Chapter Four
He was going to regret this.
Adrial pounded his fist against the door that’d only managed to get uglier over the past decade.
Because who in their right mind painted their house kelly green to accent redbrick?
Arthur Hutton. That was who. Hell, Adrial had been the one to help him do it, too.
The green had been the cheapest exterior paint the former chief of police could find, much to the embarrassment of his daughter at the time. Which only made this so much worse.
The door swung inward, centering the gut-wrenchingly beautiful redhead in his sights.
Winnie had changed since barging into his office this morning, and was now wrapped in skintight Lycra workout clothes streaked with dust. Not to mention cobwebs in her hair.
She quirked one side of her mouth to dislodge that traitorous strand that always seemed to fall into her face. “Can I help you?”
“Everything I have on the Lila Mercer investigation.” He offered the too-thin stack of paperwork he’d found shoved to the bottom of one of his desk drawers. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t shredded the file when he’d had the chance, knowing how unlikely the case would ever come to a resolution.
Winnie took it with a little too much enthusiasm.
As though the limited information he’d put together outside the official investigation would be the key in getting her what she wanted.
But solving this case wouldn’t restore her dad’s reputation.
Not in the way she believed. She flipped through the handwritten notes and copies he’d made before resigning from his position as one of Black Hollow’s detectives. “What made you change your mind?”
Adrial shut down the growl in his chest. He knew her.
Knew how far she would go to get what she wanted.
Hell, there’d been times he’d admired the hell out of that stubbornness, but this wasn’t like that time she’d nagged Arthur for a special-edition birthday Barbie every day for an entire summer until the man gave in.
The Lila Mercer case would only end in heartache, or with Winnie hurt.
Neither of which he was willing to stand by and watch.
Not again. “You want to solve this case, or do you want to interrogate me?”
After sidestepping clear of the threshold, Winnie opened the splintered front door wider in invitation.
A wall of staleness drove up his nose and into his lungs, though it seemed she’d opened every window imaginable to clear out the house.
The stained cerulean-blue carpet—dark in some areas and too light in others—told the sordid story of the time his former partner had gifted Winnie a dog to keep her occupied after losing her mother at sixteen.
It hadn’t helped. In many instances, throwing money at Winnie instead of the affection she’d craved from her remaining parent had only made things worse between them.
This damn case hadn’t helped one bit.
“Sorry about the mess.” Winnie closed the protesting door behind them and pushed into his peripheral vision.
The living room—easily the largest room in the old rambler—looked the same as it had ten years ago.
The floral couch against the longest wall still held the imprints of someone who’d taken to sleeping on it instead of shuffling down the hall toward the bedrooms. It was easy to imagine Arthur locking himself in this house, living off processed foods with the case spread in front of him.
The rest of the furniture, including the oversize round dining table that had been cut off at the legs to make a coffee table, had somehow survived under layers of dust and water rings.
Framed photos that hadn’t been touched since Mrs. Hutton had been alive decorated the walls behind a two-deck leather-lined rolling bar that had been pushed into the corner where the Christmas tree used to go, stocked with VHS Disney movies, old laser disks in their original packaging, bronze elephants and Winnie’s mother’s old bible.
He had a feeling the giant flocked Christmas tree hadn’t gone up since Winnie had insisted that year she and him were supposed to get married the following January, and he’d learned she used to eat the salt dough ornaments off the tree as a kid.
Hell, he’d bet Arthur never bothered celebrating any holiday with what was left of his family, always putting his work first.
“I’ve been working on it since I got into town, but he wasn’t great about staying on top of the cleaning.
” Winnie swiped her hand across the coffee table and wiped the residue down her thigh, creating new streaks over lean muscle straining under black fabric.
She’d always taken good care of herself, apart from her addiction to a very specific chocolate bar she liked to unwrap in front of the TV more than few times a week, but these past few years had done wonders for her.
Her skin had cleared up, her hair had grown in thicker, muscles flexed where they hadn’t before and her teeth were much whiter.
Marriage had obviously done wonders for her, and he was happy to see it.
Really. “Would you like something to drink?”
“I’m good.” Adrial tried to breathe through the staleness, but there was no escaping it. “You’ve been through your dad’s case file?”
“Not all of it. No.” She glanced toward the bare wall on the other side of the barely held together entertainment center stuffed with more dust, more photos and more blue-and-white patterned china, and Adrail caught the outline of paper-size rectangles on the wall.
Given the pinpricks in the textured drywall, something had been pinned there long enough for the sun to change the color of the cream-based paint.
“There are a few boxes I haven’t opened.
I’m honestly not sure where anything is, or if what I found is the full investigation.
If he had a system, he was probably the only one who knew what it was. ”
He hadn’t heard her right. “Boxes.”
“Yeah. Boxes.” Winnie crossed into the kitchen at the back of the house, bright yellow linoleum threatening to trip her along the way.
She hauled a paper box without any clear label from the struggling kitchen table and set it on the coffee table between them, then removed the lid.
“Most of them are in the office, but I pulled this one from under his bed. There’s a lot here, but I have a hard time believing there are this many boxes dedicated to one case. ”
“Your dad was known to be a bit obsessive.”
“You think?” Her mouth tugged up at one corner, almost convincing him there was a smile somewhere underneath her dark lip stain, but it was gone just as quickly as it’d appeared. A figment of his imagination.
Adrial flipped through the first few items stacked in this one box.
“I mean he had a tendency to write a set of notes and then rewrite them again and again until something came of them, or he found something useful. And he kept every draft. Entire notebooks filled with the same information stacked in his desk. I’m betting a lot of these are duplicates. ”
“His desk.” A groan slipped free of her control. “I didn’t even think to clean out his office at the station.”
Adrial siphoned off the first few sheets of notes.
Scribbled and scratched through in that familiar handwriting.
He’d instantly recognized Arthur’s slashing g’s and a’s—as though the man had needed to punish the paper for its existence—on the sticky note with Cold Hollow Investigations’s name on the file Winnie brought in.
Why his former partner had left it to begin with—directing whomever would be going through his files to CHI—Adrial didn’t know.
He and Arthur hadn’t spoken in close to a decade despite working some of the same cases in the same small town.
“One of the other officers has most likely already gone through it. They’ll want to make sure nothing leaves the station that isn’t supposed to. ”
“You mean like case files?” She motioned to the entirety of the house.
He couldn’t stop the answering laugh that took him by surprise, and set aside the first few pages of this box. “Yeah. Like case files. Evidence. Crime scene photos. Witness statements. Office supplies.”
“They want to make sure I don’t take his office supplies?” Winnie’s hand brushed his as she moved to catch a paperweight that had toppled from the top of the stack, and a surge of heat flared into Adrial’s veins. “What are they going to do? Arrest me for taking his stapler?”
A chain reaction streamlined into his chest and spiked his heart rate higher.
Adrial sucked in a sharp breath to counter the visceral change in his body.
There’d been times he wondered if he was still capable of feeling anything past the numbness he’d let take control, resigned to spending the rest of his life detached, disassociated and disconnected from the kind of physical touch he hadn’t let himself have these past few years.
That simple brush felt like an explosion rather than an innocuous shock, and Adrial couldn’t get himself back in control.
He cleared his throat, reality coming back in slow increments.
“BHPD is severely underfunded. Those office supplies are like gold.”
“Good to know.” Her hair fell over one shoulder as they worked through the box side by side, each careful to keep their distance.
Seconds stretched into minutes, into what must’ve been an hour, before they came up for air and had reorganized a small portion of the box.
Some documents had come from the Lila Mercer investigation.
Others were clearly the ravings of a man who couldn’t let things go.
Dates neither of them recognized, interview questions jotted down but possibly unanswered.
Arthur Hutton had not been well in his final days.
That much was clear, and Adrial’s stomach twisted at the thought of Winnie dealing with her dad alone.
But she seemed to manage well enough. She had her husband—some lawyer from Seattle—to help her through. “I got your wedding invitation.”
That…was not what he expected. The media reports he held became indiscernible as his heart thundered at the base of his throat.
She didn’t look up, didn’t break her focus on the impossible task in front of them. “My dad sent it to me.”
What the hell? Pain shot through Adrial’s jaw as he locked his back teeth. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Winnie shuffled through the next stack in the box.
Expense sheets submitted by detectives working the case.
Had Arthur saved every sheet of paper connected to the investigation?
“He’d been trying to convince me to move home and join the department at the time.
I think he thought if I came back to Black Hollow to stop the wedding, I would stay. Sometimes I think he was just lonely.”
“He did it to himself.” Adrial hadn’t meant the harshness that lined his words, but there was nothing for her to deny.
Her father had given up on raising her the moment his wife had passed away.
Adrial had done his best to pick up the pieces and hold her together, but she’d only been sixteen.
She’d needed her parent, and Arthur hadn’t been that for a long time.
“You would’ve found out about the wedding sooner or later, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to be invited considering how we—how I—left things. ”
“You’re not wrong.” Another one of those humorless laughs struggled into existence. “What better way of telling a woman you wanted to be married, you just didn’t want to marry her, then sending her a wedding invitation?”
Damn it. Adrial tossed the papers he’d been going through back into the box, leveraging his weight on the edge. “Winnie, that wasn’t—”
“No. I’m sorry.” She waved her hand as though to erase the past couple of minutes. “That’s not why I brought it up. I just… I wanted to tell you I’m happy for you. Getting married, starting your agency.” She offered a slim smile. “It’s everything you wanted. You deserve it. Really.”
Adrial didn’t have a response to that. Everything? It had been. For a couple of years. He forced himself to review the carbon-copy evidence list dedicated to the Lila Mercer case. Confusion branded him for only a moment. “This list is wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Winnie pressed into him, her shoulder tucking against his chest, but he wouldn’t give into that heat again. Couldn’t.
“This is one of the first evidence catalogs from the scene, but these items aren’t what made it into the official investigation file.” He flipped over the thin paper, searching for another list. And came up empty. “Evidence is missing from the investigation file.”