Chapter Fourteen
Lunch was served by Theo, moving around the small kitchen with ease while bickering with the young woman named Winnie even more.
They were talking about the best practices to train for a half-marathon one moment, and the next they were fussing about the proper way to make a sandwich worthy of a specialty shop.
Mitchell threw in his two cents worth from his spot at the kitchen counter about what he thought were the best trimmings for said perfect sandwich, and this, somehow, transitioned into a conversation about the local coffee shop.
What constituted the perfect drink came next.
Eve let her attention wander to the man sitting opposite her while their debate started.
Darius seemed uncomfortable.
And it wasn’t with the current company chattering in his kitchen.
Something in him was hurting or, at least, bothering him. Eve had already seen him adjust his shoulder twice, and his drawn brow hadn’t relaxed since he’d arrived home.
She couldn’t blame him.
Not only had he been shot and gone through surgery and recovery in the hospital, he had also spent those days studying the chaotic notes Eve and Mitchell had taken on a story that, if broken, would at the very least turn the town upside-down.
Then he had come home and gone right to work.
There was no rest for the wicked; there was no rest for detectives who knew Eve Myers.
A problem that Eve understood was tricky.
What if she hadn’t come back to Seven Roads, at least until they’d had concrete evidence of Scott’s wrongdoings?
Darius wouldn’t be sitting across from her, wounded and working in secret. Setting his rules, his procedures, aside for a case that wasn’t even technically a case.
Because keeping everything on the down-low was the other stipulation that everyone in the kitchen had agreed upon.
Their deep dive into Scott Keys, the fake relationship between Eve and Mitchell and the connection to Gary Whittaker and his murder were all pieces of information that they alone knew about.
It was another point of pressure that Eve had inadvertently applied to her former boy next door.
She hadn’t even asked him to keep such a complicated secret once he had taken her bullet. Yet the straight-as-an-arrow lawman had done so.
It made Eve’s stomach twist a little. The memory of his one condition being that she couldn’t leave his side—well, that made her stomach feel a different kind of way.
That feeling, and a sudden warmth crawling up her neck, made Darius’s gaze suddenly pulling up to meet hers only intensify.
Eve tried to play it off.
She tapped the table’s top beneath her finger.
“Out of all the furniture you got rid of from when we were kids, I’m glad this one didn’t make the cut,” she tried. “I’ve always liked this table.”
Darius snorted.
“You only like this table because of how much my mother loved it.”
Eve couldn’t deny that. She shrugged. The sandwiches might not have been finished, but Winnie had clearly decided it was time to enter a more interesting conversation. She was smiling as she sat down to Eve’s right, her back against the wall so she could keep an eye on Theo’s progress, Eve assumed.
“Theo said you two were neighbors,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were close to Darius’s parents too.”
At this Darius’s snort turned into a little chuckle.
Winnie’s smile faded a bit. It probably didn’t help that Eve must have looked offended.
“Close in distance but never in spirit,” she clarified. “My time spent in this house was out of sight and mind of those two.”
Winnie’s eyebrow rose as Theo started to hand out plates of food. Mitchell joined him. He looked as perplexed as they did.
“But you like this table because his mother loved it?” Theo repeated. “Doesn’t that imply that you feel a fondness for her since she felt a fondness for it?”
Darius let out a bite of laughter again but decided to help out.
He tapped the table’s top.
“Put on your phone’s flashlight and look underneath.”
Winnie, Theo and Mitchell did just that.
Mitchell was the one to read the words that had been scratched into the wood in little-kid handwriting.
“Eve Myers owns this table. Jon D. can bite tires.”
Three faces emerged with varying expressions of delight and confusion.
Eve thought it was telling of their personalities who asked the following questions.
“You wrote this?” Mitchell asked. “How old were you?”
Eve didn’t have to think long.
“I was a persistent eight-year-old, who thankfully got a little better with my handwriting.”
Winnie was next.
“You claimed the table as yours because you didn’t like his mother,” she said. “Did she ever see this?”
Darius answered that with a resounding no.
“For almost two years she sat at this table never knowing that little Eve the terror had defamed one of her favorite pieces of furniture.”
Theo only seemed concerned about the last part.
“Who’s Jon D. and why can he bite tires?” he asked.
At this Darius’s mouth shut and thinned into a line.
In all honesty, Eve had forgotten she had added in a mention of Jon D.
Even before what he’d done when they were ten, she had already greatly disliked the boy.
She sobered a little for her answer, trying to be as discreet as possible.
She might not have been around for the last twenty years or so, but she had a feeling that Darius hadn’t been chatty about the origin of the scar on his back.
The scar on her own hand felt oddly heavy as she answered.
“He was a boy who lived down the street and who only came during the summer breaks to stay with his grandparents,” she explained.
“He decided to make it his personal mission every summer to make our lives miserable. Around the time I scratched that in, he was at a level seven out of ten on the annoyance scale. If you’d given me a few years I’d have written in a lot worse. ”
Darius didn’t add anything to that.
The rest of the table seemed to take the hint. They fell into a communal silence as each ate their food. It wasn’t until a few contented sighs and the sight of empty plates later that the silence was broken.
Eve was the one to do it.
“So how do we prove that Scott has been destroying small towns before he saves them? What did you find that we didn’t?”
Everyone’s gaze waved over to the man at the head of the table.
Darius didn’t flinch at the dramatic, yet valid, questions.
Instead, he seemed more than ready for them.
“You and Mitchell built your investigation on timing, right? Scott meeting with key individuals in one town before and after something inherently goes wrong, only to be able to fix that exact thing that went wrong.” Eve nodded, not that he needed the confirmation.
Her notes had looked like a madwoman’s rantings and ravings as she had tracked Scott over the past ten years as best she could through financial transactions, planners, press releases and gossip.
“There was a lot of overlap of him being at the scene of the crime before the crime happened and then directly after,” she confirmed.
“Like what’s been happening with Clare Biometrics,” Winnie added.
Eve had been the one to personally tell Winnie and Theo everything she knew, while Darius had been in the hospital. However, she was starting to realize that Winnie had a knack for making sure everyone was on the same page. It seemed to be a trait that Theo appreciated too.
Eve nodded.
“The last pharmaceutical company that had used the research annex, Camden Pharmaceuticals, was ruined by corruption, and after the investigations and the company being shut down and having to leave, the whole thing was a big hit against Seven Roads and the county’s future growth.
Until Horace took an interest in it and decided to go on contract with Clare Biometrics for the next ten years,” Eve said.
“Horace Clare coming to town created excitement and created a positive outlook for Seven Roads, which is what Scott claims had him become interested in the town.”
“Which seems harmless until you realize that Scott had met with one of the higher-ups of Camden Pharmaceuticals twice before they moved to Seven Roads,” Mitchell added.
“Which, again, might not seem like anything if you look at it as an isolated event, but of the three small towns that Scott has been praised for supposedly saving, there have been similar situations like this,” Eve added.
It was Darius’s turn to nod. He domed his fingers on top of the table.
“The breakthrough you and Mitchell say you made right before Scott insisted on the two of you getting married was finding the flight plans for Scott’s best friend, Toby Sanderson,” he underlined.
Mitchell and Eve confirmed that.
“We realized from the big uproars that happened in the second small town he was praised with saving that Scott hadn’t met with anyone but his best friend and fellow rich socialite Toby Sanderson had,” she said.
“And he’d gone there on his private jet.
We had finally gotten our hands on a copy of those flight records when Scott told Mitchell to propose. ”
“Then Mitchell reached out to Gary Whittaker about the legal side of being married, since he was the family lawyer,” Darius said.
He looked to Winnie and Theo. While he had agreed, begrudgingly, to let them in on what was happening, he hadn’t been able to talk to them at the hospital for any real length of time.
Theo let him know that this information was something that they already knew.
“Which seemed to freak Mr. Whittaker out,” Theo finished.
“A feeling he still had when Mitchell went to meet with Gary the day of the wedding,” Winnie said. “Right before he was killed somewhere within an hour-and-a-half radius of the diner here in town where he and Mitchell met.”
Despite their harrowing time spent at the steel mill, the site of Gary’s murder was still a mystery, as was his killer.
Darius moved his hand to tap the top of the table, bringing their attention back to him.