Chapter Twenty #2
He pushed out of his car, ignoring the unfamiliar feelings battering his insides. Doubt. Guilt. Worry. Old memories trying to prove Cal’s point. But that was just what Cal Bennet did, what lawyers did. Fucked with your head.
Jake was stronger and smarter than all that.
He walked up the path to the front door, hands deep in his pockets. He wasn’t sure she’d answer if she saw it was him through the peephole. He wasn’t sure of a lot, and that was new territory.
There was no getting through to Cal, and Jake had seen that enough with the families of criminals. They couldn’t accept someone they were related to wasn’t the person they thought. Because it was clear to Jake that Cal was the one who couldn’t admit the truth because of his issues.
Sam was too smart to keep ignoring evidence, ignoring the truth. Too practical to be fooled by the Bennets for much longer.
And if he was the one who got through to her on that score? Well…
It wasn’t about that. It was about the truth. Something the both of them believed in above all else. And he knew in his bones Nate Bennet had killed that woman. There was too much evidence. Too many connections. Maybe some of them were tenuous, but a lot of tenuous evidence added up.
Hence why the man was in jail.
Jake knocked on the door. He waited and waited. Wondering how long he’d let it stretch out.
But after a few minutes, the door slowly opened. Sam stood there. She was dressed in jeans and a thermal and a puffy kind of vest. Her boots were on, and there were two stuffed bags sitting in the background like she was packing for a trip.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“I can’t imagine what the fuck you think you’re doing here, Hayes.”
His gaze moved from the bags to her furious dark eyes. “I want to talk to you about the case.”
“If you want to question me, you’ll have to take a long walk off a short pier.” She started to close the door, but he held out a hand.
She could have shoved the door harder. He would have let her. Instead, she let the door hit his hand and stop.
“Sam. I get it. You love the guy, but you are letting that get in the way of good investigative sense. A judge issued an arrest warrant. We have evidence. If you would cooperate with the investigation, I think you’d come to accept the truth.”
She surprised him by opening the door, though there was no give, no consideration in the hard expression on her face. “Okay. Tell me this evidence then.”
“I cannot give you details about an ongoing investigation into your—”
“Great. Bye.” She started to close the door again. He didn’t bother to hold out a hand. He did something even stupider.
“The Bennet pocketknife was found at the scene of the crime.”
Her eyes widened. She sucked in a breath, almost like a gasp.
Finally, he thought. He’d gotten through to her. She understood now. There was real, physical evidence. He reached out—to be a friend, to offer some kind of comfort. It had to be a shock, and it had to hurt, but she was accepting things now and—
She whirled away from him and disappeared deeper into the house.
Maybe he shouldn’t take that as invitation, but he did. Stepping into the entryway, carefully closing the door behind him.
When she returned, she was all furious storms. No shock. He was a little surprised she’d flipped the switch that quickly, but he’d always known she was smart and if she just saw the truth she’d—
“You mean this Bennet Swiss Army Knife?” Her voice was shrill, and she shoved it—hard—into his chest.
Jake looked down at the knife in question. A set of keys dangled from it. Clearly Bennet’s, which was weird. But all the brothers and a number of Bennet ranch hands had these. They’d been used as evidence in the case against Benjamin Bennet.
Still, if this was Nate Bennet’s…
It didn’t matter. It was hardly the only evidence. “So what? You want me to look into Cal and Landon instead?”
“I want you to do your job. This is Nate’s.” She jangled the keys aggressively. “So whatever you found at the scene of the crime wasn’t his.”
Jake wouldn’t frown. Wouldn’t betray an emotion. Because emotion didn’t matter. There were facts. There was a police investigation and an arrest warrant. This wasn’t about him.
“There’s more than just the keychain, Sam. Regardless, one of those means the Bennet name exists at the scene of a murder. The only connection the victim had to a Bennet was to Nate Bennet.”
“Open and shut then, huh?”
It was. It was. “Sam, there are things you don’t know.”
“Like what? Let’s have a list, Jake.”
He’d already given her too much, that much was clear. He’d miscalculated, and he couldn’t do it again. Or what? She might prove that evidence circumstantial too?
“You know what I think?” she demanded. Then continued without letting him answer. “I think you have something to hide, Jake. I think you’ll use whatever and whoever is in your path to hide it. I think this”—she gestured at him, and the room around them—“is a distraction.”
Frustrated with her, with how this wasn’t going at all like he’d assumed, he crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s ludicrous.”
She smirked at him. “We’ll see.”
“I came here as a friend.”
“No, you didn’t. Maybe you think you did, but you don’t know the meaning of the word. We all worked together last month. We all found the truth out, about what happened to your father.”
But Nate wasn’t stupid or swayed, because when they’d worked together it hadn’t been about his father. It had been about Glenda. Discovering the truth about his father’s death had been an accident, really. “No one was all that concerned with what happened to my father.”
“We all worked together and found the truth. Including the man you think would hurt a random woman, because what? You’ve got your evidence. Pathetic though it is. What’s the motive? That she was annoying? Guess what, Hayes? You’re fucking annoying. I haven’t killed you yet. Neither has Nate.”
He opened his mouth to argue that, but she just kept pressing on.
“You came here thinking that I’m blinded by love or stupidity.
You came here thinking you could change my mind simply because you believe something.
When you’re the one who has fucked with him every step of the way.
Pulling him over that night was childish.
And you’ll note, he didn’t take his frustration on that night out on you or anyone else.
But you think because he set some boundaries with that woman publicly, and there’s a Bennet knife that something like twenty people own, he’s a murderer?
You think that’s open and shut? You think Cal won’t destroy you in court with this?
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you came here because deep down, you know you fucked it up. ”
“I have followed the letter of the law.”
She made a sound. Rude. Condescending. “You’ve absolutely let personal feelings interfere with your investigation, and trust me, when this is all over? I’ll have your badge for it.”
He rolled his eyes, too used to having people threaten his badge or him to be moved by such a threat. “All right, Sam. I see you’ve taken the full plunge into Bennet delusion. Have fun with that.” He turned, jerked open her door and stalked out of it.
“If you ever come to this house again, you will be taking me away in cuffs,” she called after him. “If you can walk.”
Temper warred with sense. He turned to stare her down. “Threatening a police officer?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I fucking am. What are you going to do about it?”
He hated that the answer was and only could be nothing. He wasn’t going to arrest her. He certainly wasn’t going to fight her, and there was nothing more he could give her without risking his case.
He got in his car, drove to the station instead of home. If he went home, he’d only seethe and stew. Better try to work some things out.
Still, he was fuming as he settled back into his desk.
That was what a guy got for thinking he was friends with someone.
That was what he got for thinking there could be some decency to be found in that group of assholes.
Sure, he’d thought working together on Benjamin Bennet’s trial and then Glenda Harrington’s secrets meant something, but a man could still be wrong sometimes.
Dead fucking wrong.
“Because I can fucking admit when I’m wrong,” he said aloud to no one.
But he wasn’t wrong about the damn investigation. Just Sam. And maybe Cal.
Anybody who didn’t see through Nate Bennet didn’t know shit.
So she had one of those Bennet knives and she claimed it was Nate’s. So what if it was? There was plenty of other evidence. Jake knew it.
But something about that knife poked at him, like he was missing a piece of some puzzle.
Except he wasn’t. Because the puzzle would be complete once Nate Bennet was convicted.
Still. Jake dove back into previous work. He pulled up the responding officer’s report of coming across Jules Hyatt’s body. He read over it—nothing out of the ordinary. The report was as thorough and by the book as they went.
So he read through the transcription of the 911 call that had sent first responders over to the TikTok Motel.
Nothing out of the ordinary there either.
He’d interviewed everyone who’d been working at the motel at the time, the people staying closest to Jules Hyatt’s room.
No one had seen or heard anything—not uncommon for a dingy motel outside the city limits.
Jake went through everything that had Jules Hyatt’s name associated with it, including his own notes on the crime scene and…
Yeah, the report he’d taken when Jules Hyatt had come to see him. Normally he wouldn’t have taken a report for such a pointless visit, but she’d seemed like the kind of woman who’d complain to higher-ups, so he’d made sure to put the whole meeting in writing. To keep his nose clean.
But now she was dead. And that meeting hadn’t shed any light on anything, pointed nowhere.
All it did was connect him to the victim.
So, after a moment’s consideration, Jake overrode the system and deleted the file.