“What?” I murmur in surprise.
Clearing his throat, Jeff adds, “Not that I’d know about those pills. I’m just saying . . .”
I shake my head, finding some spine. “Not that! How can this not warrant some investigation, at least?” I hold my hands out wide, framing the paper again, thinking maybe he just didn’t really see it.
“How did you get this? You left that part out of your story.”
He can plainly see the trash laid out across three tables, a mixture of food wrappers, junk mail, used tissue, and more.
“Yvette Horne’s trash,” I say, quickly continuing, “and there’s evidence she was having an affair too. That’s motive. Plus the supplement is our means.”
I swear, has he never seen a detective movie in his life? I’m laying the whole case out for him on a silver platter!
Okay, a stainless-steel table, but the idea’s the same.
“An affair?” Jeff asks. Of course, like everyone out here, he’s most interested in the salacious gossip angle.
“Yes! I’ve got the proof for you. It needs to go out to the lab for testing, but I put it in an evidence bag.”
Okay, that might be pushing it, but a baggie from my kitchen was all I had, and I did date and sign it with a Sharpie I found in my junk drawer. I go over to the fridge in the corner. It’s the medical-grade one, not my personal one. I wouldn’t put a used condom in with my snacks, even if it is sealed in a Ziploc baggie.
“Is that a used condom?” Jeff sputters, jerking back with a grossed-out twist of his lips.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never seen a dirty rubber, Jeff,” I chide. “This was collected weeks after Richard Horne was dead, so it can’t be his. Yvette was having an affair.”
“Put that away.” Jeff waves at the bag, and I set it back in the fridge for safekeeping. That done, he seems to relax a little, but he’s talking to me like I’m a cornered animal about to lash out. “Zoey, I don’t know what you’ve been up to here, and I commend your dedication, but all of it . . . I mean, it’s . . . the case is closed and the man’s already buried—”
“But this is new evidence.” I interrupt. “As county coroner, you know I have the right and the duty to investigate. Said it yourself.”
“Sure, you do,” Jeff says, “but like I said, I have to snap the cuffs, and the DA has to get a conviction. Now what do you know about that part?”
I shrug, knowing I look stupid now. “Not much.”
“Exactly,” Jeff growls. “Zoey, there’s a reason that we turn anything suspicious over to the State for investigation. First off, I ain’t got the budget to have county employees traipsing through someone’s garbage and doing investigations. I have to fight for a budget just to keep your damn fridge on as it is. Second, any arrest we make here gets tried here. And while it’s legal, folks in this part of the state are hypocritical as hell. They’ll have their noses all up in your business, yes. But if someone goes into court saying they found evidence going through the trash? Shit, they’d be all up in arms even before the DA could sit his ass down.”
“Then put the call in to the State,” I declare. “Richard Horne was murdered. I feel it, right here where I should have a cheeseburger right now!” I lay my hands over my gut, knowing he understands instincts.
Jeff taps his temple in response, adding, “Someone really smart told me heart attacks aren’t caused by heavy metals. The State team would only say the same thing.”
He shrugs, and that shrug of dismissal might as well be a slap to my face.
“It might’ve been from something else! She could’ve added another poison too!” I’m reaching for straws. I didn’t expect this at all. I thought I’d find evidence, Jeff would understand, maybe even appreciate it, and justice would be served for the man whose last moments were spent on my table with a story to tell that only I could hear.
“I’m sorry, Zoey. Really, I am. And I’ll look into it. But it has to be by the book, something I can hand off to the State all nice and tidy and wrapped up in a bow. Not . . . garbage spread out on a table.”
The rebuke stings. Especially since I didn’t do it by myself. I did it with Blake, but I guess that doesn’t matter to Jeff. He assumes, like everyone else, that I’m alone.
“You promise to look into it? Jeff, she really killed him. I swear it.”
He nods earnestly. “I will. You have my word on it.”
“Do you want this?” I point at the invoice I painstakingly put together.
“Bag it up,” he says with a sigh. “Hell, tape the thing together so someone could read it. But if I come back and tell you State ain’t taking it, I want all of this shit in a box on a shelf, ignored. Now listen, in the future, if you really do have one of these feelings, come to me, okay? I don’t need Alver runnin’ into my office playin’ tattletale and acting like an old biddy at Bingo Night. You don’t want that either.” He gives me a pointed look, and I wonder how many people heard Alver’s version of the story about my trash-strewn morgue and are upstairs right now discussing whether or not Jeff is reading me the riot act.
“Okay,” I say forlornly, all the wind knocked out of my sails.
Already dug down deep in my pity party, Alver’s reappearance makes it suck even more.
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.
He can see by the look on my face that his plan worked. Maybe not the way he wanted it to, but he’s swimming in my misery like a pig in slop.
“Here’s the coffees, Sheriff. DDG.”
Jeff holds out his hands to take them both. “Anything I should know about these, Alver?” he asks directly. Guess Jeff’s on the same thought train as I am about the coffees, at least. Alver shakes his head and Jeff’s eyes narrow. Moving one to his lips, he sniffs deeply before taking a sip. Smacking his lips, he says, “Seems okay.” Then he repeats the move on the other cup, drinking from them both as proof that they’re not laced with laxatives or Visine.
“Which one you want?” Jeff asks me.
“Either. Just set it on my desk, please.” It doesn’t matter because I won’t be drinking it anyway. I still don’t trust either cup. Jeff sets one down, switches, and then switches back before throwing me a wink.
“You promise?” I ask one more time.
Dipping his head, Jeff vows, “I do. Now clean this mess up.”
He added a little spice to that bit, probably for Alver’s sake because he smiles triumphantly.
As Jeff turns around to leave, I catch Alver’s eye and draw my thumb across my neck with a dark look that threatens murder and mayhem. Alver squawks and follows Jeff out, quick-stepping to get to his side. With a sigh, I look at my work. Everything I’ve done, that I knew would be helpful, reduced to . . . trash.
* * *
“Hey, sugar snookums!” a voice says with barely restrained laughter. I want to be amused by it, but my brain is a big, gray blob of ‘fuck everything’, and I don’t think there’s a thing in existence, not even one of Jacob’s pranks, that could make me smile right now.
Maybe I should install a revolving door in my morgue. With as many interruptions as I’m getting today, it’d make sense. Hell, it’d make moving bodies in and out easier too.
Don’t be grumpy because Jeff pissed on your parade.
I plaster a smile on my face. “Hey, Blake.” I aim for flirty but must miss the mark by a mile because Blake’s smile melts into a frown.
“What’s wrong?” He comes to me, gathering me in his arms with his hands on my hips, and looks deep into my eyes.
The worry is plain to see, no filters or walls, just pure openness and readiness to listen. I want to fall into him and rage out my frustration by yelling and sweeping the whole invoice into the trash.
But I don’t do that.
It’s not who I am.
I’m the calm in a storm, handling whatever shit life throws my way with a shrug of ‘never expected anything different’ and making sure other people don’t feel what I do. But I failed this time, like s
o many times before. Blake’s going to be disappointed . . . in Jeff, that our work isn’t going to result in a big arrest victory, and mostly, in me.
I can’t hold his intense gaze, so I focus on the tiny line between his brows instead.
“I talked to Sheriff Barnes. He says that I should drop this investigation while in the same breath telling me he’d look into it. Not sure I believe him, though. I think he was just placating me. Even though I figured out how Yvette did it.”
“You did?” Blake’s excitement is palpable, and he doesn’t seem upset about Jeff at all.
At least somebody gets it, how far we were willing to go to figure this out, how hard the research has been, and he’ll definitely appreciate how many teeny-tiny pieces of paper I puzzled together.
“Look . . .” I point at the table where the invoice is now taped together. “I went through the trash again because I felt like we might’ve missed something.”
“And I’m guessing we did.”
I tell him about fitting the scraps of paper back together, the online pseudo-pharmacy, and the supplement Yvette bought. His eyes narrow as he examines the invoice.
“You did it. This is how she poisoned him.” Blake holds the paper up, showing it to me like it holds the importance I thought it held. “You are so fucking brilliant! How long did this take you?” He makes it sound like I cured cancer or figured out how to make chocolate be calorie-free.
“Hours,” I lament, “which would’ve all been worth it if it were useful.”
He places a quick, soft kiss to my forehead that soothes me more than I’d admit. “Useful to Jeff or not, it’s useful to me.”
“Huh?”
Blake shrugs. “I work in insurance, not the law. And our standard is a lot more . . . asshole-ish might be the best word. Let me see what I can do. Because what you found is the truth. And that matters. Answers matter.”
I don’t think we’re talking about Yvette Horne’s shopping habits anymore, but rather, my finally agreeing to go on a date.
That ‘yes’ changed everything.
“They do. Does that mean we’re going out tonight? Are you here to sweep me off my feet and whisk me away to dinner?” I cringe at my awesomely bad flirting skills. They’re not the best, but hopefully, they’re better than my pep talks. And I could use some pity pizza for my pity party. Maybe a pity White Claw too.
“Uh, does whisking you away to your place count?” His sheepish grin begs me to say yes once more. “I went there first, and Jacob offered to watch Chunky so I could hunt you down here. I promised to bring pizza back as payment. It’s not the date I promised you yet, but it could be fun?”
Pizza sounds perfect, but . . . “Hunt? Pretty sure I’m the easiest person in the world to find. I go home, go to work, rinse, and repeat,” I say, tilting my head left, then right, and then do the same thing again. “I am so ridiculously boring.”
“You are the furthest thing from boring, Miss Walker,” he says, squeezing me around the middle and shaking me a little bit, which makes me laugh. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
The request startles me but delights me too. He doesn’t coddle me, doesn’t want my intelligence to be invisible. To the contrary, he wants me to feed my brain, my soul, and enjoys that same journey with me.
“Did you know the word ‘coroner’ shares a Latin root with the word ‘crown?’ Because the coroner worked for the crown in most cases in Europe.”
“Fascinating.”
If anyone else told me that after sharing a useless trivia factoid, I’d assume they were being sarcastic or polite. Blake actually means it.
He is fascinated by me, and I’m fascinated by him.
“Tell me something too.”
Blake tilts his head and grins. “How about I tell you over pizza because I had a pretty interesting day myself?”
“Ooh, can’t wait to hear about the exciting happenings in the life insurance world,” I tease.
“Ha-ha,” Blake bites back. “I’ll have you know my informative day was spent at the dog park with Sebastian. And then . . .” He lowers his voice, looking over each shoulder even though we’re totally alone, not even a DB in here right now, “I followed him to Yvette’s. He called her his ‘Sugar Momma’.”
I freeze, sliding more and more puzzle pieces into place. They might not be pieces of paper, but they are parts of this mystery all the same.
And then Blake’s last words process.
“Sugar Momma?” I echo.
Blake’s eyes widen with unshed laughter, and I can feel mine do the same, and then we’re both laughing so hard I have tears streaming down my face.
“Those are his words! Along with cougar. And I had to play along with a straight face! You have no idea how hard that was!”
“Rawr,” I growl, putting up a clawed hand.
“Not that kind of cougar, Miss Walker,” Blake jokes with an awful game-show host wink that makes me laugh even harder. “Though I might put those nails to good use . . . after pizza. Let’s go.” My laughter dries up when he catches my hand to press a kiss to the back while giving me a dark look that promises dirty, sexy things that’ll make me forget all about the disappointment of today.
My laughter is the only thing dry, though.
The rest of me?
Hot and wet.
And I don’t mean the sheen of sweat on my forehead. Nope, lower than that, definitely way lower.
Chapter 20
Blake
“She did what?” I blurt, sitting up straight in my chair so fast that the leather creaks beneath me.
Frederick is on the other end of the line, sighing in exasperation. “Check your email. I just sent over the paperwork. I knew this claim would be a pain in my ass. Figured it’d come to this sooner or later. Though I didn’t expect it this soon.”
“No shit,” I reply, not caring to watch my language or stay professional with the big boss. Not when I’ve been named in a lawsuit against Everlife.
Yvette Horne actually did it. Since Sheriff Barnes closed the case on Richard’s death, deeming it due to natural causes, a.k.a. a heart attack over his morning breakfast, Yvette’s beyond ready to get her grubby little hands on the claim payout.
And apparently, she’s done waiting.
I wonder if Barnes’s agreeing to look into the case again, however unofficially, has anything to do with the fire she’s lighting?
“Does she even realize that our standard process is three months? And that’s when cause of death is cut and dry. Something Richard’s most definitely wasn’t.”
“I told the lawyer that, but he kept saying, and I quote, ‘my client is entitled to these benefits, and Everlife is needlessly prolonging the process in an attempt to avoid payout.’ I swear it was like he was reading from a cue card or a teleprompter or something. Maybe he’s new?” He pauses, humming thoughtfully, “Or flipping it around, trying to make it seem like he is so we underestimate him?”
Frederick is twisted enough that he sometimes sees it in others well before anyone else clues in to it. Playing things smart and slick is how he got to the table of big dogs at the corporate office, so I respect his expertise.
“I don’t know,” I tell Frederick as I scan the court filings he emailed me that name Holland Monroe as Yvette’s attorney. “He’s local, but I’ve never heard of him. Want me to ask around?”
“No, we’ve got our legal team on it.” The threat is clear that Frederick expects our corporate team to outgun some local schmuck attorney easily. “Just be ready to testify next week.”
“Next week? How in the hell did she get a hearing that soon?”
Court cases usually take weeks of depositions, hearings, mediation, and getting court dates. Not a week.
“Guess the courts aren’t too busy out there in Hicksville,” he says snidely. “Not enough land disputes and baby daddy drama, I guess.”
“It’s not that bad.” I try to defend Williamson County, but he cuts me off.
; “Just keep your paperwork and evidence tight, Blake. We can get a drink afterward and discuss your future in the company.”
I hear the truth. If this case goes well, I’m set. Maybe I’ll even get opportunities for bigger and better contracts that would mean I’m not constantly chasing new clients and business, filming commercials with Amy in corn fields.
If it doesn’t go well, I might as well let the children of the corn take me because I’m as good as dead either way.
“Sure, Frederick. Sounds great.”
* * *
The phone rings in my ear for the third time.
Why isn’t Zoey answering my calls?
This isn’t exactly something I can put in a text. I hang up and dial again, but an incoming call interrupts me. It’s a number I don’t know, but something makes me answer it.
“Hello?”
“Blake, it’s Zoey. I’m on Jacob’s phone.”
“Okay. What’s wrong with yours?”
That’s a relief because at least she’s not avoiding me. I’d started to get worried she was ghosting me, scared once again and retreating into her fears after I did so much to chase her out of them.
“Nothing, but uh . . .” There’s a pause, and I can feel her desire to say something.
“What, Zoey?”
“Did you get . . . have you seen . . . uhm, how. Was. Your. Day?”
The intentional directness of the question is obvious, and I realize she wants to talk about the same thing I need to talk to her about. But she wants to see if I know anything first.
“Are you talking about Yvette Horne’s lawsuit?” I ask.
A whoosh of air releases from her, and relief floods her voice. “Oh, thank God. Yes, and what the hell? And what are we going to do?”
I get the feeling her mind is spinning and she could ramble on and on with more and more questions.
“Nothing,” I reply simply.
“Nothing?”
“Well, not about the lawsuit. That’s between Yvette and Everlife, but—”
“I can’t see you anymore,” she blurts out.
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