Everyone in the room sat back, glancing at each other. The others looked as stunned and disgusted as he felt.
“Randall Bowe has unleashed a huge load of crap and misery on this town and has to pay,” Bryce said.
“Davison has to be stopped,” Clarke said. First and foremost. He wanted Bowe badly, but at least they’d already taken away that man’s ability to hurt them. But Davison...
“We’ve both been looking for Bowe,” Troy told Clarke, motioning toward Bryce. “But so far have no actionable leads...”
“I’ll get a team together and take on the hunt for Davison.” Bryce spoke up, sitting forward as though ready to spring into action. “We know he was an accountant, was laid off from his job at a large company, was an average employee. He has a daughter, Tatiana. We talked to her when Davison was a suspect for the first murder. I’d heard she went to Paris, but I’ll see if I can track her down. With this looking like a serial case, the FBI should be the lead...”
“Fine.” Melissa looked at the agent and nodded. “You get some officers together and deepen your search for Bowe. All overtime will be approved.” She looked down the table to Clarke. “You mind doing some digging into the two victims? See if they have anything else in common besides their ages and walking dogs in the park? You can do that from your place...”
He gave her an immediate thumbs-up. Stood as the others did, eager to get home, but paused long enough to let the others depart before him.
“How’s Everleigh holding up?” Melissa asked him as he shrugged into his coat, pocketing his notepad. Though tall and clearly strong, wearing her title with confidence, she still looked like his little sister to him, even in the way she held her folder of papers up to her chest.
“Better than you’d expect,” he said. “She takes everything on the chin...but I know it’s getting to her inside. Her grandmother’s situation appears to be bothering her most of all. Is there anything you can do there?”
Her blue eyes shadowed with concern, Melissa shook her head. “Other than what I’ve already done...seen to it that she’s housed with minimum offenders, and that she has all the perks anyone can get in prison...no. It’s with the DA now.”
He’d known what her response was going to be. Wasn’t sure why he’d even asked. Nodding, he turned to go.
“Clarke?”
The authoritative tone in her voice had him turning back to her. She wasn’t his boss. He was his own. But she hired him on a regular basis, and... “Yeah?”
He was used to the way she studied him. Held up to the scrutiny just fine. Until she said, “What’s with you and Everleigh?”
“Nothing. Why?” He held her gaze, but it was tough.
“Your voice just sounds...different...every time she’s mentioned.”
“It’s been, what, twenty-four hours since I met her? I’d hardly think that would give you time to assess a damn thing.”
Oh, but he knew differently. Knew that the anger in his tone gave him away, to himself as much as Melissa.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you be so protective with a woman that wasn’t a member of our family.”
He couldn’t speak to that. Didn’t go around assessing his levels of protectiveness.
“I’m just doing my job, sis,” he said, attempting to calm himself with that truth. “Maybe it’s not me that’s different, but her. Everleigh accepts inequities in her life as though they’re meant to be there, and yet she doesn’t get bitter. Or hard. She just keeps moving forward. Doing the best she can. She’s smart, maybe too loyal, if there is such a thing, but no matter what gets thrown at her, most of it unfairly, she doesn’t complain...” He kept picturing her calmly returning more tackle than any one man needed to various boxes, knew he was saying too much. Told himself to wrap it up. “She was done wrong by the city of Grave Gulch. We owe her. And that’s what this is. Me being extra vigilant in an attempt to pay her back.”
All true.
And yet, as he quickstepped it out to his vehicle, he knew that he hadn’t fooled Melissa. Or himself.
Chapter 9
Everleigh spent much of Friday on the phone with lawyers, bankers and insurance brokers. She canceled Fritz’s remaining policies, and let the bank know she would no longer be paying for Fritz’s sports car.
He’d driven it to the house just before he’d been killed. As far as she was concerned, the bank could come repossess it.
No one seemed to know if he’d come to the house alone that day.
There’d been no break-in the day of the murder, implying his killer had had a key or Fritz had let them in. That had been part of the rationale for blaming her. And due to the murder weapon and the type of injuries, they’d labeled it a crime of passion.
Clarke’s thinking that the killer could have been one of Fritz’s mistresses made good sense. She’d far rather think that an unknown woman, rather than someone she actually knew, was behind this.
Clarke had texted to let her know that he was home less than an hour after he’d left. His brother was already gone, and other than the brief introduction, she hadn’t seen or spoken to him. At noon, she went down and put together a chef salad for lunch, using her own groceries, texting Clarke to let him know that his was in the refrigerator if he wanted it.
And just after one, a good four hours before they had to even think about leaving for her mother’s, he texted to ask if she was up to a trip to the apartment Fritz had rented for himself. She’d been planning to visit the small place, to clean out his stuff, after grocery shopping the day before. The estate lawyer had told her that Fritz had paid six months’ rent up front, so she had time, but...
The police have already been over it, sweeping for DNA, Clarke texted her, but I’d like to go back and see if you and I together can find anything that might tell us where to look for any of the women he’d been sleeping with.
He was working the case. And because that felt good and right to her, she sent back immediate agreement, hitting Send as she left the lovely room she’d been allotted.
Nervous about venturing out. About being in Fritz’s space—somewhere she’d never been, but maybe his killer had. And most nervous of all about spending the afternoon, as well as the evening, with a man who sent way too many vibes for her to avoid.
* * *
Clarke was driving a loaner vehicle, a black town car with tinted windows that looked like something a mobster would drive, while the back passenger door of his SUV was being repaired. He’d paid extra for the rental car, having it delivered late that morning. After that shot had been fired at them, he couldn’t contemplate driving Everleigh around in a car that left them both sitting ducks. He knew she wouldn’t agree to be a total prisoner. He’d suggested as much the day before to no avail. She was going to visit her gram. And they needed to go to the party that night. She wanted her life back. And she was going to do whatever she had to do to make that happen...with him at her side.
So he took her to Fritz’s apartment, and out they were, but at least anyone outside the car wouldn’t be able to see her head through the window to properly take aim...
He had to assume that whoever was after her was everywhere she was. It was the only way to keep her safe.
And while he also knew that luring the person out was the quickest and best way to find the perp, using Everleigh as bait went against every single instinct in his body.
Everleigh had the key to the apartment on her ring, and as cold as it was, no one was outside in the quiet neighborhood when she let them inside. Looking around the place itself proved as uneventful as the trip over had been. Furnished with nondescript pieces, the three rooms looked more like a middle-line hotel suite than anything else. Other than clothes in the closet and a few of the drawers, a phone charger and toiletries, there was nothing else there.
“He came home every day I worked,” Everleigh reminded him. Whil
e she watched silently, he turned the place over pretty thoroughly anyway.
Just because there was nothing of him there didn’t mean a woman hadn’t lost something along the way. Happened during affairs in hotel rooms all the time.
“An earring back, even, could be a clue,” he said, pulling the sheets down off the bed. As though she’d only been waiting for direction, Everleigh started pulling out drawers, in the bedroom and the adjoining bath. Looking in the shower, on the floor by the toilet...anyplace anything small could have dropped.
And as much as Clarke wanted to be immune to Everleigh, the way she took all of this on—without what would have been perfectly understandable histrionics, or even the edge being in that place should have given her—had him admiring the hell out of her instead.
* * *
She wanted out. Of the apartment. Of the need for protection. Of any talk of murder. So Everleigh went to work. Trying not to think about the fact that Fritz had traded eighteen years of marriage to her for the boring little generic apartment and affairs with someone else.
So yeah, Clarke Colton might find her intriguing, but he’d known her only a day. She couldn’t let herself make anything of it. Everleigh refused to risk ever being in a vulnerable position like the current one again. She’d get through the moments ahead, one at a time, and she was going to build a good life that depended only on herself and never look back. She’d seen enough of the past.
“I talked to Melissa about your grandmother,” Clarke said as they went through kitchen drawers—him on one end of the little kitchen, her on the other.
She looked over at him, hands frozen. “And?”
A shake of his head had her going back to work. “It’s like she told you—it’s with the DA. There’s nothing more she can do. You have to convince her to take a plea, Everleigh. It’s the only way she’s got a hope of getting out in a reasonable amount of time.”
His words got her ire up. Didn’t matter if they were accurate or not. Didn’t even matter the guise in which they were offered. She didn’t care if he was trying to be kind, to help. She was not going to just accept that her gram might die in prison.
And because of her...
“I’m holding out hope,” she said, her strong tone driven by the tension inside her. She shut one drawer a little harder than necessary and moved on to silverware. “It worked for me. My case was a slam dunk. Everyone was certain I was guilty. And I got out. I’ve got faith that something will come up for Gram, too.”
“There’s a major difference here.” He’d stopped at a utensil drawer, his head turned toward her. She saw him with peripheral vision but didn’t face him.
“What’s that?”
“Hannah’s guilty, and she admitted it,” he said. “You weren’t and didn’t.”
She couldn’t let him build doubt to the point of giving up. If Gram had given up on her when all seemed lost, Everleigh would be spending her life in prison.
“I know she’s eighty years old,” he said softly. “And I know she had good reason for what she did. Her cause was right. The police were wrong, and she had to prove that. All of those mitigating factors will help her, certainly, but she’s still a kidnapper...”
“She wasn’t stealing him. She was just getting your family’s attention in the only way left to her. None of you would listen to her. You were all so certain that I was a murderer...”
Yeah, she was still a bit bothered by that. She understood that the evidence concocted by Bowe had looked bad, but once they’d seen what he’d presented, they’d stopped looking. In spite of the fact that a crime-scene investigator had relayed the evidence differently.
“She took him, Everleigh. With reason that was sound to her, with good intentions, maybe, but without permission.”
“Why don’t we just wait and see what happens?” she said, getting increasingly agitated and not wanting to make a fool of herself. Who did he think he was, sitting as judge and jury on her grandmother before there’d even been a trial?
Even if he was right in the end, she was right to hold on to hope. He could not to take that from her.
“She needs to take a plea,” he said again. Not letting it go. “You’re trying to justify vigilante justice and we can’t live together in society with that kind of thinking,” he said, almost as though lecturing a class, and she wondered if he was trying to piss her off on purpose.
Or maybe he’d had enough of her. It couldn’t be easy for a guy like him to have a constant companion around his neck, invading his home, twenty-four hours a day.
She’d tried to stay out of his way...
“I’m not saying we can take matters in our own hands just because we don’t like the way the system is working, or not working, in a particular instance,” she said, trying not to grit her teeth. She bit back a string of words best left unsaid. “What I am saying—” pain made her voice a bit stronger than it should have been “—is that I’m hoping something neither one of us can see right now will present itself and the situation will be resolved. There are still protests going on downtown. You have to have seen them when you went to the station this morning...” She’d seen them on the news she’d watched on her tablet. Had cried a little at the sight of so much support for her gram.
“We can’t rule by popular opinion, either,” he said. “We’ve got laws for a reason. Without them we all live in chaos...”
He just wasn’t able to get it. Didn’t seem to comprehend what hope was all about. And she kind of understood. He was the oldest of his generation in a large successful family and hadn’t had to grow up dreaming of a better life as she had. And the law-and-order part—she got that, too. But he might want to take note... The townspeople weren’t real happy with the way the GGPD was being run as of late.
Still, she needed Clarke’s help. And Gram had taught her a long time before not to bite the hand that fed her. She wanted to stand up for hope. To show him there was more than just thought and facts. But when she realized why, realized she was taking his attitude personally, she stopped. “I respect the law, Clarke,” was all she said.
And set about searching cupboards for any sign of her deceased husband’s lovers.
Or any other reason someone would want them both dead.
* * *
What in the hell was the matter with him, picking a fight with Everleigh just so she’d see reality and not get hurt again? His job was to protect her person, not her heart. If she wanted to believe that someone could wave a magic wand and set her grandmother free, then she had that right.
This lesson, that Everleigh’s heart was not his to protect, had been a good one. Timely. Considering that in just a couple of hours they’d be on their way to her parents’ house for a party that was bound to be emotionally stressful for Everleigh on so many levels.
And he didn’t need to worry about how she felt, just keep her safe. He was there to investigate every single person who walked through the door. To make casual conversation all over the place. And see if he could figure out whom Fritz Emerson had been seeing. Either most recently or further back. Yeah, they were going to see her family, but she and Fritz had been married eighteen years; it stood to reason that Fritz would have developed relationships there. Maybe said too much during guys’ poker night. And while Fritz and Everleigh had grown up in different neighborhoods, Grave Gulch wasn’t all that large. And Fritz had supposedly chosen his women from the gym right there in town. Anyone could have seen him with any of those women. If his current mistress had been upset with Fritz for not filing divorce papers, that could be motive. And a jilted lover was always a prime suspect.
Feeling more like himself than he had since he’d run to the grocery store for a gallon of milk the morning before, Clarke was fine to ride in silence back to his place, where, he figured, Everleigh would return to her room, and he’d have another couple of hours to work. The lack of any apparent si
milarities between the cases Bowe had tampered with was bothering him. A lot. Why had the man manipulated evidence in only those instances?
Had the deed just been a compulsion that would come over him, like a sexual thrill? One he couldn’t control?
The theory just didn’t ring true with the scientist he’d known Bowe to be. He was meticulous about everything he did. Which meant he must have had specific reason for blowing those cases. For framing particular people. Or, conversely, as with Len Davison, the criminals he’d set free.
“Bowe didn’t just get innocent people locked up,” he said as they waited at a light several miles from his condo. Everleigh’s silence had been starting to nag at him. He could tell she was upset, and he wanted to help. And Melissa had said, as she’d walked with him to the door of the station that morning, that he could tell Everleigh what he knew. As one of Bowe’s victims, and a woman fighting for her life, she had the right to information.
“He didn’t?” She’d turned to look at him, and with one brief glance, as their gazes connected there in that private front seat, his sense of balance flipped again.
There it was. That feeling that he could help her in more ways than one.
That she was calling out to him somehow.
That it was a call he needed to answer.
“He manipulated other cases where guilty people went free,” he continued, steering himself with the course he’d chosen, trusting that the professional path was the best one. Working the case. Leaving the heart alone. Maybe when he was younger, women were more prone to just having fun, but hurting Aubrey as he had...not even knowing that she’d been starting to think they were going somewhere more than enjoying each other...she’d been devastated and he hadn’t even seen it coming.
Colton's Killer Pursuit Page 9