Chapter 8
“Burnout is just emotional combustion. You're still hot, just unstable.”
—It’s science
Hector
I walked into my living room after heating up my leftovers and sat on my couch.
Sarge, my chocolate lab, followed me, hopping up onto the couch next to me, his face mere inches from my food.
“Don’t even think about it, buddy,” I told him.
He listened and backed off, but his surrender was also accompanied by mildly pathetic whining.
It was later than I usually got home, but I had stayed at work tonight trying to read over some extra files Agent Andrews had sent me. It wasn’t that the files were complicated. It was that the woman mentioned in the files was.
Every time I read Iris’s name in the report, my brain deviated to thinking about her instead of the case.
Her spooked face after retelling the story of tripping over the skull.
Her gorgeous body and what it might look like naked and underneath me.
Yeah, it was the latter one that was the issue and what had gotten me in trouble at work.
Every time my mind wandered, I got further and further behind on my work.
This is not about Iris. It’s about the body. Not her body, but the dead body. Just as I repeated that thought again, my phone rang. I glanced down to see Iris’s name on my screen.
We’d exchanged numbers the day of the incident in case I needed to ask her about the case. I hadn’t expected her to use it, though she had texted me twice now, but this was a phone call—something she had never done before. My Spidey-senses were peaked. Something felt off.
I grabbed the phone and swiped to answer the call after the second ring.
“Madeira,” I answered, trying to remain cool and calm.
“Hector?” Iris’s quiet voice came through the line, but her tone was laced with a bit of fear.
“Iris?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure why, since I knew it was her.
“Umm…I don’t know if it’s related or not, but someone broke into my apartment,” she said, her voice still quiet, but I could hear her breath hitch at the end of her sentence.
“Where are you?” I asked as I jumped up from my seat and headed toward the door, grabbing my keys on the way.
“I’m across the hall in my neighbor’s apartment.
The cops came and checked everything out, but one of the officers said it didn’t look like a regular robbery—or something like that.
” She mumbled the last part as if frustrated.
“They started to ask if I had any enemies or something. I’m sorry to bug you, but I wasn’t sure if it was related—”
I cut her off before she could continue. “I’m glad you called. Given the letter you got, it’s always better to take precautions. Stay at your neighbor’s. Share your location with me—I’ll be right there.”
I threw that last sentence out as a desperate attempt to hide the fact that I had memorized her address from the paperwork I had been staring at all day, but I didn’t need her to know that.
I hustled to my car, trying to settle the mild rage coursing through my body at the thought of someone breaking into Iris’s apartment. Knowing she was upset irritated me, even though I had no claim to her.
Agent Andrews had called me earlier, letting me know they had dug into the self-proclaimed “crime expert” podcaster a little more. Some podcasters were great, and what they did could work in tandem with police investigators, but others were just weirdos and were more of a hassle than anything.
It sounded like our letter guy fell into the latter category.
When I arrived thirty minutes later, I went straight to her apartment instead of to her neighbor’s. I wanted to talk to the cops and see what they knew and also give them what I knew from our case to see if it was connected.
I knocked on the half-open door, seeing a male cop I didn’t know, who instantly went alert at my presence.
“Sir, you can’t come in here,” he said to me, walking toward the door, ready to block my entry.
I knew procedure, so I stayed in the doorway as I reached for my badge. “Name’s Hector Madeira. I’m the chief ranger over at Lake Echo National Park.”
“Madeira?” a familiar female voice said. “Holy crap. Long time no see.”
“Hey, Swift,” I greeted her with a head nod.
“You know him?” the other officer asked.
“Yeah, we were rookies together. He used to work at LVPD before he bailed and got the cushy job for softies,” she said, smirking at me. “Clarkson, this is Hector Madeira. Hector, this is my partner, Taylor Clarkson.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but Iris called me because this break-in may be related to a case we’re investigating,” I told them and then filled them in on the details I had.
They nodded and asked some questions as I explained, and then they gave me what they knew about her break-in.
“So far, we just have her word that things are out of place and moved,” Swift said. “We have a crime scene analyst on the way to grab some fingerprints just in case. Otherwise, the only other thing we have is the cotton ball.”
“Cotton ball?” I asked.
“There was a cotton ball on the floor of her laundry room, which she swears she never uses because they aren’t environmentally friendly or some shit,” Clarkson said.
“Thing is, it was still wet. Even if it had accidentally gotten stuck on her clothes or something, it would have been washed with her clothes and dried during the hours she was at work. The fact that it was still wet means it was newly wet. Possibly by the person who broke in.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Exactly,” Swift said back to me.
“Alright. I’m gonna go next door and check in with her. Keep me posted on anything you find so I can let Agent Andrews know,” I told them.
“I’ll be over in a few,” Swift said. “I need to find out if she’s planning to stay here tonight or if she’s going to a friend’s or something.”
I hadn’t talked to her yet, but I wasn’t letting her stay at her own apartment tonight. Not until we got some more information.
Walking across the hall to where Swift told me the neighbor lived, I knocked on the door.
“Iris,” a female voice called from the other side of the door. “Come look at the peephole, dear. There is a very handsome but slightly scary man on the other side of the door. Do you know him?”
I heard shuffling feet and muttered voices, and then the door opened.
I wasn’t sure what I expected her neighbor to look like, but it certainly wasn’t an elderly woman, barely five feet tall, wearing bunny slippers. A yappy dog started barking incessantly as the door swung open even wider, and I saw Iris.
“Hey, Hector,” she said to me amid the loud barking.
She looked defeated and wrung out. Her eyes were dry, with no signs of having cried, but they also looked tired.
“Hello, I’m Nancy,” the old woman said to me as she ushered me into her place, holding a tiny dog in her arms. “And this is Cocoa. Her bark is worse than her bite.”
Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to find out if that was the truth or not.
“I’m Hector. Thank you for watching out for Iris,” I told her.
I was glad Iris had this woman to go to for support and comfort. She deserved it, though a part of me found I also wanted to give her some of that support.
“Thanks for coming,” Iris said to me. “I can take you over to meet the cops if you want.”
“I went there first, actually,” I told her, filling her in on the fact that I knew Officer Swift. I chose not to tell her what they said about the cotton ball just yet.
“Here. Come have a seat, young man,” Nancy said, pointing at her couch.
I took her up on that offer and sat down next to Iris, facing her and Nancy, who was sitting in the chair with her dog in her lap.
“I highly recommend you stay somewhere else tonight other than your own place,” I told Iris, and I was about to suggest a friend or family member when Nancy chimed in.
“She can stay with me. I have a pull-out sofa, and Cocoa and I will take good care of her.”
While I had no doubt this woman meant what she said, I wasn’t sure she was any safer here than at her own place. Not to mention, her dog wasn’t exactly ideal protection material. I just needed a delicate way to tell her that.
“That’s very kind of you, but it might make her relax a little more to be away from this apartment complex for a night,” I informed her.
She looked at me and nodded as though she understood where I was coming from.
I hated where my next thought went, but it needed to be asked.
“You got a man, Iris?” Because if she did, and he was a good man, he would want to know about the break-in. “One you can go stay with?”
“Not anymore,” she said, grumbling.
I was happy about that for reasons I chose not to think too deeply about. I was not, however, thrilled with how she muttered it.
“Why?” I asked before I thought better of it.
“Because men suck,” she murmured, looking down at her cup of tea.
I knew I shouldn’t ask. Shouldn’t get involved. But I wanted to know what happened. If someone had hurt her, even if they’d just disappointed her, I needed to know.
Before I could say anything else, Nancy took that moment to fill me in on some of the losers Iris had dated—including one who wanted her to lose weight.
That one pissed me off the most because Iris had an incredible body and didn’t need to change a damn thing.
Any guy would be lucky to have her at his side—or underneath him.
Shit. I needed to bring my thoughts back to the here and now.
“You can stay with me,” I blurted out, suddenly unsure if it sounded too forward.
“I don’t want to inconvenience you,” Iris replied.
“I’ve got a spare bedroom you can crash in until you figure something else out,” I offered, hoping she didn’t fight me on it and just accepted.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Nancy chimed in, clapping her hands.
“Okay, thank you,” Iris said, twisting her hands as though nervous. “It’ll just be for one night. I just hate texting some of my friends so late, but I can make arrangements for the weekend.”