Cold Case Murder Mystery (Hudson Sibling Solutions #7)

Chapter Fifteen

Zeke woke up while it was still dark out, with an empty side of the bed. For a moment, he just stared. The room was dim, but he could make out the rumpled sheets, the indentation in the pillow on that side. A faint floral scent lingering in the air.

He hadn’t dreamed it. Probably.

But where had she gone?

He got up, pulled on some clothes, and went in search of her. Not because he needed her to have some sort of postmortem, discuss what this was, what this meant. Just because he had to know she was okay.

At least, that’s what he convinced himself of as he moved through the living room, the kitchen. He was about to get really desperate and creep upstairs to see if she’d gone to sleep in her own bed, but he noticed the front door was unlocked.

He’d checked all the locks at least three times last night before she’d come down to his room.

Surely that meant she’d left the house on her own accord. Maybe she’d gone to the barn to work in her lab. But her purse was right there and a quick look through it told him her key to the barn door was still in it.

So, she’d left for some other reason. But why? If she’d bolted because . . .

Well, he’d find her. He didn’t care what it took. Maybe she didn’t want it or like it, but he was hardly going to let her . . .

He pushed out the front door and then came to an abrupt halt.

She sat on the rickety porch, in the rocking chair that Carlyle had put there a month back, telling him he’d needed it because he was an old man now. Viola lay at her feet.

Brooke was watching the hint of a sunrise in the east. Or had been, until she’d looked over at him when he’d stormed out.

She raised an eyebrow, clearly at the way he’d burst out the door. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah . . . I just . . .”

He didn’t have the words. Her hair was tangled. She was wearing his hoodie—way too big for her small frame. She had her legs curled up under her and the sunrise seemed to burnish her gold. Ethereal.

He didn’t have words for the emotion that swamped him. The need clogged in his throat. How much he wanted this. All those things he’d told her he’d never be able to give her four years ago.

And now he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted more.

She sighed heavily. Her gaze moved back to the sunrise, but her words were careful. Deliberate.

“I know what this is, Zeke. I know what last night was. It doesn’t have to be all dramatic this go-around. I’m under no . . . illusions this is going to be something more than what it is.”

“Which is?”

he returned, not comfortable with the dispassionate way she’d delivered all that.

“A momentary . . . trip down memory lane.”

She said it with one of her patented nods, like she could make things true through sheer force of will. “It was a great . . . interlude. No guilt. No drama. Just . . . a distraction. Like you said.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Her head whipped back to look at him. Clearly an argument was on the tip of her tongue. He didn’t let her mount it.

“I asked if that’s what you were suggesting. And that’s fine. If that’s all you want it to be. I can deal.”

Maybe he’d find some way to deal. Because he supposed he deserved that.

But Zeke Daniels didn’t go down without a fight. Why let that change?

“A distraction is not what I’m after though.”

He didn’t know how to do this. How had Walker and Carlyle just . . . said the things that needed saying to deal with the people they loved? How had they made it all work?

Oh God, was he going to have to ask them?

“What are you after, Zeke?”

she asked, sounding tired. “Another few months where we’re in each other’s pockets, pretending to have this . . . relationship, this domestic thing we never got as kids? Until the danger is gone and reality seeps in and now you don’t even have North Star to blame for not being able to have a future. So then what?”

He deserved every single thing she was saying, even if every single word hurt. It’s exactly what he’d done back then. But this wasn’t back then. “Do you really think I haven’t changed?”

She inhaled sharply, though her words remained very, very calm. “Maybe you have, but . . .”

She looked so pained, so confused, so lost. And he had felt all those things. Every moment since the last time he’d seen her. He had convinced himself it didn’t matter. It would never matter. He was such a lone wolf.

Yet what had he done? Settled down in the same place as his siblings with some vague idea to start a life. With some . . . nebulous hope something like Brooke would come along again.

Or maybe, deep down, he’d always just hoped for her.

But on the other side of all that was her. What she’d done in their time apart. What she’d thought. And the fact he’d had her trust once and broken it. She shouldn’t so easily believe him this go-around. He knew that.

He also knew what it was like to hurt her, and he didn’t want to live with that again. That pain had been worse than his fear, his inability to deal with everything he’d felt for her.

And, he supposed, that pain had brought him here. So he tried to find the words to get it across. To make her understand.

“I bought a ranch, Brooke. I put down roots. I sure as hell don’t know what to do with them, but they’re there.”

“Okay,”

she said, nodding, though he knew her easy agreement wasn’t going to go in his favor. She met his gaze with dark blue eyes. Sad, sad eyes. “But they’re not my roots.”

He should leave it at that. He should. But he couldn’t.

“They could be.”

Brooke didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what they were doing. Why either of them thought now was the time or that this conversation was a good idea. It would only make working together uncomfortable.

And she couldn’t blame him because she had gone to his room last night. She’d done that, and on purpose. She had gotten the exact result she’d wanted last night.

She’d woken up . . . with none of the expected regrets she thought she should feel. It had been too . . . wonderful to be back in his arms, back in his bed. Relive all the things they could give each other.

It hadn’t been a distraction. It had been like coming home. Roots.

They could be yours.

But, without regret, she had to focus on reality. On keeping her feet and expectations grounded. They’d been down this road before. He’d ridden out the chemistry, and she’d let herself believe it was love.

She couldn’t make the same stupid mistake again.

Even if he was standing there saying all the right things. All the right things she wished he’d said four years ago.

She hadn’t expected this. She didn’t know how to weather it. Not with everything else going on.

She pushed herself out of the chair. “I have to get ready. I want to get an early start at the cave. Detective Delaney-Carson is picking me up soon.”

He didn’t argue with her, didn’t push the point of their relationship . . . whatever it was. He nodded, his dark eyes never leaving her face. “I could drive you down to the cave.”

“I know, but I’m going to ask you for an even bigger favor.”

He studied her like he couldn’t possibly think of one, so he didn’t fully believe her. But it was a huge favor for her, and it required trusting him the only way she knew how.

To protect someone she loved.

“Watch Royal for me. I just need to know there’s someone here who’ll stop him from flying off the handle, given the chance. I think . . . I think he wants to do the right thing, but I wouldn’t put it past him to do the wrong one, thinking it was right.”

“I guess I know a little about that.”

Her mouth curved in spite of the riot of feelings inside her. Zeke did indeed.

Could she really believe he’d changed? She knew he was different. There was a . . . stillness to him he hadn’t had four years ago. Still tense, still serious, still very protective. But not quite so . . . pumping with unleashed energy. Not so desperate to act.

Did that equal change? She wasn’t sure she could come to a conclusion on that and believe in it. It required her to be . . . certain and sure. With everything else going on? How could she be sure of anything?

“I’ll keep an eye on him,”

Zeke promised. “And look, we can pretend last night didn’t happen. We can do whatever you want, Brooke, and I mean that. Because I care about you. I never stopped thinking about you. I made a mistake, a lot of mistakes.”

She didn’t know what to say. Maybe nothing. Especially when he kept talking.

“I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

He said it like a promise, like a vow. And she wanted to be stronger than the woman who fell for that line, but look at him. All serious. All . . . perfect. He’d always been just what she wanted.

Remember how hard it was to get over that?

The Zeke of old had never made a promise that didn’t have to do with her physical safety. He was right the other day when he’d told her he’d never said he hadn’t loved her back then, because he’d never used the word love.

And he still wasn’t saying it. He was saying a lot of sweet, important things. But not the main one.

“I don’t know what I want, Zeke. Except to solve this case. To figure out who’s after me or Royal or whatever this is. Maybe after that . . . I can figure out what we are.”

He nodded, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

She’d expected an argument. Or did she want one? Because an argument would solidify her feelings, but him agreeing with her just left her even more confused.

But she had work. Important work. She marched herself inside and got dressed for the day. She grabbed her laptop and took it out to the barn, avoiding everyone. Even the dog.

Holed up in the makeshift lab, Brooke opened the report the lab in Cheyenne had sent her this morning. She read through the report, took notes, lost herself in the work. Putting the data points together.

There was no way some of the bones in the cave didn’t precede Jen Rogers. It wasn’t Brooke’s job to come up with a second suspect. It was just her job to compile and analyze the data.

She put together as much of her own report as she could—this one geared to the detectives with enough laymen’s terms they wouldn’t be lost by the science. Anything admitted to court would need to be more scientific, but they needed another suspect before they could worry about court.

Luckily, Jen Rogers had confessed to the Hudson murders, so there was no way a second suspect got her out of trouble. This just . . . compounded the trouble.

A knock sounded at the barn door and, a second later, Zeke stuck his head in. “Detective’s here to pick you up.”

“Oh. Right. I’ll be out in just a second.”

She glanced at where she was storing the skull. She still hadn’t confessed to the detectives she’d taken it, run her own tests.

Now wasn’t the time for that anyway. That was for another day. Today was for more excavating. It was for focusing on one problem, not the cascade of others.

She greeted Detective Laurel Delaney-Carson with a smile. She’d worked with Thomas more than Laurel the past few weeks, but she’d been more with Laurel the first few, so they were on friendly, comfortable terms.

They chatted about the weather and trivial things before easing into the case.

“I’ve got a little update on the scrapbook,”

Laurel offered as she drove. “Dahlia is still doing some digging into the facts behind who the two men were in the picture that might be in the cave, if the label is right and all that, but it looks like the picture was taken in the thirties. Maybe early forties,” she said.

Brooke considered the picture. There wasn’t a good way to judge the age of the men, at least to Brooke’s eye, and no doubt Dahlia would find more information as she researched, but Brooke didn’t think those men in the photograph could have been any younger than twenty. That meant, even if that picture was dated into the forties, the youngest either of those men could be now was well over a hundred.

And her preliminary examination of the skull lent itself to her believing it had been buried closer to a hundred years ago. That meant . . .

“If the bones are as old as the picture, we might be looking at a suspect who’s long dead.”

Or worse, a series of murderers who used the same place as their dumping grounds. Purposefully, maybe.

“And spent their life getting away with murder?”

Laurel scowled as they drove into the nature preserve. “I don’t like that.”

“Has anyone questioned Jen Rogers about the scrapbook?”

“We’ve tried. Last month when she was first arrested, we tried to get her to explain why she would steal it from us. Obviously, she wasn’t too keen on letting us in. Unfortunately, with her murder case so open and shut, there’s no real leverage on our end to get her to explain now.”

Brooke considered keeping her theory to herself. She’d fought so hard in her position, and it required a lot of evidence and not a lot of theory on her part. She’d worked with several detectives who’d only wanted the facts. Not her take.

But Thomas and Laurel hadn’t been like that, and maybe everything the past few days was trying to teach her to stop being so damn self-reliant. To let people in. To trust.

She thought of Zeke saying he didn’t make the same mistake twice. The way he’d held her when she’d cried. Last night in his bed and . . .

Good lord, now was not the time to be thinking about her personal life. She tried to organize her thoughts on the case, but Laurel pulled up to the cave entrance where usually a pair of deputies were stationed.

Not today.

“I don’t like that,”

Laurel said, a frown on her face as she slowed the cruiser to a stop. “Nothing came over the radio about them leaving their post.”

She picked up the radio in her car. Brooke didn’t follow all the little codes she used, but she got the gist that Laurel was trying to figure out where the deputies had gone and asking a few more to come out. Brooke didn’t think the assigned officers were responding.

“We’re going to stay right here until we know what’s going on,”

Laurel said. She sounded and appeared calm, but it didn’t escape Brooke’s notice that her hand now rested on the butt of her weapon as her gaze scanned the world outside her cruiser.

So Brooke looked out into the sunny day as well. Was there another threat out there? Would she ever really be free of them?