Something New (16 page)

Didn’t mean his dick wasn’t appreciating a lithe female form wrapped around half his body, though. A pleasant state of partial wood put a nice buzz in his blood.

Particularly when Abby stirred against him and her breasts brushed his ribs and arm.

“I don’t want to get up,” she murmured, sounding drowsy. “Will you carry me downstairs to the store?”

Rodrigo craned his neck at an awkward angle to meet her luminous gaze. “Make sure you really want me to do that, because I will.”

A flush crept up Abby’s neck to fill her cheeks. “Maybe not.” She untangled herself and got to her feet. Her gaze still on his, she added, “Yet.”

Shit
. With that single word Rodrigo went from the sensation of fingers feathering over his shaft to a rubbing tug that shot lines of pleasure all the way into his belly and up his spine.

He stood, challenged by the sparks deepening her eyes to the colors of a midnight ocean. “How about I walk you downstairs with my arm around your waist and then give you a respectful kiss good-bye that leaves your panties damp and you humming for me the rest of the morning?”

Her neck tilted back, she planted her hands on her hips. “You think you can? With one little kiss?”

He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Oh, I know I can.”

“Let’s go.”

Rodrigo slipped his arm around her waist and guided her down to her store’s back room.

Ten minutes later, she wouldn’t admit that he’d soaked her through and through using nothing but his mouth on hers. She had to put her hand on the wall before getting steady enough to walk into the body of her store, though, so Rodrigo took that as a resounding success.

He ignored the fact that he bumped into a pile of boxes on his way out the back door.

* * *

Captain Thomas Zanger steepled his hands against his lips, tapping the tips of his pointer fingers against each other in a steady rhythm that Braden knew meant the man was taking his time thinking his answer through. The beefy, muscular lawman didn’t only intimidate with his size and buzzed head; he could also crush any officer in his precinct under the scrutiny of his ice blue stare. Braden had seen men and women cower, but Braden had never feared an evaluation or judgment of his performance, so he didn’t slouch or develop a nervous tic when facing his boss. At least not an outward one that would show he cared.

Give the man time
. Braden refused to even let his boot tap against the tile floor as he waited out Zanger’s silence.
He’ll come to the right conclusion.

As Braden internally sweat out the captain’s decision, he focused his attention on a series of photos on the bookshelf behind the man’s desk, each one depicting Zanger’s love of fishing. From a sandy-haired teen to the hard-ass he was today, Zanger proudly held up his various catches for the camera. Braden stared while trying to appear as if he weren’t and attempted to identify each species of fish so that he didn’t let his overwhelming need for a yes from this man show on his face or in his body language.

“Go for it,” Zanger finally said, breaking the silence. The gruff scratch of the captain’s voice made each word sound like it came out over shards of jagged rocks. “But be discreet about it, for fuck’s sake.”

Braden didn’t show so much as a dip in his shoulders, but on the inside, he let out a big sigh. “Yes, sir.”

Zanger’s glacier stare belied the explosive fire of the man’s personality. “I don’t want this town getting a whiff of a new investigation and flipping out all over again. I don’t want people camping out on our station steps demanding some new suspect’s head for no good reason.”

“I understand, sir.”

“And while you’re at this, find a fucking concrete way to assure me Cormack didn’t do it. We liked him for a reason. I don’t want a mile-long list of people who
could have
done these murders. I need something solid if we’re going to end up discrediting the good work a lot of men and women did on this case.” The captain grimaced, and if Braden hadn’t seen it before, he might have flinched. “Myself included. I might have been the lowest man on the totem pole back then, but I don’t like to be wrong.”

Braden flipped through the notes he’d made before requesting a conversation with the boss. “I have Lorene Jones’s address, and I’ve already set up an appointment to speak to her later on today. I plan to assure myself she truly believes the claims she made to Abigail Gaines before this goes any further.”

“Good.” Glancing down at the original case file—Braden’s copy was now at Abby’s place—Zanger leafed through the clipped pages. “How is the girl?” His voice softened as much as Braden figured it probably could. “Woman now, I guess. She could not speak a word to any cop or child psychologist we brought in to help her recover her memory. I never talked to her personally, but half of us thought the mental block might be a blessing.” His mouth twisted as he shut the file and looked up again. “Because I have to tell you, after seeing the bloodbath at that crime scene and knowing she’d likely been sitting there for hours at her dead parents’ sides, I wouldn’t want a child being burdened with the memory of something that horrific.”

Braden’s blood went cold at Zanger’s brutally honest depiction of the crime scene. Braden had been a cop for a long time and a detective for over a year, but nothing in his life experience could ever allow him to understand what it must have been like for Abby to sit for such a long time within the carnage of her murdered parents. Nobody could.

Christ. Is it worth putting her through this again for just a small outside shot of finding a new suspect?

The captain knocked his big fist against his metal desk, and the sound jerked Braden back into his office.

“If you can’t do this, Crenshaw…”

“Sorry, sir.” Braden mentally kicked himself and put his full focus back on the man who could kill this case before it even began. “Ms. Gaines is still very sketchy on her memory. As an officer of the law, I’m taking everything I hear from her with the knowledge that eighteen years have passed and she might not remember things as they actually were.” Zanger was intelligent, shrewd as hell with the politicians whose asses he had to kiss, and Braden knew it would be suicide to even attempt to bamboozle him. “As a man, though, I just want to help her get it all out so she can move forward with her life.”

Zanger’s lips pursed into an even tighter line. “I hear you. Don’t let your personal feelings cloud your judgment, though. If something comes of this, your testimony in court has to be above reproach.”

Braden clenched his jaw. “I know.” He bristled inside even as he understood it was difficult for the more experienced lawman to keep from lecturing his people.

“You need to temper this woman’s hope with some reality too, Detective.” Zanger picked up the case file and used it as a pointing device. “You know as well as I do that old cases like this never even get reopened without some significant new DNA evidence. We never had that in this case to begin with. It’s an uphill battle.” The wear and tear of every unsolved case filled in the lines of the captain’s face, making him look battle scarred. “That church community was devastated when Cormack didn’t go to prison. I don’t want to needlessly put them through heartbreak like that again.”

“I understand,” Braden responded. “I’ll make sure everyone I talk to understands that this is a case of our department reevaluating old statements and angles and that as of now we don’t foresee a new arrest being made.”

“Talk to Father Jim first,” Zanger suggested. “I remember his being a good man. He knows his congregation inside and out. He’ll help point you to the people who knew the victims best.”

“Have you been a member?” This time, Braden couldn’t cover his move to sit up straighter. “I didn’t know you went to church.”

“I don’t. Father Jim’s or anywhere else. I just remember that he was very concerned about his congregation after the Gaineses were murdered.” Zanger’s lips pulled down at the edges. “You don’t live this job for better than twenty years without becoming cynical about whether there’s any kind of higher being watching over any of us. Right after the Gaines case”—his stare slipped to downright arctic—“we found a little boy who’d been deliberately starved by his parents and then a teacher who murdered a coworker she’d been fucking. You see and hear about some ugly shit in this job, and on your downtime you don’t exactly want to listen to someone tell you God has a plan for it all.”

“I hear you. I’m not exactly a churchgoer myself.”

“Not that my wife isn’t trying to transform me.” A gritty chuckle escaped the captain, snapping him out of his dark mood. “Karen nags me to try her church every goddamn week. For fifteen years straight, every Sunday, without fail. She’s Episcopalian.”

Braden could picture the quaint slat-board-sided, white-painted building with black trim and an enormous wraparound porch. “The place over on Woodland, right?”

“That’s the one. It used to be a private residence. The man who owned it willed it to his church when he died.”

It wasn’t a huge place, but Braden drove past it regularly and recalled a decent number of cars parked there on Sundays. “Maybe you should go once, tell your wife you didn’t like it, and she’ll stop bugging you.”

“Nah.” Zanger leaned back in his chair and grabbed a stack of mail out of a basket. “She’d just move on to something else. This one I can handle.”

“Ahh. Got it.” Braden didn’t, though, not really. Then again, he’d never been married, so what did he know? “Thank you for your time, sir.” He grabbed the case file and pushed out of his chair with an appreciative nod. “I have some toxicology reports I have to track down this morning and then do some follow-up interviews with the witnesses from the gas-station robbery last week.”

“Listen.” Zanger’s rough tone stopped Braden with his hand on the door. “I can’t give you Watson or Kaufman for the Gaines case right now. It’s too little to go on to approve that much man power and that many hours. Your priority remains current cases and anything else new that comes over the horizon. If I see this doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere useful, I will shut it down.”

“Understood.” Braden swung the frosted-glass office door all the way open. “Thank you, sir.”

The captain already had his nose in his mail. “Keep me informed.”

“Will do.”

Braden had only taken one step over the threshold when Zanger groused, “And shut my damn door, Crenshaw.”

“Yes, sir.” As soon as the Braden heard the
click
, he looked around the station, saw everyone going about their business, and he allowed himself a small but vigorous pump of his fist.

Success
. First step: call Abby. Second: talk to Lorene Jones on his own. Third: a conversation with Father Jim with Abby and Rodrigo riding shotgun.

Braden prayed Abby was able to handle slipping into such a traumatic past.

I’ll make sure she is
. Braden couldn’t forget about the dark-haired Latino whose mouth he had taken so recently.
Rodrigo will too.

* * *

Braden immediately spotted Abby’s car as he turned into the church parking lot.
Perfectly timed
. He pulled in alongside her just as she and Rodrigo exited the vehicle.

After spending a half hour with Lorene Jones, who seemed kind and genuine despite Braden’s best efforts to go in disliking her on Abby’s behalf, Braden agreed with Abby’s assessment that Lorene had enough knowledge of Elaine Gaines’s personality, as well as her behavior in the final year of her life, to support a suspicion of an affair.

Now it was into this sacred building that likely counted the majority of potential suspects as members of its congregation.

Braden joined Abby and Rodrigo at the front of her car. The church, with its gleaming red brick facade, white pillars and trim, steeple, and stained-glass window depicting Christ with his arms stretched out in welcome, loomed some fifty feet away. A beacon of sunlight bounced off the bronze bell in the steeple as if God himself touched the building with his light.

Good. We’re gonna need his help.

With a glance above Abby’s head to Rodrigo, Braden saw the man stiffen his spine, and Braden did the same. Then Braden looked to Abby. She was pale, but as that was her normal coloring, not overly so.

“You ready to do this?” he asked.

Abby nodded, took a deep breath, and promptly folded right to her knees.

Chapter Nine

“Abby? Talk to me.”

“Bit, are you all right?”

Two distinct male voices swam in Abby’s ears, pushing through the sounds of crashing ocean waves putting a muting blanket on all the noises around her.

The church Abby remembered so well from her childhood swayed before her eyes. Two towering spruce trees on either side appeared as giant green arms reaching out to drag her into the mouth of the brick building, where the structure would then swallow her whole and separate her from those she loved.

“No goddamn way.” Rodrigo’s fiery will snapped through the crisp air and wound around Abby. “We’re not doing this today. She’s not ready.”

Nothing could have stabbed into Abby’s spirit and hurled her back into her body faster than Rodrigo’s strident declaration regarding her personal choices.

She shook off the hands manacling her upper arms on both sides. “I’m all right.” Abby pushed to her feet, forced herself to look at the church again, and didn’t let her heart race out of control this time. “I don’t ever have cause to drive by this church. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid. It looks exactly the same as I remember it, and it threw me for a few seconds. I let myself get overwhelmed.” She hated admitting that to herself as much as she did these two men. “It won’t happen again.”

Braden brushed away hair that had fallen in her eyes. “We can come back tomorrow, Abby.” He sounded like he was speaking to a dazed victim or shell-shocked witness. “Or the next day. Or the next. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

Rodrigo stepped in front of Abby and dipped down to get at eye level with her. “I don’t like it.” A stern line took over his mouth. “Your lips are too red when the rest of your face is too pale, and your eyes are kind of wild.”