“And you like it?”
“Dad, he’s not on the witness stand,” Allie objected.
“Just making polite conversation, Allie.”
“I don’t mind, honey. Yes, sir, I do. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Of course he couldn’t. She knew that. Still, some forlorn remnant of hope left over from last summer stabbed her heart. While she squashed that weakness, Martha announced dinner.
After Martha had served Allie’s favorite grilled salmon, her father said, “You asked what could be done about Josten’s bull. I’m afraid that the fact that the bull is of an extremely desirable bloodline will muddy the situation. Josten’s ranch depends on the breeding capacity of that animal. Last time—”
“You mean he’s killed before?” Zeph interrupted.
“Mmm. But of course, it was only a dog.” Sarcasm lay heavy in her dad’s voice. Allie knew he agreed with her about that bull and Josten’s lack of adequate security for the animal. “Josten paid a substantial compensation and installed stronger fences,” her father continued. “I imagine that either Josten or Harley will be calling on my services, so perhaps I shouldn’t discuss the current contretemps further.”
“I saw your office downtown. So you’re still—or back, I should say—in private practice?”
“I keep trying to make him retire completely,” Allie said. “Since his heart attack, he shouldn’t be—”
“Shouldn’t be sitting around the house being bored. I take very few cases, Zeph. And oversee a few things here and there. Not even a half-time load. Perhaps now that Allie’s working, she’ll quit harassing me about my work.” He gave her a tender smile, and she knew he loved it when she fussed over him.
“I’m surprised there’s even that much work in such a small town. And that what there is would interest you after your time on the bench,” Zeph said.
“I can’t discuss specifics, of course. Much of what I do is quite mundane, wills and such. I encourage those who want to sue their neighbors to seek other solutions. And other representation, if they can’t be dissuaded,” her dad said with a wintery smile. “But a few things arise that are interesting. The odd call from Monty’s jail for emergencies. And I act as conservator for a business here in town.”
She knew he referred to Blanton’s Builders and glanced at Zeph. He didn’t shift his gaze from her father. Almost certainly Zeph had come here knowing that, but she was sure he wouldn’t admit it.
He didn’t get a chance. The phone had rung a moment before, and now Martha came to the door. “Judge? It’s from the jail.”
Her father rose. “As I said. The odd call from one of Monty’s guests. I wonder who’s in trouble this time,” he said and left the room.
He returned a few minutes later.
“Don’t tell me. You have to go,” Allie said.
“I’m afraid you’re correct. I don’t know how long I’ll be, so go ahead and have Martha serve your dessert now.”
Allie went to him and hugged him. “Thanks, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Zeph added his thanks. After her father had left, Allie looked across the table at him. “Now what?”
“Now we eat this very lovely looking gelato, I hope. Does Martha make it herself?”
“Dad’s gone. You don’t have to keep pretending, Zeph.”
“Yes, but Martha’s still here. And your father might be lurking in the hall or outside the window to see what we say. And there are listening devices.”
“All right, Mr. Bond. I get it.” She ate a spoonful of Martha’s lemon gelato. “But this isn’t Private Eye 101.”
“Maybe it should be.” He sampled his dessert. “Excellent.”
She ate in silence, faster than Martha’s masterpiece deserved. Zeph followed her example, and looked up from his empty bowl at the same time she did. “Now what?”
“Time to investigate your father.”
“Yes. And prove he isn’t involved.”
“This is your chance to help me.”
“Put my money where my mouth is?” She stood.
“Fine. Make sure your father’s gone and that Martha won’t come looking for us.”
She gave him a suspicious look but decided to comply, and gathered up the dishes. When she’d taken them to the kitchen and seen that Martha had started washing them, she returned. “Now what?”
“Now we do a little light burglary.” He wrapped an arm around her, but used it to pull her down the hall to her father’s office.
“You can’t be serious.”
His sardonic look disabused her. Serious had to be this man’s middle name when it came to his work. “Stand by the door and listen for anyone coming.”
Scarcely believing what she was doing, she moved to the door and cracked it open.
Zeph homed in on the computer. Wentworth had left it on, and he scanned the directories. Nothing of interest. “Not a big computer fan, is he?”
Allie smiled. “Not exactly. He uses one at work, but he’s close to paranoid about hard copy backup. He once had a whole case go missing from his computer the day before he was due in court, and the backup file was on a thumb drive that his secretary dropped down the garbage disposal.”
“By accident?”
“So she said.” Disbelief colored every word. “After that, Dad started keeping hard copies of important stuff in locked files.”
“I would have gotten rid of the secretary, too.”
“He did.”
“So we might find hard copy even though there aren’t any electronic files of interest.” His gaze didn’t waver from the desk, and he had the intent look of a hound on a fresh trail when he honed in on the one locked drawer in the desk. He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. Except they weren’t keys.
Her eyes went wide with disbelief. “Are those lock picks?”
“Yep.” He had the drawer open before she could say anything. No way would she stay by the door. She had to see too, and scooted across the room to look over his shoulder. The nearly empty drawer held only three things—a folder and a packet of letters, which Zeph set on the desk, and a framed picture. When he lifted the picture out, Allie touched it gently. “My mother. He loved her so.”
Zeph inspected the back of the picture carefully and set it back in the drawer before picking up the packet of letters.
“They’re her letters. The ones she wrote to him when he had to be away.”
He riffled through them, opening a few and reading a few paragraphs.
Disbelief sizzled through her. “What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Making sure.” He returned them to their place and opened the folder.
Allie stared at him, shocked by his focus and stunned by his obvious expertise. She’d never thought of him as a hunter. A very good hunter. Of men.
Zeph’s bark of laughter shocked her out of her daze. “What?” she asked.
“You. No front teeth. Holding a purple ribbon and a cup half your size.”
“My first 4-H show.” She leaned close to look at the other newspaper clippings in the folder. The Stone’s Crossing newspaper hadn’t missed a show from that first gap-toothed picture to her as a leggy teen-ager on a cutting horse, to the young woman in front of a wall full of ribbons, to her graduation from U.C. Davis.
“He’s pretty proud of you, I’d guess,” Zeph murmured, and replaced the folder. “I am, too.” He started to kiss her but she jerked away and he turned back to the drawer.
“What’s this?” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the back of the drawer. After he’d scanned it for a few seconds, his mouth flattened to a grim line. “Holy shit,” he said and whipped a tiny camera out of his pocket to photograph the page.
Allie went cold with apprehension. “What—what is it?”
He carefully replaced everything in the drawer and relocked it. “It’s a list of transactions from the Blanton Builders accounts. Allie, I investigated every one of these jobs in the last week before I came here.” He looked down at her, his face like stone, and her blood chilled.
“That-that doesn’t mean he’s—”
“Involved? Maybe not, but if he isn’t, why would he have a list like this hidden in his desk?”
****
After a night of imagining Zeph hauling her father to jail, Allie opened the clinic heavy-eyed and unhappy. She didn’t want to see him. She had to make him see reason about her father. She had to stop obsessing about having helped him.
“He’s innocent,” she told Zeph the minute he walked in, and winced at the heat in her voice. A detective like Zeph didn’t take anyone’s word for innocence, especially not from a family member. And she didn’t have a shred of proof.
“What happened to ‘good morning’?” Zeph handed her a take-out cup of Betty’s coffee and a raspberry Danish.
“How did you know?” she asked, diverted for a moment by her favorite pastry.
“I asked Betty, of course. My detective skills don’t extend to mind reading.”
She scowled. “It’s a shame they don’t extend to clearing innocent—”
“They do. Stop feeling guilty about helping me last night.”
Who said his skills didn’t include mind-reading? She glared at him mutely. “I guess I’m stuck with you.”
He sighed and took the lid off his own coffee. “Allie, you have no idea how much I hate having you mixed up in this case. I think we’d have enough of a rough road without your father being involved.”
“Why don’t you just arrest him and forget about me.” She grimaced. That sounded like a petulant twelve year old.
“Because I don’t know that he’s guilty, for one thing.” He rubbed a hand over his face and looked so miserable her heart bumped.
“And for another?” she asked.
“I don’t seem to be able to forget you.”
Heat streaked through her, lust followed by anger. At herself. What kind of limp idiot could she be to have these feelings for someone who might arrest her father? Even though he couldn’t be guilty. “Why not?”
“Who knows? We have nothing in common. You don’t have any free time. You’re always surrounded by horses. But I can’t get you out of my mind.”
“Does masochism run in your family?” she asked.
“Damn it, Allie, suffering here.”
He made it sound so believable she had to remind herself that his loyalties lay with his job. Guilt over her attraction—her past attraction—to him hardened her heart. “So I’m some kind of evil temptress making your life miserable?”
“No, you’re just the woman who’s gotten under my skin and is making my job a thousand times harder than it should be. So stop taking shots at me and let’s get to work. What’s on your agenda for today?”
“Office hours this morning. After lunch, I have to go look at a horse that got cut up in some barbed wire and has an abscess because its negligent jerk of an owner didn’t call me right away. Then there’s a dog that needs to be neutered.” She smiled at Zeph’s uncontrollable flinch. “You can help with that. You’re a pretty good surgical assistant. Unless, of course, you want to go investigate something.”
“Who am I likely to meet if I stay with you? I have nothing against combining business with pleasure.”
“Well, office hours,” she said, ignoring the warm glow his words produced. “That means anybody or nobody. The horse is at Seldon’s, and—” She broke off when Zeph focused on her like a laser. “You’re interested in Seldon?”
“I’ve met him. Heard more about him. I thought he got sent up for murder.”
“He did. This is his brother. Not Lander. Wendover. He took over the horse trading business. And he runs a pitiful operation.” She forced herself to swallow her anger at the shoddy fences and dirty stalls at Seldon’s stables.
“Who does he run with?”
“Some rough characters from Sacramento.”
“Who are his neighbors?”
“Nearest is Santos Rodriguez.”
If Zeph were a dog, he’d have come to a point, tail stiff and nose twitching.
“What? What did I say?” she asked. “Is Wend going to be your chief suspect instead of my dad?”
“I think I’m very much looking forward to our stable call this afternoon,” Zeph said.
The first patient of the day interrupted her, and she never got a chance to ask just what he thought he’d accomplish at Seldon’s. But that curious alertness didn’t leave him all morning. “I have to give you credit, Zeph,” she said as he closed the door behind the last patient of the morning. “You’ve become a great assistant in a remarkably short time.”
He grinned and moved to the sink to wash his hands. “Self-defense. And I still don’t like cats. At least dogs are only dangerous at one end.” He carefully washed the long scratch on his arm. “That Snowball, she’s got a mean set of claws on the hind legs. Come on. I’ll buy you lunch at Betty’s.”
“I should buy you lunch. You’ve worked like you’re getting paid.”
He struck a dramatic romance-cover pose, all bedroom eyes and bulging muscles, and swept her into his arms. It was funny and dramatic at the same time, and made her heart jump. “Just being with you is payment enough,” he said before he kissed her, sending her heart into double time.
She had to work to remember how angry his suspicions made her. She repeated the litany: jerk; traitor; um….um…the litany had completely escaped her and she began to melt.
The door opened. “Allie—” her father said.
Zeph let go of her like a red-hot horse shoe. Only a faint red stain on his cheekbones gave away any internal turmoil he might feel, and she had to give him credit for the way he turned to face her father. “Hello, Wentworth. I was just kissing your daughter.”