Into the Fading Twilight (Starlight Grove, #2) (22)
A muscle pulsed beneath Pete’s eye. “Yeah. No problem.” His annoyed gaze flicked to me. “I’ve been over your notes. I’ve already got a few ideas of where I could strengthen things.”
Already undermining. Typical Pete.
“I’ll be sending you five cases to look into,” I said, ignoring his suggestion. “Put your case notes in the portal.”
What I wouldn’t tell him was that they were five cases my brothers and I had already looked into. I wasn’t a pompous ass—a second set of eyes never hurt, and there was always a chance that Pete could find something we’d missed. But I wasn’t about to trust him completely. Not on a case this important.
Pete’s eyes flashed with a hint of fire. “Make sure you send me all the files you have on each.”
“You know I will,” I shot back.
Sherri sighed as Pete stalked away. “Do me a favor and try not to kill him on the way to closing this case.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I grumbled, turning back to my computer to send the douchebag everything I had on the five possibles I was assigning him.
I cracked my neck and focused on the other eight cases. Highlighting a missing backpacker, I sent the file to my phone. I needed to get out of this claustrophobic office and into my real workspace. I always did my best work in the forest, in the quiet.
Checking to make sure the files had made it to my phone—tech was really not my thing—I grabbed it and my keys. As I headed for the door, my cell dinged.
NOVA:
I think you gave me a foot fetish, Boss.
Below the text was a photo of Nova’s feet in tall grass, her toenails, still a sunny yellow, peeking through.
How could toes manage to be cute? Maybe I’d taken a hit to the head when I was working on the apartment and didn’t remember it.
Me:
You know this means Brae and Wylder will think you have a foot fungus now, too.
NOVA:
Naw, my feet are too cute to be fungusy.
Me:
Fungusy isn’t a word.
NOVA:
I made it one.
That was Nova, through and through, making her own rules. And she should. She’d lost a year of her life. She should live exactly as she wanted to now.
Me:
Give ’em hell today.
NOVA:
You wrangle those trees into submission, Boss.
I chuckled, slipped my phone into my pocket, and headed for the front door of our office building. The moment I stepped outside, I inhaled the fresh air. There was something about being stuck inside an office: the recycled air with no open windows, the artificial light. I hated everything about it. The only reason I could manage what I did was because I got to spend so much time outdoors.
It hadn’t always been like this. There was a time when I thought I would be a lawyer or maybe go into finance, possibly take over my father’s import/export business. But all of that had changed when we discovered who our father really was. That he was a monster who preyed on women who looked exactly like our mother—a woman who had disappeared years before. That he stalked and killed them, burying them in the orchard on our property and saving trinkets from his kills that allowed him to relive them over and over again.
Everything changed when Dex and Mav found those IDs and locks of hair—and then Edmond Archer had found them. He had nearly killed Maverick and only stopped because Orion ended him. And I came to terms with the fact that I hadn’t been there when my brothers needed me the most.
Too caught up in my own bullshit. Too cool to stay back and watch my little brothers like I should’ve. I just had to take my girlfriend out to that movie she was dying to see. Too selfish.
And when I came home to find it crawling with police, FBI, and paramedics … I lost the ability to breathe. Everything in the house felt like it was closing in around me. And the only place that gave me respite was the forest.
It had stayed my refuge. The forest was my home now, in every way.
“Kol.” A deep voice cut into my swirling memories as I crossed the parking lot.
I looked up to see a familiar figure in a Juniper County Sheriff’s Department uniform. Roger Oakley wore the evidence of what he’d been through in the past four months. A best friend who’d ended up being a serial killer. A boss who’d turned out to be involved with a cartel pot–growing operation and had gotten himself killed.
And he also wore the pressure of trying to clean up a department completely wrecked in the wake of those discoveries. He looked older than his thirty-one years. Dark circles rimmed his blue eyes, and his sandy-blond hair desperately needed a cut.
“Hey,” I greeted. “What are you doing here?”
“Coming to find you, actually.”
The Travis Moore case had been handed off to the state police and the Forest Service in a joint investigation, with the sheriff’s department serving as support. There were too many conflicts of interest for them to run point, and they needed time to pull themselves together after all the upheaval.
“Travis’s case?” I asked.
Shadows passed over Roger’s face, the pain that came with having someone close to you betray you. And God, I knew what that felt like. Roger swallowed, his throat working with the action. “No. The election.”