fashion shows, and music festivals. It had just seemed natural to date. There wasn’t any kind of conniving. At least, not that I’d seen.
I fiddled with my keys as I came around the car and slid the key into the lock. The door alarm began to beep as I opened the door and stepped inside, informing me I needed to dial in my passcode. I tapped out the numbers on the keypad, producing another set of beeps that let me know I’d disarmed it successfully.
I headed through the mudroom into the kitchen I barely even knew how to use and dropped my keys and clutch on the granite countertop, fighting the urge to yell that I was home. I always forgot that I was the only one up here. The only place my father kept any kind of staff on duty these days were with him, and that was just his assistant. With me moved out and on my own, there wasn’t any need for my nanny Ms. Hilda anymore, or any of the maids. My eyes drifted over the darkened living room, barely registering anything by the moonlight streaming in through the windows.
Hungry and still feeling a little bit of a buzz from the drinks I had with Sheila, I pulled open the fridge door. I searched the icebox to see if there was any leftover curry from when Hannah, a local chef I sometimes hired, had come up and cooked a couple nights before, but didn’t find anything. Sometimes I got hungry at night and, without thinking, just came down and munched. Instead, I pulled out some fixings for a sandwich and began tossing them on the island behind me. Even if I was kitchen illiterate, I could at least make a sandwich.
I brushed a stray blonde hair from my face as it blew in a light breeze, and set to work crafting my sandwich next to the pile of ingredients.
As I pulled open one of the drawers in the island to find a butter knife, though, it occurred to me that there shouldn’t have been a breeze. Not in the house. And certainly not in the kitchen.
Another breeze blew, this time stronger than before.
It felt like my heart slammed on the brakes and lurched to a stop as I glanced up into the dark living room.
The curtains in front of the far window fluttered in another light breeze, the wind bringing scents of outside.
My heart slammed back on the gas and began to beat triple-time. Without taking my eyes from the living room, I side-stepped to the block of knives sitting on the counter and drew one out with a hiss.
Nothing. Silence. Just the curtain fluttering in another breeze.
I swallowed hard, my heart still racing like I’d done two hours of hot yoga. “Hello?” I called, hoping to dear God I didn’t get a response. I didn’t know what I’d do if I did.
No response.
I stepped out from behind the kitchen island and called out again to the hopefully empty house. “Hello? I-I won’t call the sheriff if you just leave right now! Take whatever you want, just leave me out of it, okay?”
My breath came faster and faster as I stepped out into the little dining area next to the kitchen. Seeing nothing, I tiptoed forward. I headed for the living room lights on the nearby wall, the knife held out in front of me leading the way in case someone hadn’t taken my more-than-generous offer.
Instead of soft carpet beneath my feet as I entered the living room, my footsteps were met with the crunch of broken glass.
My whole body gave a little jolt in fear. Worried about what else I might find, I stopped in my tracks and reached out with a searching hand to get the lights. I flicked them on.
I dropped my knife in shock as my eyes traveled over the living room.
It was wrecked. The window, which I now realized was broken and letting in the breeze, was the least of my worries. The carpet was torn around the edges, the sofas and leather chair
s sliced open and their stuffing strewn about the room like a poor imitation of a stuffing slasher film.
My eyes traveled around the room, searching for anyone that might still be there. They settled on the wall where all our family pictures had hung. Pictures from a better time, from a time when we’d still been, well, a family.
Instead, they lay on the floor, the glass in the frames shattered across the floor, their backs cut out.
Gutted, I bent down and picked up one of the larger ones that had been dropped in the little area between the kitchen and the living room. It was a picture of me and my mother, Tessa Maxwell. Both of us had our long blonde hair tied back, our almond-shaped blue eyes squinted against the sun as we sat on our family sailboat, The Miss Ashley. Yeah, father had named her after me.
The photo had been taken by my father almost a decade earlier on my fourteenth birthday. I’d begged them to take me out on it for my birthday since it was a Saturday, and my father finally caved and took it out of the marina even though it was a little early in the season. We’d spent the day laughing, with him teaching me all the different parts of the ship and Mother running after me with sunblock.
That had been a good day, one of the last ones I could remember. Not long after, she passed away. Not much longer after that, my father married the bimbo.
I still remembered how many “I told you so’s” I got from my mother when my face reddened and peeled across my nose and my cheek. I don’t know if they were from just that day, but I liked to think my little line of freckles across my nose were there to remind me of it.
Shaking my head back to the present, I stared at the photo for a moment longer. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I grabbed the picture from the frame and pulled it out.
I must have caught the edge of the glass with my finger, though, and blood began to trickle from it. It smarted a little, but didn’t hurt.
“Dammit,” I mumbled and went back into the kitchen. I set the photo on the counter and grabbed a kitchen towel from one of the drawers, wrapped my finger in it, and began to applied pressure. With the towel wrapped around my finger, I fumbled with the catch on my clutch and pulled out my phone to call 911.
“911. What is your emergency?” The operator, a younger sounding woman with a rough country accent, asked.
“This is Ashley Maxwell at the Maxwell estate. I’d like to report a burglary.”
As she and I began to go back and forth over what little information I had to give her, I began to walk around the house. All the paintings had been taken down and leaned against the walls. One of a white wolf, one that I’d really liked and had purchased from the little gallery in town, the Curious Turtle, had an X slashed into it, right across the front with the canvas peeled away.
“Twenty minutes?” I asked when the dispatcher said there was a deputy on the way.
“Yes, ma’am,” she replied. “Is there anything else I can do for you? Are you sure you’ll be fine?”
I tightened the towel around my finger. “I’ll be fine, I think. Thank you.”
We both hung up. I began to search through the names in my contact list till I found Jessica Long, Sheila’s friend and the owner of the Curious Turtle. Sheila had given me the local gossip around town, and had casually mentioned that Jessica was engaged to a guy who worked at some kind of security firm.
She didn’t go into a lot of details, but she’d totally been gushing over them.
I typed out a text message, asking if she could give me a name and number and for their firm, and sent it off.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about this just seemed off.
Chapter Three – Frank
At nine o’clock on the dot, I opened the front door of Frost Security and stepped inside, the heels of my work boots clunking heavily on the refinished hardwood of the small lobby as I headed right to Genevieve's receptionist desk.
Peter Frost and Richard Murdoch, the founder and first member of Frost Security, had redone this old saloon when they first moved up to Enchanted Rock and opened the agency. They turned it into a nice little office space with a lot of hard work and dedication. The bones of the building had been good, solid, aged timber after they’d cut the minute amount of rot away. But, still, it had just been a wide open saloon. Rather than give us cubicles, they’d installed a framework of glass-enclosed rooms in the former common bar, making us look at least halfway respectable, and added insulation and updated the electrical work.
Up here in the lobby, though, they’d kept it more open so it would look less intimidating. Fresh artwork from the Curious Turtle, Richard’s fiancée’s art gallery that he’d recently become a partner in, hung from the walls. Green plants dotted the area and comfortable chairs lined the walls. If you hadn’t known any better, you’d be amazed to find out how many old prospectors had been gunned down in this building. That was one fact we didn't put on the service brochure.
“Morning, Gen,” I said as I stepped up to her desk. “What’re we riding herd on today?”
Genevieve Richter laughed and rolled her eyes behind her wire-framed glasses, that knowing look of a grandma clear on her face. She glanced down at her appointment sheet. “You, Mr. O’Dwyer, have an appointment in thirty minutes with an Ashley Maxwell.”
Gen was like our red-headed den mother here, and one of Peter and Richard’s first cases they’d sewn up. She stayed on top of all the paperwork, files, billing, accounting, phone calls, and scheduling—all the stuff I, at least, couldn’t wrap my head around. As far as I was concerned, she was damn good at her job. Of course, the only measure of a good job for me was whether or not there was a paycheck in my account every two weeks. And she and Peter always made sure we were taken care of.
“Ashley, huh?” I asked, searching my memory bank for the name as I went around her and grabbed the coffee pot and a mug.
The name didn’t ring any bells, but that didn’t mean anything. I was relatively new to this little settlement, with only a couple years on the mountain under my belt. Enchanted Rock was a tourist community, more or less, with a few thousand core local residents who lived in town, like me, and significantly more spread throughout the surrounding mountains. “She a local?”
“Only for a few months a year.”
I nodded and sipped my black coffee. On top of the normal population, though, was the seasonal migration of the rich folk who came through. Summertime was time for hiking, backpacking, and camping. Fall was all about hunting the big game, both elk and deer. And during the winter, it was skiing and snowboarding in the surrounding resorts. And, of course, you always had the sickeningly wealthy who came up during spring and sometimes stayed just a few days, or as long as six months. Their little estates dotted the mountainsides, complete with rambling cabins and plots of land.
“Vacation cabin, huh?” I asked knowingly.
She nodded. “Sounds like a breaking and entering, and she wants it investigated. Peter has all the details back in his office. Well, as much as we have, at least.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
She shook her head. “Nope, that’s it. Better get some coffee in you and run a comb through that hair of yours. You’ve only got,” she glanced at the clock, “twenty-eight minutes till your first appointment now.”
I laughed, lifted my mug a little in a mock salute to her, and turned to head back into the office proper. “Well, I’d best skedaddle then, huh?” I asked back over my shoulder as I began to meander through the glass enclosures that counted for offices here, heading back to my little office.
I passed Matt Jones, my roommate, on the way in as he bustled back to his desk with a stack of files in his arms, blue pen clutched in his teeth. I’d heard him get up and moving before dawn this morning. Peter had him heading east to Denver for a deposition on an insurance job, a fire case where they suspected arson by the owner.
Matt gave me a nod as he ducked into his office and kicked the door shut behind him with his foot. He was on a timet
able, after all, and didn’t have time to chew the fat.
I respected that. He was the one paying our bills right now.
That’s what our meat and potatoes really was. Corporate work. The kind where Frost didn’t necessarily pad the hours or anything, but could still get by with charging a little more on the hourly rate.
With the exception of our little case a few months back involving an outlaw biker gang and a big shootout, the most exciting thing we handled anymore was corporate security penetration tests and the occasional stalker case.
It wasn’t adrenaline-pumping but, I’ll be honest, after a certain amount of getting shot at nearly everyday while I was in Baghdad and Sadr City, or running as a private bodyguard for high value targets in Brazil, you kind of want a break from all that.
Reckon that’s how I ended up here, in a sleepy little corner of the High Rockies. That and, well, the incident.
But, I didn’t have time to dwell on it, or the past. I still had emails and more coffee to down before my first appointment came in. I headed into my office and powered up my computer before beginning the tedious task of clearing out the inevitable spam that filled my inbox like burrs on a dog’s tail.
Ten minutes in, Peter appeared, rapping softly at my office door. He looked haggard, his almost black hair in disarray, big circles under his cold blue eyes. Still, though, his button-up shirt was perfectly pressed and his slacks had just the right crease on the pants. “Gen tell you about your first appointment? Ms. Maxwell?”
I nodded, reaching out to take the file from him. “Sure did. We already got a file going?” I opened the folder and let my eyes roam over its contents, just soaking everything in the way you look at a beautiful sunset.
“No,” he said, shaking his head as he took a seat, “I like to keep track of who’s coming and going out of the wealthy community, and I recognized the name from Richard telling me about her. Recent customer of his, and seems to be friends with Sheila Pearson, Jessica’s friend. Jessica’s actually the one who recommended us, I think, since Ashley knew about Richard working here. That, though, is just some clippings on Ms. Maxwell’s father and his hedge fund.”
Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series Page 26