Chapter Five
Lexa rarely slept well during the middle of an investigation, and this particular one had been no exception. Especially since this case involved her working alongside Aiden.
She’d dreamed. The nightmare again. A tangled mix of real images and others that hadn’t actually happened. Like Aiden and her dying at the hands of the young woman they’d failed to save, followed by all three of them being consumed by fire. It had taken a long shower and several cups of coffee to push those images aside and deal with the current ones.
Of that blood on the wedding dress.
And the text Chloe had sent her brother.
I’m so scared . I think I’ve made a bad mistake. I think he might try to kill me.
Yes, all of that was going to take some dealing with, and there’d be multiple steps in trying to get to the truth. Step one was to pay another visit to the crime scene and look at it in the morning light with the hopes of seeing something, anything, that she’d missed the night before.
After that, she’d show up way early for her shift and go through any updates or reports. She already knew that Owen had sent Brady home, rescheduling the rest of his interview for ten o’clock this morning. That’d been a solid move on Owen’s part to give them time to build a case against Brady.
If there was a case to build, that is.
Chloe hadn’t specifically mentioned Brady’s name in the text to Hudson, and the woman could have been talking about someone else. That’s where some hard digging and police work came into play. They’d need to identify every possible candidate for that “he” who’d frightened Chloe.
Lexa figured by now Owen had gotten a start on that list. Also, that her boss would have a much clearer picture of things. A better picture anyway than he had when Aiden and she had finally called it a day. That’d been shortly after two AM, and they’d left to their respective homes. Hers, here in town, and his somewhere on the outskirts of Outlaw Ridge.
After some of that broken sleep, she’d woken up to a text from Owen with a series of updates. Hudson had made bail and would be coming back in as well for an interview. Wylie would be, too. And the search for Chloe was still ongoing but with no results.
It was as if the woman had simply vanished.
But had she been murdered or was she injured somewhere? No way to know that unless they got a break in the investigation.
Lexa filled her thermos with coffee and drove the short distance to the manor. Of course, everything was a short distance in a small town, and it would only take her a couple of minutes to get there. She hoped no one else would be around so she could have some thinking time.
But solo clearly wasn’t in the cards.
When she pulled into the parking lot, she spotted the CSI van, the fire chief’s truck. And Aiden. He was standing there looking like a modern-day warrior eyeing a battlefield.
A modern-day hot warrior.
She sighed, not bothering to curse her body’s reaction to him. But his class A looks did solve one problem for her. The remnants of the nightmare vanished in a blink.
Leave it to Aiden to perform a little miracle like that just by existing.
He turned toward her, and even the morning sun adored him since it seemed to frame his amazing body. Six-three. All lean muscle. All primed and ready for whatever might get tossed at him.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a quick, near smile. “Like minds,” he muttered. “I wanted to get a look at the place.”
“Like minds,” she agreed, stepping to his side to study it.
Despite its label of a manor , it was more like a scaled-down version of Tara in Gone with the Wind . One story with large columns on the porch that stretched across the entire front. Most of the wood was no longer white but rather streaked with the damage from the fire and smoke. Still, the building was standing, more or less, thanks to the quick response from the fire department.
Lexa glanced at the window where Aiden and she had escaped and got hit with the memory of that frantic rush to get the hell out of there. Not an easy thing to shrug off, but she managed it.
“Have they found anything else?” Lexa asked, tipping her head to the pair of CSIs who were by the trees. Dustin Caldwell and Emily Brooks, both friends from high school, and Lexa knew they were good at their jobs.
“No. They’re examining those possible drag marks,” Aiden explained. “The fire chief and an arson investigator are inside checking things out there. Once they give the okay, the CSIs will go in and see what they can find. It could be hours before we know anything.”
So, Aiden had gotten some good info, and it made her wonder how long he’d been there. Apparently, her early start to the day hadn’t been especially early after all.
“Did you see the report from the lab about the blood?” he asked.
She nodded. It wasn’t good news. “Chloe’s DNA isn’t in the system.”
And that meant the techs would have to extract several samples of DNA from items that had belonged to Chloe, along with getting a sample from her brother. All of that took time, and it was time when they wouldn’t know for certain if the blood in the manor even belonged to Chloe.
“After talking with Owen, I also started a deep dive on both Chloe and Hudson,” Aiden continued a moment later. “It’s what Owen calls the whole shebang. Social media, any and all mentions on the internet, and public records. Strike Force has a decent database for that so I plugged in the info, and when I have some hits, we can go through them if you like.”
“Definitely,” she couldn’t say fast enough. And she hesitated before voicing one of the things that had been on her mind. “Since you’ve had some thinking time, do you think Brady could have killed Chloe and done all of this?” She motioned to the fire damage on the manor.
Aiden hardly moved a muscle, but he still managed to convey a whole lot of emotions. The quick flash of dread that went through his eyes, darkening them even more than they already were. The slight tensing of his mouth. The barely-there exhale of breath.
“I don’t want to believe it,” he finally admitted. “And, yeah, going textbook, that could make me a liability in this investigation. But I swear I won’t let my friendship with Brady dick around with what needs to be done.”
She believed him and felt the same way. “I’m friends with Brady, too. Heck, every deputy on the force is, but if he killed Chloe, that won’t stop any one of us from arresting him.”
Lexa just hoped he hadn’t ended his fiancée’s life or been responsible for that blood they found in the manor. Still, there weren’t a lot of other suspects. Not yet anyway. And that’s where Aiden’s whole shebang deep dive might help.
“I’m breaking a confidence by telling you this,” Aiden added a moment later, “but Brady’s dealing with PTSD from some things that happened when he was on active duty.”
Considering Aiden and Brady had been on several deployments to classified locations, that was understandable. “How does his PTSD manifest itself?” Lexa asked.
“Nothing I’ve personally witnessed, but he admitted that sometimes the flashbacks get so bad that he has to take prescription meds.”
That didn’t sound good, and it was going to be hard to access any info from his medical records. Maybe though Brady would spill all, and if he was truly innocent, there’d be no reason for him not to do that.
“Do you have PTSD?” she asked.
He glanced away, shook his head. “Not too much.”
The answer puzzled her. “Is that like saying you’re just a little bit pregnant?”
Aiden laughed, and yep, he managed to make that sound hot, too. “It’s nothing that requires meds, just some refocusing, redirecting, keeping busy. And tacos,” he tacked onto that.
“Tacos?” she questioned, wanting to laugh but holding it back.
He nodded, flashed that grin again. “Tacos are usually the answer.”
Before she could respond to that, their phones both sounded with texts, and she soon saw it was from Owen—who’d probably gotten less sleep than she had. The group message was to let them and the other deputies know they now had a warrant to search Brady’s place and the report on Chloe’s texts was in. Also, Brady, Hudson, and Wylie would all soon be in for interviews.
That was Aiden’s and her cue to get moving and to cut the chitchat—if that was indeed what it was. Maybe it was flirting, but if so, it got pushed aside as they started toward their vehicles.
“By the way, maybe we should just go ahead and tackle this stuff between us head on,” he said, definitely grabbing her attention. So much so that she stopped at her car and looked at him.
“The memories that keep getting triggered whenever we are around each other?” she asked. “Or the…heat?”
“Both,” he confirmed.
She would have preferred that it just be the first one. Talking about the heat, well, seemed to fire it up even more.
“Tackle it how?” she wanted to know.
He shrugged in a way that only he and a been there, done that rock star could have managed. “Full throttle emersion. Work side by side until we’re either immune to what happened in the past or decide we can’t keep our hands off each other. Maybe going out for tacos,” he tacked onto that.
She couldn’t help herself. Lexa smiled, and she had to clamp her teeth over her bottom lip to make it go away. “I think we’re about to…” She stopped when she heard some kind of hissing sound.
And the gunshot that followed.
Aiden reacted fast, charging right at her and dragging her to the ground. Their coffees went flying from their hands. Before Lexa could even wrap her mind around what was happening, he pulled her to the side of his truck.
There was another shot, another, then more. There seemed to be a dozen of them all firing at once.
“Everyone get down,” Lexa shouted to the CSIs and the people inside the manor.
She hoped they’d already done just that. Hoped, too, that none of them and no one in the surrounding area had been hit.
There were no houses or businesses directly next to the manor since it was the last building on a dead end street with empty lots all around it. The nearest occupied place was a good block away, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t be venturing down this way to check out the crime scene.
Aiden and she both drew their guns and glanced around, looking for a shooter. Lexa didn’t see anyone, and she couldn’t pinpoint the location of their attacker. The shots were spewing out in all directions.
“Smoke,” Aiden pointed out, tipping his head to a vacant lot across the street from the manor.
The owner kept the grass cut, but like at the back of the manor, there were plenty of trees and shrubs. And, yes, a fire. Or at least smoke anyway. It was rising up, thick and black, near some oaks.
“The bullets are cooking off,” Aiden muttered.
Because the sound of the shots was deafening and her heartbeat was pounding in her ears, it took Lexa a moment to realize what he meant. Cooking off. As in someone had put some bullets in heat or flames, and the ammo had heated to the point of firing.
So, maybe no shooter.
But she couldn’t imagine that this had been an accident. No. Someone had purposely set this. Maybe the same someone who’d tried to burn Aiden and her the night before.
That sent a slam of raw anger through her. Because the sonofabitch wasn’t just endangering them but anyone around them.
The shots continued, and she heard one crash into Aiden’s truck. It came too close to hitting them, but there was nothing they could do. There was no gunman they could stop with their own weapons. No way for them to run to cover because those cooked-off bullets could land anywhere.
“Everybody stay down,” she yelled again in case any lookie-loos had come this way to see what was going on.
No one responded so Aiden and she waited for the gunfire to slow…and then stop.
“Don’t get up yet,” Aiden warned her. “There could be a stray bullet left in the fire.”
He was right, but waiting was hard. She wanted to make sure the CSIs, the fire chief, and arson investigator were all right because she was pretty sure some of the bullets had hit the manor itself.
The seconds seemed to crawl by, but there were no more shots. Finally, her heartbeat settled down some, too. Enough for her to turn and look at Aiden.
And her heart went to her knees.
Because that’s when she saw the blood. That’s when she realized that Aiden had been shot.