Chapter 31
A long hotshower did wonders for his bruised body. But still, Nick had trouble getting to sleep. He was unable to keep his brain from trying to put the puzzle pieces together. Some of them seemed to fit.
Chadwick Tudor and April Whitfield had traveled to Alaska together. When he’d been killed, she’d dealt with her grief by building a haven for herself at Fire Peak. She’d left behind the hardware store. So why were the Chechens interested in it?
Why did they care enough to steal that photo from him? Were they the ones who had installed that camera that had been spying on the hardware store? What exactly did they hope to learn from it? Were they interested in it because of Chadwick or because of April? Or both?
So much to tell Charlie.
Charlie…
Thinking of her, with a smile on his face, he finally drifted off.
The sound of her voice woke him up. She was at the door, talking to Hailey. Jesus, what time was it? The blackout curtains in the little bedroom made it impossible to tell.
He saw from his phone that it was after ten in the morning. Scrambling out of bed, he decided Charlie could deal with him in boxers and a t-shirt, and hurried into the front room.
Charlie was showing off her wound to Hailey, pulling up the bottom edge of her Burberry hip-hugger shorts. The sight of her long bare legs gave him a jolt of lust.
That disappeared when she caught sight of him and the smile dropped from her face.
Uh oh. Something was wrong.
“Good morning.” His voice was husky from oversleeping.
“Rough night?” Charlie asked coolly.
“You could say that.” He glanced at Hailey, since he didn’t want to tell her the story of being attacked last night. “But successful too.”
She got the message, and gestured with her head toward the road outside. “How about a little stroll down to Lila’s? Ani wants to check my wound again.”
“Sure. Just give me a minute.” He wanted to get inside that hardware store anyway, and warn Lila about the Chechens’ interest in it.
He went back into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.
Something was definitely wrong. Charlie hadn’t met his eyes once during that whole exchange.
Outside, they walked down the dusty road in the direction of the hardware store.
“Before we get there, let me fill you in on what happened last night.” He gave her a quick rundown of his encounter with the Chechen.
Finally, her chilly manner thawed. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
“Sore, but okay. Lost another jacket.”
She didn’t seem to find that funny as she scanned him with troubled eyes. “Why did they take your jacket?”
“I’d found a photo of Bulldog. I should have taken a picture of it, damnit. It never occurred to me that someone would want to steal it. But it had his real name on the back. Chadwick Tudor the Third.”
“Chadwick? Yikes. No wonder he preferred Bulldog.”
“Right?” He laughed a little, but she didn’t join in. He filled her in on the rest of what he’d learned from Pinky, including the the fact that they’d lived in the hardware store.
She picked up the pace. “It’s a good thing we’re already heading there. Those freaky Chechens, do you think they were spying on the store?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know why. Anything big come up on your end? Did you see April?”
“No, she wasn’t around yesterday. I never saw her. But I did find out something interesting. She owns the entire mountain outright. They call it an inholding. That means it’s within the national park, but privately owned. That includes surface and subsurface rights, with no limits on what she can do with it.”
“So if there was a mineral deposit of any value in it, she’d have the rights to it.”
“Exactly.”
“Great job.” He tried another smile, but it didn’t work. In fact, she stopped along the side of the road, not far from where he’d gotten jumped last night.
“I have to ask you something. I need you to be completely honest with me,” she said, more seriously than he’d ever seen her. Her sunglasses were perched on top of her head, her blond hair in a sleek ponytail, her usually sassy features stern.
He nodded, dread already forming in his stomach. “Okay.”
“My father said you gave them some kind of advice about me, and they said it was working. What were they talking about?”
Worst suspicions confirmed. His mouth went dry. But he had to tell her the truth. He respected her too much not to. “When I left Firelight Ridge, I told Mark Jones that your father was the most important thing to you.”
Her eyes darkened. “So that’s why they decided to show up at the hospital?”
“Maybe. Probably,” he admitted. “But I was out of it by then. That wasn’t my call.”
“You gave them the idea.”
“It’s quite likely that what I said gave them the idea. That’s one of the reasons I wanted time to fix it. Which I did.”
She scanned his face, probably searching for any sign that he was lying. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
But it wasn’t entirely it, and that must have shown on his face. “How did you get them to back off, then? Your twenty-four-hour trick, what was it? I know you told them you wouldn’t tell me. But I need to know, Nick.”
Goddamn, she wasn’t going to let that slide.
Then again, why had he thought she would? This was her life. Her father.
Sorry, Mark Jones.
“After I left Firelight Ridge last time, I did some digging. Their file had left out the part about your dad working for Hobbs, and that didn’t sit right. I’ve done a lot of work for Hobbs over the years, and I know their executives. I know all the skeletons in their closets. The man who testified against your father, Stefan Volcker, he’s the CEO of another division now. I looked at his testimony and found some obvious lies that only someone like me would know about. I told Mark Jones that I’d do something with that information if he didn’t lay off you and your father. ”
Her face went more and more pale as he spoke. When he was done, it filled with bright color instead.
“You can clear my father? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Very likely, though no guarantees. Stefan was the principal witness against your father. If his testimony was thrown out, who knows.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“That was part of the deal. They want to keep all that buried. They have evidence against you from when you hacked into their system. I made the call that keeping you and your dad free and safe was more important.”
Her mouth fell open, then snapped shut again. “That should have been my call.”
“You’re right.” He threw up his hands to show he wasn’t arguing. “But I had to act in the moment. Your father already served his time. He’s out. But you could get charged if they reported you. So that’s the call I made.”
Charlie swung away from him and strode toward the hardware store. He hurried after her. “I’m sorry. I was trying to do my best for everyone.”
“I can’t talk anymore right now.” Then she stopped and wheeled on him. “My whole life, I wanted to clear my father’s name. You have the evidence and didn’t tell me?”
“Charlie…” he tried, but she spun on her heel and kept on going down the road.
“Not now,” she said tightly. “I have to think about this. I’m furious, but also, I don’t know, grateful…shit. We have work to do, so let’s go.”
Damn, damn, damn. He walked beside her, both of them silent the rest of the way. He should have known this would bite him in the ass. But he was used to taking care of business and moving on. Secrets, confidentiality, that was his domain.
Had he ruined things with Charlie for good?