Chapter 30
Thirty
LAYLA
Somehow I had not expected Madden to have a Mastiff mix who made Koa look like a medium-sized dog.
Moonpie was an absolute lover, with the slow, easy gait of a dog who believed everyone existed to adore him.
Which Madden clearly did. She was his person, as evidenced by how he’d sprawled across her feet, going belly up for rubs with the absolute certainty they were coming.
Her usually serious features relaxed into something soft as she obliged.
Roy was romping in the backyard with Bree’s dog, Keeley, and I’d regained enough control since yesterday that Koa had deigned to stretch out by the baseboard heater vent. My other de facto guardian hadn’t gone any further.
Jace had spent the past twenty-four hours seldom more than ten feet away from me.
He’d understood I needed to work, to keep moving forward.
I’d come to understand that he needed to protect me.
Even as we’d retreated to our own corners of the cottage living room to work, he’d found subtle reasons to be near me, many of which had involved a constant supply of warm beverages.
He delivered most of them without comment, just silently bringing a fresh cup to replace the empty one.
It was so precise and patient, and so completely without demand that it had taken me until mid-afternoon to understand what he was doing.
He was checking on me the way Koa checked on me. Continual low-level monitoring. Presence without pressure.
The realization had almost made me smile.
Almost. Except I knew what to do with Koa.
I had no idea how to handle what was happening with Jace.
It was one thing to work with him. It was another to take him to my bed.
But letting him take care of me? That was something else entirely.
Something a whole lot terrifying and, I suspected, that had the potential to be rather wonderful, if I were brave enough to let it happen.
All of it was too much for me to sort through while also trying to do my job. So right now I’d keep my focus on the case and my stomach.
It was takeout for our confab tonight at Madden and Rios’s place.
An astonishing array of Indian curries, crisp pakoras, and mouthwatering garlic naan that were unexpected on an island of this size.
The counter was covered in containers, but we hadn’t started yet because Rios hadn’t made it home from work.
“How long have you had this big softie?” I asked.
Madden scratched behind one enormous ear, and Moonpie’s back leg started kicking. “Since the end of the summer. Willa was fostering him.”
“And I was well on my way to being a foster fail, too,” Willa admitted. “But he decided Madden was his person.”
“Without my having any say in the matter,” Madden grinned.
“He sat on her feet for three hours the first time she came over,” Willa said. “She was done after about forty minutes, but she stayed because she didn’t want to disturb him.”
“He’s very heavy,” Madden said. “It seemed rude to move him.”
I looked at the dog spread across her feet like a small bear rug, completely blissful. “Did you have dogs growing up?”
“God, no. My mother considered them a hygiene issue.” She said it without bitterness, just the flat delivery of fact. “I’ve spent most of my adult life in apartments. A dog was never practical.”
“And now?”
“Now I live on an island, and apparently nothing I thought about myself is accurate.” She scratched Moonpie’s ear again. “He’s good for me. He makes me stop.”
I understood that. The way an animal could anchor you to the present in ways nothing else quite managed. “Koa does that for me. I trained him for it, technically, but he figured out the rest on his own.”
Madden glanced at my baby where he stretched out by the baseboard heater, eyes half-closed, monitoring me even in his apparent sleep. “What’s the French for?”
“He responds better to it. Cleaner commands, less ambient noise to confuse them.” That was all true and yet wasn’t the full truth.
She absorbed that without pressing on it, which I appreciated. “Where are you from originally? Before Orcas Island.”
After so many years, the deflection was natural and automatic.
Always ask people about themselves and give as little away as possible.
But I’d already admitted I’d been in this part of the country years ago when I was taken.
“North Carolina. But I’ve been on Orcas since I was a teenager. It’s home. You?”
Madden’s quiet, penetrating look told me she hadn’t missed the evasion. Of course she hadn’t. She was a former prosecutor. But hopefully she believed it was just because my Before was traumatic and I didn’t have any desire to revisit it. Also true.
“Here. Left for college, then law school, then California. I was gone until this past summer.”
“Hard to come back to a place after that long,” I observed.
“Hard to stay away,” she said, which wasn’t quite an answer and was somehow more honest than one would have been. I understood without words that the original pull was Gwen. But what she’d found with Rios since… well, that definitely weighed heavily in the island’s favor.
When the door opened and he stepped inside, she lit up with pleasure, love, and relief that he was safe.
Moonpie accepted her abdication with a heavy canine sigh and shifted pleading eyes to me.
Because he recognized another softie when he saw one.
I scratched his chest as Rios folded Madden in for a hug.
His shoulders dropped from the contact, and some of what had obviously been a heavy day slid off as he folded around her.
My throat ached a little watching them. Seeing what they had together. They had each other’s backs in a way that was envious. Frankly, everyone here did. They all seemed paired off and perfect. Well, maybe not perfect, but real. Solid.
I didn’t have that. Wasn’t sure I could ever have that, carrying the damage I did.
Jace dropped onto the sofa next to me and casually leaned down to rub Moonpie’s belly.
The position meant his arm pressed against mine.
Even as my agitation settled, I was annoyed at how everything in me wanted to lean into him.
This… thing between us wasn’t permanent.
We were enjoying each other while I was here.
That was all. I couldn’t allow myself to consider the possibility of anything else.
Because he didn’t know me.
Not all the way.
And it needed to stay that way for my own safety. And his.
Ford shot up from his spot in an armchair cross the room. “Hot damn, you’re here. That means we can eat. That butter chicken has my name on it.”
“Sorry, I’m late.” Rios scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Nasty domestic dispute. Had to haul the husband in and make sure the wife and kids got to the ferry so she could go to her sister’s up at Nag’s Head.
God willing, she’ll be filing for divorce instead of taking his sorry ass back this time.
Shelton said this is the sixth call this year. ”
Madden rubbed his shoulder. “We’ll eat and settle in before talking about the case.”
“Save your strength,” Sawyer advised. “You might need to wrestle me for that garlic naan.”
“Can’t be harder than a gator,” Daniel mused.
Willa gaped at him. “You have not wrestled an alligator!”
He laid a hand over his heart in exaggerated seriousness. “I am a Cajun, cher,” he said, as if that answered the question.
The group devolved into what was obviously a welcome and familiar form of banter as everyone wandered into the kitchen and began loading plates.
As the takeout containers spread off the counter and onto the table, we carried plates back into the living room to actually eat.
Koa decided the lamb rogan josh was reason enough to camp out at my feet.
When I shot him a Look, he literally stuck his tongue out before settling in more firmly.
He was exceptionally well trained, but he was still a malamute, and when he made a decision, it was hard to sway him.
After the pakoras had disappeared, and we’d divvied up the naan to dip into fragrant sauces, Jace finally turned the conversation to the purpose of tonight. “So our promising lead turned out to be a dead end. Literally. Shane Tatum died six years ago of a drug overdose.”
Daniel’s focus sharpened. “Self-inflicted or something else?”
Rios leaned forward in his chair. “I ran his record earlier. A few minor drug charges as a juvenile, and some bigger ones as an adult. There’s nothing hinky in the file suggesting this was anything other than the end of a long road for him.
But after what happened with Willie Sanders last summer, that file may not tell the full story. ”
“Who was Willie Sanders?” I asked.
“A local dockworker Rios and I spoke with who had some kind of information about an assault that happened outside Home Port,” Madden explained.
“He was high at the time we spoke with him, and he agreed to talk to us when he’d sobered up, but when we arrived at his place, we found him ODed instead.
We couldn’t ever prove it, but given the timing, it feels like someone decided to shut him up. ”
“Damn,” Sawyer muttered. “Would’ve been useful to know what Shane said in that note.”
“The note might not have been from him,” Madden pointed out. “We only know he’s the one who passed it to Lauren. It could’ve gone through multiple hands from the original sender.”
I appreciated her care not to lean on assumptions.
“Unfortunately, this is often what it means to investigate a cold case. A lot of the people who know things have died, and life has happened. I’ve certainly run up against tons of this kind of thing over the years.
Nature of the beast. It doesn’t mean there are no more leads to follow. ”
“We’ve been avoiding the most obvious one,” Madden said. All our attention swung to her. “We should be talking to the one person who is alive whom we know knows something.”
“Miles,” I said.
“But this whole time he’s been refusing to talk because he still has a family he wants to protect, even if his wife is divorcing him,” Bree argued. “I mean, he went to prison rather than reveal anything about these people in hopes of reducing his sentence.”
“True,” Madden acknowledged, “but if Rios goes to see him under the auspices of questioning him about some other related crime, it might be a way in sideways.”
“What would we even ask him?” Ford pressed. “He’s not going to just up and say, ‘Oh, it was this specific person who held me hostage all those years.’”
“Not to mention he might not know anything about the rest of the organization beyond the people who were kept around as watchdogs to make sure he behaved,” Jace said.
“Sometimes there are answers in the things people don’t say outright,” I murmured.
I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until everyone’s focus turned to me. My control had been slipping since the moment I landed on Hatterwick, and I needed to get a handle on it.
With a faint shrug, I added, “At this point, the only thing we can do is ask. If he says nothing, we’re no worse off than we were not going at all.”
“Well, can’t hurt.” Rios scooped a hand through his thick black hair. “I’ll contact the prison and make it happen.”