Licensed for Trouble (20 page)

More importantly, she also recognized the woman in the middle. She'd seen her in grainy black-and-white next to a news article about a fire at her complex.

“This is the woman who died in the fire the night Max went missing.”

* * *

“I'm not sure I want to know.”

“Calm down, Max. We don't know for sure that you had anything to do with that fire or that woman's death.”

Max paced another tight circle in PJ's empty living room as PJ sat on the floor, searching for clues in the picture.

Telling him about the fire—and Bekka Layton's death—might
not
have been the smartest move. He'd braced his arm on the car, breathing in hard a few times—something she'd seen Jeremy do on occasion. Like when he'd discovered that she'd nearly been killed by an assassin or by a rogue FBI agent.

Or discovered one more connection to the idea that her new client could be a murderer. Jeremy stood just a few feet away, watching Max pace, stop, stare out the window, pace again.

“What if I
did
do those things? What if I was the guy that broke into that woman's house and . . . and killed her? Am I the kind of person who could murder someone?” He wore such a stricken look that PJ couldn't find words.

“I just . . . I can't bear that idea. I don't want to be that guy. Maybe we should stop looking.” He held up his hand as if pushing away the news. “I have a good life and a dog . . .”

“You started this because you wanted to know if you have family or friends,” PJ said.

“I obviously killed them!”

“Calm down, Max.” This from Jeremy, who walked over to join PJ. Or hover over her, depending on the point of view. “You're making giant leaps here. You don't know what connection you have to this woman.”

Max seemed nonplussed by Jeremy's tone. “Something about her seems familiar. I can't place it. What if she was my girlfriend?” He picked up the picture. “What if this Lyle guy
is
my cousin? or my brother?” He held up his scarred hands. “Is that fire how I got these?”

“Maybe you were trying to save her,” PJ offered. “Maybe you were walking by and saw the fire—”

“Now you're just reaching because you don't want to face the truth.”

“Which is?”

“I'm a criminal. A murderer. Maybe an arsonist. I think we need to just stop the investigation right now.”

“But what about justice?” Jeremy said in a clipped tone. “Maybe you need to find out so you can own up to what you did.”

PJ shot him an are-you-crazy? look that he rebounded with one of his own.

Maybe. She found her feet, turned to Jeremy, and pitched her voice low. “Listen, maybe Max is right. Without more evidence, he could be arrested and dragged through the court system. He's probably innocent, and we'll be tearing his life apart. I have a little experience about how this feels, and trust me—we need to tread carefully before we start handing information over to the cops.”

Jeremy attempted his best lethal-silence glare.

She ignored him. “Don't you think people deserve a chance to prove themselves innocent?”

That got him. “I do believe in letting people prove themselves. I'm even a wholehearted believer in second chances,” he said tightly. “You know that. But some people
can't
change.”

She matched his tone. “Are you saying that once someone is trouble they're
always
trouble?”

“Sometimes. I think for some people, it's in their blood. Or it gets in there after seeing so much horror.”

“What do you mean?”

He hooked her around the arm and drew her closer to himself, then bent over so it was just his breath in her ear, hot and urgent. “There's something about him. He carries himself like he isn't afraid. Like he's been trained in self-defense. And the POW tattoo—where'd he get that? The only POWs I know are in Iraq. Was he in the war?”

“Maybe,” she hissed. “What if he came home to start over and something went wrong?”

“Or maybe he came home to find his girlfriend sleeping with his best buddy and tried to kill them both. And something went wrong, and he's the one who got dumped in the drink.” He raised his voice. “Where he should have stayed.”

“Jeremy.”

“Wake up from happily-ever-after land, PJ. Everything points to him being someone dangerous.” He took a breath, scrubbing one hand down his face.

Max's mouth tightened. He'd probably heard every word—their voices echoed like they stood in the Sistine Chapel.

PJ walked over to him. “Max, listen. I have instincts. And mine are telling me that you didn't do this. You aren't a murderer.”

Max's expression suggested he was trying on that idea for size. Or maybe grasping like a dying man.

“Maybe Jeremy is right. People
don't
change . . . which means that the guy who crawled around in my creepy basement and dug gunk out of my drain, the guy who adopted the homeless dog and won't call him anything but his real name,
that
guy didn't murder anyone. Because he's not a criminal and never has been.”

“Your instincts tell you that?”

“My
PI
instincts.” She gave him a slow smile.

Max's gaze tracked past her to Jeremy and back. He sighed. “I don't know.”

“Don't you want to know who you are? how you ended up here?”

“What if it's ugly?”

“I think we all have a little bit of ugly in our past. But I do believe in fresh starts. Even if some people in the room don't.”

“That's not what I said,” Jeremy growled.

She held up her hand to silence him. “Listen, Jeremy and I are going to see what we can learn about this woman. Maybe dig up something on you. We'll take the picture, flash it around—”

“I want to go too.”

“You're staying here,” Jeremy said in his boss voice. “Sorry, but if you suddenly show up in the flesh, especially if PJ is
wrong
and you
were
involved in this murder, your showing up back from the dead might make everyone clam up. Let's see what we can find, and we'll bring it back here and take a good look-see before we decide what to do.”

His words seemed more a line in the sand, daring Max to protest. Or worse, a suggestion to leave now, while he still had the chance.

But Max simply gave them both a small nod.

Jeremy cupped his hand around PJ's elbow as he escorted her out, as if he might be her bodyguard.

“Max is innocent, Jeremy, and I'm going to prove it to you, no matter what it takes.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

Chapter Twelve

“I do believe in fresh starts,” Jeremy said quietly as they walked down the sidewalk in the neighborhood where Bekka Layton had died. Not a hit so far from the neighbors surrounding the now-rebuilt town house. So far, of the three tenants who agreed to talk to them, no one remembered Bekka, and none showed even a glimmer of recognition of Lyle Fisher or Max.

Overhead the sky had turned crabby, as if a storm might be rolling in. PJ stuck her hands in her pockets, trying not to step on any cracks.

“In fact, I'm the recipient of my own fresh start.”

PJ waited for more, leaning into his words, hoping.

He must have seen her expression. “I just . . . When I came home from Iraq, I was tired. Mentally and physically.”

“Being in combat could do that, I'd bet.”

“I never thought I'd leave the teams. But things changed.” He hooked her arm, stopping her. “I have no problem with someone wanting to erase their past and begin again. But the truth is, a person has to live with their choices; there's no getting around that.”

PJ looked at the picture of the couple, the smiling, deceased Bekka Layton. “What about grace? waking up to a new day, another chance? How do you balance living with our choices with the fact that God forgives us over and over?”

He sighed. “Okay, I give you that. Both are true.”

“I just don't want to believe that there's no escape from the past. You have no idea what it's like to be labeled trouble, to have to haul it around with you everywhere you go, branded into your skin.”

She saw Jeremy's gaze travel to her shoulder.

“Yes, that brand, too. Boone is a part of that trouble label. It's one reason why I kept moving for ten years. Everywhere I went, I became a new person. No baggage. No labels. Just a clean slate. But not in Kellogg. There, I'm a troublemaker, and it's not only the country club. Now that I'm a PI—”

“
Almost
a PI.”

“
Going to be
a PI . . . it's like I
specialize
in trouble. I'm a professional troublemaker.”

“You're not a troublemaker.”

“I want to believe that, but how do you leave your past behind when it's all you've ever been? How do you start over? And what do I call myself now?”

“Oh, PJ.” Jeremy caught her hand and his eyes met hers, held them. “You've come so far since the day I found you impersonating a lawn girl. But you keep dragging your past around with you, calling yourself trouble.”

He pushed a wild, blowing hair away from her face. “Remember how after Peter betrayed Jesus, he returned to fishing? He panicked . . . and despite all the change God had done in him, all he'd learned about Jesus, the Messiah, he went back to what he knew—the simple life of a fisherman. He only saw himself as a fisherman.

“But he wasn't supposed to be there, and Jesus went after him. He called him back from his past, forgave him, reminded him that He had a new life for him, and then empowered him to go be that person.”

Jeremy hiked up the collar on her jacket. “You've been forgiven and renamed, PJ. Don't slip into your default mode and start thinking of yourself as only trouble. You're going to have to start thinking of yourself as someone else.”

“Okay, who?”

He grinned at her, his eyes sweet in hers. “How about the Kellogg heiress?”

“You have too vivid an imagination.”

“No, I just call it as I see it.”

She let herself hang on to those words, his touch lingering on her cheek, warm in the parched, windy air as they crossed the street.

Inside the next two-story, cream-colored town house, a dog began to bark, high yips that suggested a terrier or a Chihuahua.

The door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman, her hair up in a towel, wearing a bathrobe. She carried a Chihuahua under one arm. “I already have my phone book. I don't need another.” She had the basement tones of a lifelong smoker.

“We're friends of Bekka Layton,” Jeremy said. “Did you know her?”

PJ handed her the picture.

The woman took it, scrutinizing the faces. “Yeah, I saw her sometimes. We talked a few times. Nice girl. She was living here while her man was overseas, waiting for him to come home. A military man, although I don't know what branch. I think he was the baby's daddy.”

Baby?

“She had a child?” Jeremy asked, taking the picture back.

“Yeah. About a year old, maybe more. Cute little boy. Curly brown hair. His name was . . . Tyler, I think. I didn't see him at the fire. I was just getting home from night shift and saw the fire trucks and the ambulance.”

“What about the father? This soldier. What was his name?”

“Don't know. I think he came home a week or so before she died. I saw someone pull up in a taxi. Could have been a soldier. I remember his duffel bag, although it was dark—I didn't get a good look. And then, the day she died, they had a huge fight right on the front yard.”

“Were either of these men him?” PJ handed her the picture again.

She gave it another once-over. “It's hard to say. He wore a baseball cap, but I remember thinking how odd it was that he was in the military, because with his long hair, he looked more like a redneck. Oh, I do remember something—he had a tattoo on his arm. A big one. Red.” She handed back the picture. “Like an eagle or something.”

“A phoenix?”

“Is that a bird?”

“You didn't see him the night of the fire?” Jeremy asked.

“No—but I left for work in the afternoon.” She seemed to be looking past them, as if peeling back the layers of that night. “I wish I could remember. It was chaos—so many fire trucks and cops. I couldn't even get into my driveway. I had to park down the street. Then they were cleaning the streets the next day, and I got a ticket from the city of Bloomington. A girl can't get a break.”

She gave the yipping dog a one-finger smack on the snout. “Enough, Spike.”

PJ inadvertently put a hand to her nose. Ouch. But Spike, hmm. PJ would have to try that one on Dog. “What happened to the little boy?”

“I don't know. He might have had family, or maybe it was just a day care provider. Every once in a while, I'd see a car parked in the driveway, and one time I saw an older woman carrying the little boy to her car. Might have been Bekka's mom. She said her mom was moving here from someplace out West.”

“You don't have a name or address?”

“Nope. Listen, I gotta get to work.” She hung on the door for a second. “I do hope you find out who set the fire. She was really nice. I know she was hoping it would work out between her and her man. But then again, who doesn't?”

They stood in silence on the steps after the door closed.

“What if—?”

“That's a pretty big leap.” Jeremy led the way back down the sidewalk. What, now the man could read her mind?

“It's not such a big leap. Max has brown hair—and she said, specifically, curly brown hair. What if Max was in the military and the little boy is Max's son?” PJ said. “It would account for why he was never around.”