Slumped in her desk chair, Madeline pressed a finger to her aching temple and tried to ignore the sounds of seven a.m. shift change drifting up the stairs.
“Hey, Chris, I brought breakfast. You want the grilled PBJ, or egg and cheese biscuit?” Troy Lee’s raised voice competed with slamming doors and jailers doing head counts.
Madeline scratched a note in the margin of the incident report she was reviewing. Geez, he was loud. Parker’s reply, muffled and indistinct, followed. At her elbow, her cell phone buzzed. She stiffened and cast a cautious glance at the screen before opening it. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself.” Ash’s drowsy voice flowed over her, warm and appealing. “What time did you leave?”
“About five.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose and yawned. “I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to bother you, so I came on in. You were still sleeping the sleep of the drugged.”
His harrumph came clearly across the connection. “I’m not taking any more of those things at night.”
“You will if it makes you feel better.” She leaned back in her chair. In the past week, she’d discovered he was a horrible patient, and while she understood his caution with the painkillers, hurting just because he was stubborn didn’t make much sense either. “I should be home a little after five. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid around the farm while I’m gone.”
“Define stupid.”
She ground her teeth. The man was incorrigible, and if she didn’t lo—
like
—him so much, she’d kill him. “Like work. I don’t want you doing anything more strenuous than sitting in the office, working on that ‘system’ of yours.”
“Have I ever mentioned I like it when you’re bossy?”
“Your knee needs time to heal. I want you to take it easy.” She swallowed hard. “Please?”
Silence trembled between them. He cleared his throat. “Whatever you want, babe.”
“I’ll, um…” She pushed her hair away from her face, her own throat tight for some God-only-knew reason. “I’ll see you later.”
After his quiet goodbye, she closed the phone and laid it aside. With a quiet exhale, she rested her face in her hands for a moment.
“Looks like deep thought.” Tick dropped into the chair next to her desk.
She lifted her head. “You’re early.”
“So are you.” He traced a scar on the chair’s wooden arm. “Trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah.” She tapped a restless tattoo atop the desk. “I always turn into an insomniac when a case isn’t going well.”
He tossed a photograph on the blotter. “How would you feel about taking a little ride over to Cressley?”
“Why?” She lifted the picture of the young dark-eyed, dark-haired man. “Who is this?”
“Allison’s first husband. He died of a sudden heart attack at age twenty-one. Cait thinks”—one corner of his mouth hitched in a self-derisive smile—“if we follow up on that, we might find out it wasn’t a heart attack.”
A little flutter of excitement came to life at Madeline’s pulse. “I really like the way Cait thinks. But why go over there? Why not just phone?”
“I know the investigator. I’m thinking an in-person visit might make it harder for him to blow us off.”
She pushed up from the chair and shrugged into her jacket. “Let’s go then.”
A slow smile crossed his face. “There’s that enthusiasm I like.”
Flipping her hair over her collar, she gave him a look. “Listen, having you treat me like a human being is weird enough. No being nice to me on a regular basis, Calvert.”
He pulled his keys from his pocket. “All right. I can handle that.”
Early-morning traffic surrounding Moultrie slowed them, so they approached Cressley’s city limits just before nine. Madeline stretched stiff legs, pointing her toes. “Where do you know the investigator from?”
“High school.” He checked his rearview mirror as the four-lane narrowed to single-lane traffic. “Football, baseball. That kind of stuff.”
“So who is it? If you know him, I might as well.”
“Bobby Wentworth.”
The name dropped between them like a bomb. Madeline gaped at him a moment, then snapped her mouth shut. A harsh laugh bubbled in her throat and she covered her eyes. “Fuck, no.”
The words came out louder, slightly more hysterical than she meant them to. The truck swerved slightly and Tick glanced at her. “What?”
“I don’t believe this.” She laughed at a situation far from funny. Damn karma. Just her fucking luck. “You’re kidding me.”
“
What
?” Tick looked at her again and slowed for a stoplight. “Holton, what is wrong?”
“Bobby Wentworth is the investigator we’re going to see.”
“Yeah. He went through the academy the year after I did.” The light turned green and a horn beeped behind them. He hit the accelerator. “What is the big deal?”
She sighed. “When I was a junior, I cut class and blew him behind the weight room because Allison dared me to.”
“Holy hell…” He shook his head. “Well, this is going to be awkward.”
“You’re telling me.”
He laughed, damn him, his shoulders shaking with quiet guffaws. “Shit, Madeline, that was a stupid-ass thing to do on a dare.”
“Hey.” She resisted the urge to punch him in the arm to shut him up, the way she would have with Jack. “At least I was only stupid with him once. How many times were you stupid with your psycho girlfriend?”
“That is not nice.” He took a right off the main drag.
She did cuff his arm then. “You’re
laughing
at me.”
“Well, it’s funny.” He draped his wrists on the steering wheel and spread his hands. “This wouldn’t happen to anybody but you.”
“Oh, thank you very much.” Her mouth twitched. Shit, he was right. Who else would this happen to?
“If it makes you feel any better, Cait once jumped me on the couch while I was still wearing my gear. We managed to key my radio and treat half the department to about thirty seconds of us hot and heavy.” He pulled into the gravel lot fronting the small Cressley city hall.
“Nope, sorry, not the same thing, Calvert.” She released her seatbelt and pushed the door open. No sense in dragging her feet. The reality wasn’t going away anytime soon.
As they walked up the sidewalk to the neat brick building that housed both the city offices and the small police department, she threw back her shoulders and envisioned for a moment relating this whole story to Ash. He’d probably laugh his ass off. Oh hell, maybe she’d laugh with him, once this was over and done.
Tick held the door and they entered a tiny foyer. The young blonde at the city clerk’s desk looked up and smiled. “Good morning. May I help you?”
“Investigator Calvert, Chandler County Sheriff’s Department.” Tick held his ID aloft. “Is Investigator Wentworth available?”
She pointed down the hall to the left. “Third office on the right.”
“Thank you.” He ushered Madeline before him. Her stomach twisted and she sucked in a couple of deep breaths. At the partially open door, Madeline rapped sharply.
“Come in.” The voice was no longer familiar, not that she’d known him that well to begin with.
With Tick on her heels, she pushed the door open. Bobby looked up from the file on his desk, but recognition didn’t light his eyes until he caught sight of Tick. He rose to proffer a hand. “Well, hey, boy, what are you doing down here?”
“Need to talk to you about an old death.” Tick took his hand in a hard shake. “Good to see you, Bobby.”
Bobby’s blue gaze tracked to Madeline with polite expectation. Tick cleared his throat. “You remember Madeline Holton. She’s serving as our interim investigator.”
Recollection dawned on his face and he stuck out his hand. “Madeline Holton? Well, I swear. Good to see you, girl.”
“You too.” She found her own hand engulfed in a firm grip and then he stepped back, gesturing.
“Y’all come sit down. You said something about a death?” Bobby settled behind his desk again.
“The coroner called it a heart attack, but an autopsy was never completed.” Tick handed over the manila folder he’d brought with them. “We’ve uncovered some unrelated information concerning a cold case in our jurisdiction that makes us think maybe his death wasn’t so natural.”
“A heart attack, huh? At twenty-one?” Bobby glanced up, askance. “I mean, it happens, but a lot of times it don’t happen, right?”
“Right.” Tick dragged out the monosyllable.
Bobby lifted a couple of papers, his gaze on the folder’s contents. “Any family left?”
“Nope, not locally. His parents both died a few years ago; he was an only child. An aunt who used to live in Alabama, but no recent address.”
“Wait. His wife was Allison Barnett.” Bobby lifted his eyebrows. “That’s some shit. You thinking she might have had something to do with his ‘heart attack’?”
“We do.”
“Huh.” Bobby paged through the rest of the file. “She always was a little off. No offense, Tick.”
“None taken.” He rested his elbow on the chair arm and rubbed his jaw. “She’s a lot off now.”
“Tell you what…I can’t make you any promises, but I’ll talk to the chief, see if he’ll let me take a run at this. I’ll start by tracking down the aunt, maybe contact the insurance company that paid out on the death.” Bobby flipped the folder shut. “We’ll see where it goes.”
“We appreciate it.” Tick rose and the two men shook hands again over the desk.
Bobby slanted a smile in Madeline’s direction. “Again, good to see you, Madeline.”
Another round of handshakes and Tick shepherded her into the hall and through the lobby. Outside, she squinted across the hood as he unlocked the truck. “That was…not as weird as I’d thought it would be.”
He slid behind the wheel. “What’d you expect, for him to ask you for another go right there? C’mon, Madeline, it had to be an awkward moment for him too, but you’re both professionals and it happened twenty-freakin’-years ago. You gotta learn to let things go.”
“Did you just refer to me as a professional?” She fastened her seatbelt. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
He gave her a look and shifted into reverse. “I mean it, Holton, you have to learn to let some stuff go. You carry it around until it cripples you—”
“I owe you an apology.” The words were out before they’d completely formed in her mind.
He braked harder than necessary. When he glanced at her, surprise glinted in his eyes. “For what?”
“For…” She swallowed hard. “For what I did. I never even thought about you as a person, as someone that my actions might hurt—”
“Don’t.” Remorse twisted his expression. “You don’t have to, and there’s more than enough blame to go around.”
She brushed her hair away from her face with shaking hands and made herself look him in the eye. “I am sorry.”
He nodded once, and his throat moved. “So am I.”
Silence fell. He rubbed his palm over the steering wheel. “You know what? I skipped breakfast. Let’s hit El Toreo’s before we head back.”
“Yeah, let’s do.” She smiled and glanced away. “Sounds like a great idea.”
Just as she’d expected, Ash laughed.
“It’s not funny.” She wrapped her arms about his waist and buried her face against his chest.
“It’s not, but it is.” He rested more of their weight against the counter behind them and rubbed the small of her back. His mouth danced across her temple. “Kinda like looking back at Suzanne’s crazy shit.”
“Yeah.” She lifted her head to look at him. Tiny lines of weary pain still bracketed his mouth and eyes. “Are you sure you want to go to Calvert’s for dinner? You look tired.”
“I’m also going stir-crazy. Being cooped up in the house for a week is making me nuts. So yeah, I’m sure I want to go.” He spun her toward the living room. “Now get your coat so we can get moving.”
She drove them the few miles to Calvert and Falconetti’s home. With the swelling receding on his knee, Ash had eschewed his crutches and instead leaned on a cane as they went up the walk. She tucked her hand under his arm, simply pleased to be in his presence.
Tick met them at the back door. “Hey, y’all, come on in.”
Warmth enveloped them inside, and spicy scents lingered in the air as Tick took their coats. “Let me get you a drink. Madeline, water, beer, tea?”
“Water’s fine.”
“Cait’s upstairs with the baby.” Tick pulled a beer from the refrigerator and filled a goblet with ice and water from the pitcher on the island. He extended it in Madeline’s direction. “She’ll be down shortly.”
Ash accepted his beer. “Is that her alfredo I smell?”
“It is.”
“Fantastic.” Ash hugged Madeline to his side. “Babe, wait until you experience this. The woman makes the best alfredo sauce I’ve ever tasted.”
His enthusiasm was darn near infectious. She patted his arm. “I can’t wait.”
Tick tagged Ash’s chest. “I have those proposals I was telling you about in the study. If Madeline doesn’t mind, I can show them to you quickly.”
Madeline waved an airy hand. “Be my guest.”
Ash leaned in to brush his mouth over her cheek. “I’ll be right back.”