Chapter 1 #2
"I try." He looked back out at the mountains, unbothered by her silence, which was somehow more unsettling than if he'd pushed. "For what it's worth, Detective, you're welcome to search every one of us front to back. We've got nothing you haven't already read in that file."
"Everyone says that right before I find something they didn't want me to read."
"I imagine they do." He glanced sideways at her, something almost amused in it. "I'm not everyone."
"Everyone says that too."
That, finally, got a real laugh out of him — short, surprised, like she'd landed a hit he hadn't seen coming. Simone filed the reaction away without quite meaning to. It was useful information. She told herself that was the only reason she noticed it.
"You always sit out here alone in the dark?" she asked, before she could stop herself.
"Most nights. Helps me think."
"Think about what?"
"Tonight? Mostly you, as it happens. Wondering what kind of detective the county sent us."
"And your conclusion?"
"Don't have one yet. I don't like guessing when I can just wait and find out." He said it like a simple statement of fact, no flirtation in it that she could point to, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd tried. "You strike me as someone who prefers evidence to guesswork too."
"I prefer evidence to almost everything."
"Then we've got that much in common already." He glanced toward her car, parked at an angle on the shoulder like she hadn't planned on staying. "You want a bottle of water or something before you go? Long day, probably."
"I don't accept refreshments from persons of interest."
"Noted. I'll drink both, then." He held up an invisible second bottle and toasted her with it, entirely straight-faced, and something in Simone's chest did an unhelpful, unfamiliar thing that she decided, firmly, not to examine.
She did not pull up a tree.
"I'll be seeing you around, Mr. Rourke," she said, and walked back to her car with her spine very straight, the particular posture she reserved for moments when she wanted a room — or a grove — to believe she was completely unbothered.
She was thoroughly, inconveniently bothered.
She drove home replaying the whole encounter on a loop — the calm, the ease, the fact that he hadn't tried to charm her or intimidate her or explain himself, just told her a plain fact and let her decide what to do with it.
Criminals didn't typically lead with the truth in her experience.
Criminals lied first, and lied well, and dressed the lie up in exactly the kind of charm that made you want to believe it.
Which meant either Elliot Rourke was the single best liar she'd ever encountered in twelve years of police work, or he genuinely hadn't been lying at all.
Simone let herself back into the rental house, locked the door, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling fan ticking overhead in the dark. She thought about chestnut hair and a man who called a random grove his thinking spot and a voice that hadn't once tried too hard.
"It's a case," she told the ceiling. "He's a subject in a case. That's all this is."
The ceiling fan continued to tick, entirely unconvinced. So, if she was honest with herself — and she prided herself on being honest, even when it cost her — was she.
She closed her eyes and made herself think about financial records instead. It worked, eventually, mostly, in the sense that she did eventually fall asleep.
But somewhere underneath the financial records, in the part of her brain that didn't take orders well, there was a grove going dark under a spring sky, and a man who hadn't flinched when a cop said his club's name like an accusation.
She had a feeling — the good kind, professionally speaking, the kind she'd learned a long time ago never to ignore — that Clover Ridge was not going to be the quiet punishment posting she'd assumed.
She had absolutely no idea, that first restless night, how right she was, or in how many different ways.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand around midnight. Her sister, Dana, three states away and apparently still awake.
How's exile? the text read.
Simone typed back: Met a biker in a grove. He invited me to sit on a wall.
The response came fast. THAT'S not exile, that's a romance novel. Did you sit on the wall.
No.
Simone.
He's a subject in an active investigation.
You've been there SIX HOURS.
Simone set the phone face down on the nightstand, which felt, in the moment, like the professionally correct response to an unprofessional line of questioning.
She was not going to dignify it with further commentary.
She was a detective with twelve years of experience and a spotless, if inconveniently honest, record.
She did not get flustered by men who called groves their thinking spots.
The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.
It buzzed a third time. She flipped it back over out of pure weakness.
Also, Dana had written, what does he look like. This is important for the investigation.
Simone did not respond to that one at all, which she considered, privately, a significant act of professional discipline.
She lay back down and stared at the ceiling fan some more, cataloguing, against her own better judgment, exactly what Elliot Rourke looked like.
Chestnut hair. Calm brown eyes that had looked at her like she was a puzzle he found genuinely interesting rather than a threat to be managed.
A voice that didn't rise even when she was clearly trying to unsettle him.
Forearms that suggested he did actual physical labor rather than just looking like he did, which was a detail she absolutely did not need to have noticed and had, apparently, noticed anyway.
None of that was relevant to the case.
She told herself that a fourth time, for good measure, and then a fifth, and by the sixth time she'd stopped believing herself entirely, which felt like exactly the kind of professional failure she'd have written up any other officer for.
Tomorrow, she decided, she would be a detective again. Tonight, apparently, she was allowed exactly one lapse in judgment, alone in the dark, about a man in a grove who called it his thinking spot and hadn't once tried to talk her out of leaving.
She fell asleep somewhere around one in the morning, still annoyed with herself, and did not remember, until much later, that she never had answered his question about what she thought of him. She supposed that was fair. She hadn't decided yet either.
Her last coherent thought, before sleep finally took her, was a small, treacherous one: that she was almost looking forward to tomorrow, and that tomorrow had absolutely nothing to do with the case file sitting closed on her nightstand.
She would deny that thought completely by morning. But it was there, in the dark, honest the way only very tired thoughts ever were, and some part of her — the part that had spent a year building walls out of spite and evidence — knew it was going to be a very long, very interesting spring.
She reminded herself of that fact three more times before she finally, mercifully, fell asleep, and dreamed — infuriatingly — of a grove going gold at dusk, and a man who hadn't once looked away first.