Bayou born, p.15
Bayou Born, page 15
“I didn’t pull that hard.” Turning his face into his shoulder, he sneezed as he offered it to me. “I tugged on a few blades, and the whole thing came up in my hands.”
“It’s fine.” I carried the chunk of sod back to the kit, plucked a few promising blades then presented the square to Mr. Upton. “I am so sorry the tech got overzealous.” Tech was a stretch, but we needed to cut and run. “He didn’t mean to damage your beautiful lawn.”
The poor man cradled the Bermuda patch against his chest. “Are you finished?”
“Yes, sir.” I gestured for Cole and Thom to follow. “We’ll leave you to, ah, perform triage.”
We walked to my Bronco together, and I had my fingers on the door handle when someone tapped my shoulder. I suppressed a shudder and turned to find the same teenage boy who had pointed out Mr. Upton aiming his phone at my face.
“I thought you looked familiar. You’re that girl they hauled out of the swamp when I was a baby.” He kept his hand steady. Not a picture. He was filming me. “Your dad’s a cop too, right?” He grinned at me in open curiosity. “Do you remember your parents? Your real parents? Where did you come from anyway? Is that girl in the hospital your sister? Are you runaways from some freaky cult?”
Cole reached over my shoulder, plucked the boy’s phone from his hand, then hurled it at the pavement so hard the screen shattered. The hard shell bounced four times before spinning under the Bronco and staying there.
“Hey! That’s my phone.” The boy dropped to his knees and crawled under my vehicle to retrieve his device. “My parents are going to kill me. They just paid for an upgrade.”
“Your parents love you. They won’t kill you.” Cole gripped my hips and lifted me into the vehicle. “I don’t have those problems.”
The kid paled and stumbled into the throng of onlookers, many of whom had no doubt recorded the entire incident. Sometimes I hate modern technology. Mostly on days ending in Y.
I waited until Cole had safely navigated us out of the subdivision to say, “Thanks.” I adjusted the air vent to keep the chill off my damp skin. “For humoring me, and also for smashing that guy’s phone.”
“He’s lucky it wasn’t his face,” he grumbled.
“I would have had to arrest you.” I patted his forearm. “Assaulting a minor is a major offense.”
He grunted in my direction. Clearly we needed to work on his sense of humor.
Flashing lights in the rearview mirror had me leaning over to check our speed, but Cole was within the posted limits. “What in the world?”
He coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the road and placed both hands on the steering wheel in clear view while I twisted around to get a look at the cop as he exited his vehicle. Ignoring the surly driver, Buck trudged through the high grass to reach me. He tapped on the window and waited for it to lower before leaning his forearm on the frame.
“Hey, Buck.” I shoved him out of the vehicle. “What’s up? We weren’t speeding, my insurance is current and I renewed my tags back in February.”
“You weren’t answering your phone.” He rubbed his nape. “Thought you’d want to know . . . ” He loosed a frustrated noise. “We found a leg out on Barnes Road.”
“A leg?” A stunned moment lapsed while my thoughts reordered themselves. “As in a human leg?”
“Well, it wasn’t a turkey, if that’s what you’re asking.” He dropped his arm. “Female, if the size is any indication.”
“How fresh?” I forced myself to ask like I was talking about a slab of meat and not a person.
“Fresh.” His lips pursed. “No decay.”
My palms went damp. “How?”
“Animal attack as near as we can tell at this point.” The radio perched on his shoulder squawked. “I have to get back. I saw you pull out of Marsh Landing and figured you’d want to know.”
“My cell must have died back there.” I rubbed my palms on my thighs. “It’s been getting a lot more action than usual the past few days. I’ll get it charged. How long ago was the leg discovered? Has the scene been cleared?”
“About four hours ago. We cleared out about thirty minutes ago.” He eased back a step. “Are you heading up there?”
Cole rested his wide palm on my thigh, and I jerked my gaze to his. Had another man done it, I might have taken it as a possessive gesture intended to stake his claim on me in front of a male he viewed as competition, but that was probably all the Discovery Channel talk catching up with me.
“It’s not far,” I told him. “About five minutes.” Close enough one of the super gators roaming the subdivision could have hightailed it over there. “Are you going to drive me, or can I drop you off somewhere first?”
“You’re not driving anywhere.” He noticed the position of his hand, snapped it back to the wheel, then turned a snarl on me. “You’re pushing yourself too hard.”
“I have to do this. Please, Cole. Help me out here, and I’ll go home and nap.” I held my three middle fingers flush, then touched my thumb to my pink finger. “Scout’s honor.”
He eyed my hand with skepticism. “You were never a scout.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There was no portrait of you wearing a Girl Scout uniform at your house.”
“I forgot you saw my lifetime-achievement wall,” I grumbled.
“This is the last stop,” he warned. “I mean it.”
I saluted him and then twisted back to find Buck chuckling under his breath.
“Thanks for the update. I appreciate it.” I folded down my visor and lifted a plastic gift card branded for a national coffee chain. “There’s five bucks left on there. Go wild.”
“Bucks because my name is Buck. Ha. Never heard that one before.” He accepted the gift as payment for my pun. “I heard about the accident. I’m glad you’re okay.” He sized up Cole as he spoke. “Be careful out there. Call if you need anything.”
“I will.” Silly as it might be, it warmed my heart to know that Buck had my back. That was more loyalty than most offered me. “Thanks for volunteering to stay at the hospital with Jane Doe. That was—Thanks.”
“No problem. Consider it a birthday gift.” He patted the side of the SUV. “Now you can’t say I never gave you anything.”
Buck strode toward his patrol car, and we let him leave before Cole made a three-point turn to get us headed in the right direction.
“He’s a good guy,” I told Cole between directions a few minutes later. “He was in my class at the academy.” His molars continued to seesaw as they had since Buck popped in on us. “He dated another girl in our group.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“Maybe not,” I mused, “but you’ve stopped grinding your teeth.”
He did that growly thing under his breath and parked on Barnes Road. We got out and didn’t have to look far to find the crime-scene tape strung between black tupelo trees where the sidewalk ended.
“What are you hoping to find that the others missed?” Cole ducked under the yellow streamers and entered the patch of forest. “The leg was found here.”
“How do you do that?” Thom might be the Wild Man to my Wild Child, but Cole had his quirks too. “You’re like a blood-hound when it comes to, well, blood.”
“The ground is soft.” Beyond this clearing, marshland waited, the only reason this stretch of trees hadn’t been bulldozed to make room for yet another development. “See the ring of boot prints? People circled this area.” He pointed out the center of the ring. “The leg must have been discovered there. No impressions.”
“It was placed there for someone to find.” This close to homes with kids who no more listened to their parents’ warnings about not exploring the woods than I had as a child meant it was only a matter of time before the gruesome token was discovered. “There’s very little blood. Whatever happened, it didn’t happen here.”
“This doesn’t feel the same as the other incidents. The Claremont girl and your friend were taken with care that no one noticed when they went missing. This is the opposite. It feels desperate. It’s a bid for attention.”
I wasn’t much for profiling, but I had to agree with him that the killer—how else did you come by a whole human leg?—was baiting us. “Do you think we’re going to be finding the rest of the parts over the next few days?”
“It’s possible. It depends on the reason for the kill and the purpose behind revealing it to us.”
“An animal attack, that’s what Buck said.” I measured the distance from here to the water in my head. “It doesn’t fit. There would be paw prints in ground this mushy, drag marks, slides. But there’s nothing like that.”
Cole pinched a leaf between his fingers and studied its veins. “Gators aren’t this aggressive toward humans.”
The way he said humans, so emotionally divorced from the word, sent a shiver up my spine. “How much longer do we have on those results from your lab?”
“It takes about sixty hours for results to get fast tracked through the system.”
“That’s still got the PD beat.” Thom had asked me if I’d ever considered working in the private sector. I hadn’t seen the appeal then, but I was seeing it now. “It takes weeks . . . months sometimes.”
“Do you want to take samples from here to add to your collection?” He stood and dusted his hands. “Should I fetch the kit?”
“We should talk about expenses. Your time is worth money, and I’ve been hogging you for days.” I had a healthy savings account, another benefit of living at home. I would gladly invest in the hunt for Maggie. “Not to mention the tests you’re running on my behalf.” I stared up and up at him. “Invoice me when you settle on a figure, okay?”
Rather than answer, he strode back to the Bronco. For a guy who worked in security, who I was dragging deeper down the rabbit hole of police work, he wasn’t pushing to charge me for all his billable hours. Rich people stayed wealthy by not spending their money. The same rule applied to seemingly well-off entrepreneurs. Yet he was tossing his time, his money, into the fire every minute he spent with me. Unless . . .
“Do you require clients to pay a retainer?” I asked when Cole returned. “Am I burning through Dad’s? Is that why you haven’t shaken me down for all the work you’ve done?”
“Yes.” Cole worked his jaw until it popped. “You’re still on your father’s tab. Satisfied?”
Not really. “You will bill me if I go over?”
“I’ll invoice you if that’s what you want.” He opened the kit and passed over gloves. “Should I charge you for these too?”
“Why the attitude?” I set about collecting samples. “You’re running a business, not a charity.”
“You were wrong about me.” The tendons in his neck strained. “It’s not always about the money.” A dark flush swept over his cheeks, and he stalked off deeper into the woods.
“Wait.” I sealed up my baggies, tossed my gloves and went after him. “Talk to me.”
A growl pumped through his chest.
“Cole.”
The sound of his name brought him up short, and he paused in front of an ancient oak strung with brittle vines, but he didn’t face me. “I never planned on charging you for any of this.” His hands flexed at his sides. “You’ve been helping us with Jane and the Claremont case. I wanted to repay the favor.”
“You don’t owe me anything.” I brushed my fingers against his. “I would have done this for them with or without you picking up the tab.”
“I know that now.”
“You don’t have to sound so grumpy about me finding out.” I pried his fist apart and slid my palm against his as I scooched close enough to glimpse his profile. “I’m glad you told me. It gives me a chance to thank you.” I raised up on my tiptoes and pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw, as high as I could reach without his cooperation. “Thank you.”
His fingers contracted once around mine before he released me and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I like you.” I’m sure the tree he spoke to was very flattered. “But this—you and me—can’t happen.”
“Is the problem my dad being a client?” Conflict of interest was an understatement for how entangled we had become over the past few days. “Or me being an ex-client? Or my connection to Jane?”
“Yes.” He latched on without specifying a qualifier.
“Okay, I can respect that.” We each wrote our own code of ethics, and it was up to the individual to uphold them. “How about we call it even up to this point? No more freebies, okay? And maybe, if you need my help, I should work with one of the others instead.”
“All right,” he rasped, voice tight.
“Good. Okay. We’re agreed then. We each go our separate ways.” Except we had ridden together. “Starting tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he agreed, the strain ratcheting his shoulders tighter.
“There are still a few hours left in today.” I released an inward groan the second the words passed my lips. We stood yards from where a human leg had been recovered, we were knee-deep in an investigation without any authorization whatsoever to conduct our information gathering, and I was basically asking him out on a date when a relationship was off the table. “You know what? Never mind. I was way out of line. Forget I asked.”
Slowly, he angled his body toward me. “What did you have in mind?”
“We could get takeout and go back to my place.” An entire colony of fire ants must have been dumped down my nape for how bad it stung. “I’m not hitting on you.” Except maybe I was a little. “I’m peopled out for the day, but I wouldn’t mind some company.”
Hello, contradiction.
“We could watch a movie or play a board game.” I had a few calls to make to assure myself the ball was still rolling in Maggie’s case even if I wasn’t the one behind it pushing, but that was all the energy I had left in reserve. “Or maybe we could sit on the porch. The mosquitoes aren’t too bad yet.”
“You’re asking me out on a date.” A line appeared between his brows. “To eat, and watch television?”
The adorableness of his utter confusion was the only thing that kept me from snatching back the invite.
“Dinner and a movie is a classic combo. It’s basically the definition of a date.” I shoved him, which popped my wrist but didn’t threaten to topple him any more than a breeze might level a fortress. “How do you not know this?”
“How many other men have you invited home with you?” His soft voice promised violence.
“That’s a personal question.” And I had no time for guys who looked down on women with sexual histories. As anemic as mine was, I still owned it. Another part of me sighed with relief at having pinpointed a flaw, a solid reason for being glad tonight was a one-time deal. “I don’t recall asking you how many women you’ve invited back to your place.”
“None.” Cold. Flat. Dead. The word had no pulse. None. The man was serious. The mountain was admitting to never having been conquered.
Sweet baby Jesus.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Inviting a guy back to my place came with one huge drawback that was normally an asset. Dad. He would be pissed at the way I’d handled him earlier, tucking him into bed, then darting off without leaving so much as a note behind. He wasn’t the type to call and ream me out over the phone. No, he stewed in his anger until it bubbled out of his pores.
“We don’t have to go through with this.” Cole sat beside me in the Bronco, both of us staring up at the front of the house. We had been parked in the driveway for a good five minutes while I studied which lights were on in what rooms while attempting to divine my father’s whereabouts and mood from them. “I can call for a pickup.”
“I’m a grown woman.” I clutched the DVD rentals to my chest. A steaming bag of Thai carryout sat between my feet and perfumed the air with curry. “I can pick my own friends and make my own decisions.”
Yes, it had been reckless to get behind the wheel in my condition, but fear drives desperation. Sometimes literally.
“Do you need this?” Cole reached between the seats and produced a small paper bag from the convenience store filled with nickel candies for Dad. A peace offering. Fine. Okay, a bribe. “You can breathe into it.”
“You are no help.” I snatched it from his hand. “Come on. Let’s go face the firing squad.” We got out and strode onto the porch together. I tested the front door, expecting to find it locked, but it swung open under my hand. Proof Dad was waiting for me. “Dad?”
“In here,” he called from the kitchen.
“Hi.” I lingered in the doorway with Cole a massive shadow behind me. “How are you feeling?”
Dad took a sip of his coffee, earning himself a moment before he answered. Once he set the mug on the table, he seemed to have come to a decision. “Better.” His gaze hadn’t stopped boring into Cole since we entered, and there was a weary set to his shoulders, a grimness in the twist of his mouth that set me on edge. “Cole and I need to talk.”
“Dad—” I began.
“No.” The word lashed out at me, left me raw and stinging, his temper an exotic beast I had rarely glimpsed. “Cole, you and I are going for a walk. We’re long overdue for a chat.”
“He’s right.” Cole met his stare. “We should talk.”
“Dad, it wasn’t his fault.” I couldn’t let it go. “I drove myself to the station—”
“Cole.” He stood and rinsed out his mug. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Our guest left on silent feet, a marvel considering his size, and I was left staring at Dad’s bunched shoulders as he braced his palms on the edge of the sink.
“I was standing in the hall outside your bedroom the first time I heard that old phone ring, and I know it’s called for you every year since on your birthday.”
“W-what?” I almost swallowed my tongue.
“I paid a guy to take it apart and check for transmission equipment. I thought maybe it had been wired by some industrious bastard looking to get a story using you. When that dead-ended, I tried tracing the calls and got nowhere,” he continued, huffing out a laugh. “People thought I was crazy. I thought I was crazy.”
