For Love & Bourbon (11 page)

Cooper chuckled. “Not so fast. While the investigation is going on I can’t give you free reign of the office at the risk of you tampering with evidence.”

Frustration filled her at the patient look in his eyes, like he was kindly scolding a naughty child. “I need that paperwork or else I can’t pay my employees.”

“Gotcha. Tell me where it is and I’ll get it for you.”

She let out a huff of breath and pointed at the top drawer of the receptionist’s desk. “It’ll probably be with Dolly’s stuff.”

“Right.” Cooper yanked open the drawer, pulled out some paperwork. “This it?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Ava accepted the documents, tucked them under her arm. She watched him carefully, wondering how to go about getting information from him. Since it’d worked before, she settled on being flirtatious. She angled her face up to his and gave him a slow, sugary smile. “So, Agent Lawson, how’re you liking Fox Hills so far?”

Over her shoulder, Cooper saw Marco’s eyebrows shoot up.

Clearing his throat, Cooper settled on the edge of the desk. “It’s good. Nice little town. Friendly people.”

“Except that sheriff guy. What’s his name?” Marco cut in, snapping his fingers. “Brad. Billy…”

“Beau,” Ava supplied with a snort of laughter. “Why am I not surprised he came sniffin’ around here?”

“Strutting around is more what he did,” Marco recalled. “Came in acting like he was one of us, like he had some right to know what’s going on just because he wears a badge. I told him if he wanted to help out he could start by getting me a sandwich from next door.”

“He didn’t like that,” Cooper mused. His eyes met Ava’s. “Beat his chest a bit and made a few empty threats, but we got him out of here.”

Ava grinned. “Good for you. Here I thought I was the only one brave enough to put him in his place.”

“What’s he gonna do? Call the cops?” Marco joked, biting down on his cigar.

“So what did you tell him about the investigation?” Ava asked.

Cooper and Marco exchanged looks. Cooper spoke first. “Not much.”

“Just the tax fraud stuff and the…what was it again?”

“Nice try.” Cooper got to his feet, gave her shoulder a friendly pat. “Look, I know you want answers. You won’t find them here.”

Ava frowned as he started to lead her out of the office. “So what am I supposed to do, then? Just sit around and wait for you to finish whatever the hell it is you’re doing?”

“What you should do is go about your life like normal and forget we’re even here,” Cooper advised, opening the door for her. His face was serious now as they locked eyes. He reached into his coat pocket and handed her his business card. “If you need anything else, just give me a call. My cell’s on there.”

She wanted to crumble up his card and throw it back in his face, but withheld the urge and pocketed it instead. “Fine. Goodbye, Agent Lawson.”

Keeping her temper painfully in check, she stepped out into the midday sun only to watch it disappear behind a cluster of storm clouds. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance and had the hairs standing up on the back of her neck.

Great, she thought. She was no closer to getting answers than when she’d shown up.

On the bright side, at least she could spread the word around town that Beau had gotten his ass handed to him by the Feds.

COOPER WATCHED
out the window as she drove away.

“So I guess her old man decided not to tell her,” Marco said, twirling his cigar around in his fingers.

“Guess not.” Cooper stuffed his hands into his pockets, then spotted the clouds rolling in. “Might get a storm tonight.”

A sly grin played over Marco’s face. “She’s a spitfire, isn’t she?”

“Who?”

“That Ava chick.”

Cooper gave a half-hearted shrug and headed for Ty’s office, not wanting to discuss it. “She’s okay.”

“She’s more than okay. That’s a woman who’s fine and damn well knows it, too.”

Sitting behind the desk, Cooper tapped back into the laptop. Marco followed him into the room, prowling around the office with the cigar tucked between his teeth.

“Her family is indirectly responsible for the deaths of two Americans,” Cooper reminded him, slipping on his glasses. His system was on overdrive from having her there, invading his space. He swore he could still smell her, spiced apples and rich vanilla. “And we still don’t know for sure that she’s not involved.”

Marco waved off the thought. “Please. If she knew, she wouldn’t be trying to get answers out of us. She’s clueless.”

“Or she’s playing dumb so we’ll trust her enough to let something slip.” He dug back into Ty’s emails, scouring for any correspondence from Ned.

“Well, she won’t get anything outta me. I can’t say the same for you.” Pulling the cigar from his mouth, Marco inspected it. “I saw that look in your eyes when she turned up the heat. You like her.”

Cooper snorted. “I do not.”

“And I spotted that bottle of 101 in your room. I damn well know you don’t like the stuff. You want to impress her.”

A deleted email from two days earlier caught Cooper’s attention. He opened it, read the brief but troubling message, and frowned. “Hey, come look at this.”

“What?” Marco skirted around the desk and leaned over Cooper’s shoulder. His brows furrowed as he read aloud. “‘I know she’s with you.’ What’s that about?”

“No idea.” Cooper rested his chin in his hand, tapping his fingers against his cheek. “It’s not from one of Ned’s known email addresses or his sons’, but I can trace where it came from.”

“Could be completely unrelated.” Marco straightened and folded his arms. “We’re looking for money requests and mentions of the IRA. I don’t think this fits.”

Cooper pulled up the IP address, ran a search on it. “It came from an ISP in Ireland. This might fit more than you think.”

“Ned’s been careful to cover his tracks before. Why let this one slip through?”

“Not sure. Doesn’t look like Ty responded to it, though.” Cooper did a search of the address in Ty’s emails, came up empty. “He’s never received anything from this email before. Think he knew who it was from?”

“Maybe. He went to some effort to hide the email. If he didn’t know what it was about, why bother?”

“True.” Adjusting his glasses, Cooper glanced up at his partner. “I wonder who our mysterious ‘she’ is.”

“Might not be a person at all. Could be a code for something.”

“Or a threat.” The thought left Cooper’s mouth subconsciously, surprising him. His eyes glazed over as he ran with it, his pulse kicking up. “What if Ned knows we’re investigating his cousin? He might have tried to access the Swiss account only to find it’s locked up. So he creates a new email account, gets this message over to Ty as a way to acknowledge that their business arrangement is over.”

“I guess. But that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Ned knows the shit he kicked up by killing those two Americans. Surely he expected this.”

“Or maybe he expected Ty to handle it better. It’s only a matter of time before we have concrete proof that Ty knew the money he was depositing into the Swiss account was going to fund the IRA. We’ll be able to shut him down and Ned’s income stream will dry up. He’s got to be pissed. This is his threat telling Ty he knows the FBI is here and to figure it out.”

Marco nodded. “Only Ty has no idea what to do. All he cares about at this point is protecting his wife and kids from the backlash.”

Cooper let out a rush of breath. “I don’t think he’ll be able to. Ned’ll do whatever it takes to keep that money coming in. He may try and make another contact within the family, start fresh after Ty’s arrested. We need to screen the family, see if any of them have allegiance to the Irish side.”

“That might be tough to do without revealing what we’re looking for,” Marco pointed out.

Cooper sat back in the chair and rapped his hands on the armrests. “Depends on how we do it. If I were Ned, I’d go after the young, impressionable ones.”

“Ava and her brother.”

“Yeah. Though Joe’s the only one we know for sure has been to Ireland. Feud or not, we don’t know how his allegiances fall in regards to the IRA.”

Marco sat on the edge of the desk, tucked the unlit cigar into his jacket pocket. “Let’s try something. Reply to that email, let’s see if we get a bite back.”

“It’ll have to be a vague response, since we don’t know for sure what the email is about,” Cooper began, clicking into the computer. He brought the email back on screen from Ty’s account and hit reply. His hands hovered over the keys as he considered what to say. “Maybe, ‘What do you want me to do about it?’”

“That works. Try that.”

Cooper typed out the message, read it over a few times, then hit send. He sat back and folded his hands behind his head, releasing a steadying breath. “All right. We’ll see if we get anything back.”

Marco got to his feet. “Give it a day or two. If we get nothing, we’ll start bugging the family about the Irish connection.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

A
s the last guest of the day shuffled out of the visitor’s center, Ava closed the door and leaned against it gratefully. A tour bus of winos from California had swept in an hour before closing, their final stop for the day on the Bourbon Trail. Her staff had been accommodating as usual, but Lord had the group tried her patience.

She’d had to explain more than once that winemaking and whiskey distilling were two completely different animals. Other than some types of wine being aged in a barrel, they didn’t have much in common. Especially the taste profile, which a few of the fragile flowers had found a bit too “brutal.” They’d tossed perfectly good whiskey in the throwaway pot and fanned their faces in morbid horror.

What else could be expected from people whose taste buds were as refined as a cheap Moscato? she asked herself. They wouldn’t know a good whiskey if it bit them in the ass.

After waving goodnight to the last of the employees, she went to the tasting bar to clean up a few of the leftover glasses. Humming an old Hank Williams song, she washed and dried the glencairns and didn’t notice her brother come in.

“You’re here late,” Adam said, strolling toward her with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. His mouth spread in a lazy grin, one she recognized as being laced with liquor.

“Had a tour group come through last minute.” She placed the clean glasses back on the shelf, then faced him. “What are you doing here?”

He let out a dry laugh. “Why does my presence around here bother you so much? This company’s mine as much as it is yours.”

“Think again,” Ava replied, resting her hands on the bar. “When you don’t put any effort in, don’t expect to reap any of the rewards. All you’re good at is drinking our whiskey, not making it or selling it.”

Anger had his brows pinching together as heat flushed his face. “Is that what you really think? That I’m useless?”

Her own temper had words pouring thoughtlessly out her mouth. “What were you doing all day while I was here working? Oh, that’s right. You were drinking. Just like you always do. I gave up expecting anything useful out of you a long time ago.”

She saw a flicker of pain in his eyes and knew she’d hurt him. Almost instantly it was gone, replaced by indignation. “This is my family, too. I deserve a place at the table. Stop shutting me out and then getting mad at me for keeping my distance.”