Lost in the Dark (Harper Adams Mystery #4)

Chapter 1

“Get away from the window,” James said behind me in a gruff voice.

“Why?” I turned around to face him, letting the heavy curtain fall back into place over the window overlooking the front yard of the property we’d just moved into minutes before. “I thought we were safe here.”

“We are,” he grunted, dropping onto a worn green sofa.

I grimaced at the dark stain on the cushion beside him. “I’m not so sure we’re safe from bed bugs—or whatever diseases live in that thing.”

He gave me a piercing glare. “You can’t expect the Ritz Carlton.”

“I’ve never stayed in a Ritz Carlton in my life,” I said, my tone sharper than intended. But this was the third safe house we’d rotated through in a week, and they seemed to be getting worse with every move. “My expectations aren’t that high. Strangely, I thought yours were.”

He scowled but kept quiet.

I closed the distance between us and perched on the edge of the peeling pleather recliner beside him. “Sorry.” When he didn’t respond, I placed my hand over his. “James.”

He turned to look at me, his face blank, neutral in that way I’d come to recognize—he wasn’t pissed at my criticism. He was worried.

I’d spent the past seven days with him, 24/7, and I’d started to learn his tells.

“We’re safe,” I insisted, giving his hand a squeeze.

At least we were safe at the moment.

We were on the run, hiding from Gerald Knox, who might as well be a ghost for all we’d been able to find out about him. All I had were scraps, and the most damning one came from his mother, Nicole.

Nicole had killed my mother, who’d learned about my father’s work as the Knoxes’s attorney. My father had helped Knox—and other shady businessmen—hide, bury, or sanitize money over the past two decades. And she’d been collecting proof.

A little over a month ago, my father had left her. But before he walked out, she told him about the file and threatened to make it public.

So, my father turned around and warned Nicole.

Nicole came to Jackson Creek under an alias and set up an “accidental” meeting with my mother.

My mother had few real friends, and Nicole had offered a sympathetic ear.

But it was all a play to find out what my mother knew.

When Nicole couldn’t get it out of her on friendly terms, she’d escalated to threats.

But my mother had still refused to hand the information over.

That’s when Nicole—helped by her son and his people—had killed her.

She’d staged it to look like an accident; my mother’s car had driven off the bridge outside of town. And my father had covered up for Nicole by fueling rumors that my mother had done it on purpose.

The evidence fit. He’d asked their family doctor to prescribe her antidepressants, which had been in her system at her time of death.

And tongues were already wagging about the way my mother’s neat and tidy life had suddenly turned messy.

She was a cautionary tale—a woman who’d taken pride in being better than everyone else.

The town had swallowed the whole story.

James and I did not, and we were able to retrieve the evidence my mother had collected and hidden away.

Before we’d gone on the run, we’d copied everything into a password-protected file on the cloud and locked the original documents in a safe in his office. I spent the first day on the run, digging through the files with a fine-tooth comb, looking for evidence to bring the Knoxes down.

Evidence that strongly suggested the Knoxes had a large-scale money laundering scheme. Was it enough to bring them down? Maybe not, but it would be enough for a law enforcement agency to get a search warrant to start connecting dots.

Once we realized what we were sitting on, we had one brief discussion about turning it over to the FBI, but we’d both quickly dismissed it.

At least for now. Getting arrested would be too comfortable for them, not to mention, they were slippery enough to get bail and live their lives until they finally made it to trial years from now.

They needed to pay sooner.

But there was something else that made us hesitate. My mother had paperwork that tied the Knoxes to the purchases of properties James suspected to house criminal activity. One in particular stood out—a warehouse Knox had sold recently. A warehouse James thought played a role in human trafficking.

And apparently, James had been looking for information about a trafficking network in Little Rock. He wanted to pursue this lead, so we hadn’t mentioned bringing in the law since.

Still, I wondered if I’d made a selfish decision.

“I should have killed Nicole,” I said flatly.

“No,” he said. “She was unarmed.”

“And look what we’re dealing with now.”

When Nicole Knox realized we had evidence implicating her son, she’d had his men run us off the road. She’d wanted James alive—long enough to question him before she killed him. We’d figured she probably just wanted me dead.

The crash had left him with a concussion and unable to run, let alone shoot a gun.

When they advanced on us that night, I did what I had to do.

I’d killed nearly a dozen men, but they’d still kidnapped James and taken him to a warehouse.

I’d tracked them down and found him tied to a chair, Nicole seconds away from pulling the trigger.

I took out the guards, who were doing a piss-poor job of protecting her, and then shot Nicole in the arm to keep her from killing James. I’d been ready to kill her after she admitted what she’d done to my mother, but James had talked me out of it. He’d insisted I’d regret killing an unarmed woman.

Only now, I regretted letting her go.

Sure, Gerald would still be after us if I’d killed his mother, but at least I would’ve had justice. It would have made it a little easier to bear with our current situation—

James was recovering from a concussion, and we were hopping around the state, trying to stay hidden until I was sure James could hit the broadside of a barn with a handgun.

James’s gaze softened, an expression I was still getting used to. “You did the right thing.”

“You would have shot her,” I said matter-of-factly.

His eyes clouded. “That’s me. We’re talking about you.”

I let out a harsh laugh. “I’m not Detective Harper Adams anymore. I don’t follow the rules she was so obsessed with.”

He slowly shook his head. “You’re still more her than you want to admit.” He grimaced.

“You shouldn’t be moving your head. You’re impeding your recovery.”

James snorted. “It’s nothing. I’ve had a helluva lot worse.”

Yet, he wasn’t arguing with me that he wasn’t a hundred percent. And he sure as hell wasn’t ready to go on the offensive.

Concussions were tricky things. James had admitted this wasn’t his first—or even his fifth—which probably explained its massive impact.

Each concussion made the next one harder to recover from.

We’d hoped he’d be better by now, but his progress had been slow.

His double vision had disappeared a couple of days ago, but he was easily tired and had persistent headaches.

It felt like we didn’t have any time to lose. The Knoxes were hot on our tails, and it would boil down to us or them.

It made total sense to try to find them, only James said Gerald Knox was notoriously secretive about where he lived—or even did business. Which had proved to be true after I’d taken advantage of my private detective license access and spent the last week trying to find anything about his location.

There was nothing.

He had a bank account, no loans, and supposedly no property.

But I also knew that property could be hidden by corporations, which I suspected to be the case here.

Especially since there was evidence of Gerald Knox selling a Little Rock warehouse under a corporation and that same corporation had recently been dissolved.

James was certain Gerald Knox was the man in charge of the trafficking ring, but I couldn’t find anything to tie him to it.

James was also certain that whoever was in charge of the trafficking ring had been doing it for a while.

At least three years, based on the fact that James had insinuated he’d worked out a deal with the Feds where he’d have his charges dropped from a previous case if he helped them bring the ring down.

Which meant the ring had been in operation a while. And he’d been running it while I was a homicide detective. The thought lit something cold and furious in my chest.

If Gerald Knox was selling people, then I needed to catch him. I needed to stop him.

And even if he wasn’t, I needed him and his mother to pay for what they’d done to my mother.

Sighing, I got up and headed for a closed door off the living room.

“What’re you doin’?” James demanded, suspicion lacing his voice.

Turned out he could read me pretty well now too.

“I’m finding the bedroom so I can wash the sheets. If there’s a washer and dryer, that is.”

I pushed the door open and found a full-size bed with a beat-up wooden headboard and a stained, bare mattress—one stain dark enough that it looked like blood. And large enough to suggest the wound may have been fatal.

“Where did Carter find this place again?” I called out to the living room.

“It’s one of mine.”

“You own this dump?” I laughed. If there was a set of sheets in this place, I had no idea where to find them. And if I did, I’d probably have to burn them.

“It’s a safe house. It’s not meant to be comfortable.”

“At this point, I’d settle for halfway clean.”

When I walked back into the living room, he was leaning his head back on the sofa, his eyes drifting closed.

Guilt washed through me. He hadn’t said it outright, but I knew he felt responsible for us being on the run, not only because of his concussion, but because he was James Malcolm, and Gerald Knox already had it out for him.

I felt guilty that investigating my mother’s murder had gotten us into this, but I felt even more guilty that I was grateful he was in this mess with me.