CHAPTER SEVEN #2
Sherri scrubbed a hand over her face. “Listen, I know Pete’s an asshole. Everyone in this office knows Pete’s an asshole. But he’s an asshole who does good work. And if I can deal with him being a misogynistic prick, you can deal with him being an asshole.”
Hell. She had a point. Pete was always dropping little comments that undermined Sherri, things that were just shy of getting him in trouble. But Sherri dealt. I could, too.
“You’re the senior officer,” she went on. “Utilize him for what he does best and don’t let him walk all over you.”
That was easier said than done because Pete did whatever the hell he wanted and walked over the rest of us to claim whatever credit he could.
“Sherri—” I began.
“How many possibles do you have?” she cut in.
My mouth thinned. “Thirteen.”
She shook her head. “You need to take care of yourself, Kol. I know you care about this one, but don’t let it drive you into an early grave.”
“I’m not,” I clipped, but I could feel the muscle along my jaw beginning to flutter.
Sherri studied me for a long moment. “Is this one getting too personal? I know Nova is close to your brother’s fiancée. I can do a full reassign if—”
“I know the rules.” Tension wove through my muscles, turning them to stone. That wasn’t a lie. I did know the rules. Just like I knew a victim of a case living above my garage could be considered a personal relationship that broke more than one of them.
Fuck.
But I couldn’t let Nova slowly drown while living in Brae and Dex’s cabin. Not when I had the ability to help. It went against every fiber of my being. Sometimes, breaking the rules was the risk.
And it was a risk. Sherri didn’t mess around with conflicts of interest. We’d had cases go sideways because of an investigator’s relationship with a victim, and she’d never forgotten it. She wouldn’t hesitate to discipline me. Or worse, fire me.
Sherri was quiet as she continued to watch me, taking stock of everything under my words. But if she saw through to my secrets, she didn’t say anything. “Fine. But you can’t investigate thirteen cases on your own. Divide and conquer. Give Pete a few to look into and start there.”
“Did I hear my name? Talking about how invaluable I am?” Pete cut in, moving in beside Sherri in my doorway.
That now-familiar scowl was back. I stared at the douchebag extraordinaire.
In his late forties, I had no idea how Pete had ended up working for the Forest Service.
While I hated logging time in our office, preferring the forest as my backdrop, Pete’s idea of camping was a luxury lodge with every amenity known to man, and his carefully coiffed hair showed it.
Sherri’s mouth thinned. “Pete, we’re going to add you as a second on the Travis Moore case. You’ll answer to Kol on this one and take your orders from him.”
A war of emotions played out over Pete’s expression. A flash of excitement in his brown eyes, followed quickly by more than a hint of annoyance. “I could always take half the cases and Kol the other. Then, we won’t get in each other’s way,” Pete suggested.
“This is Kol’s case,” Sherri said with finality. “You want on, you’re support to him.”
A muscle pulsed beneath Pete’s eye. “Yeah. No problem.” His annoyed gaze flicked to me. “I’ve been over your notes. I’ve already got a few ideas of where I could strengthen things.”
Already undermining. Typical Pete.
“I’ll be sending you five cases to look into,” I said, ignoring his suggestion. “Put your case notes in the portal.”
What I wouldn’t tell him was that they were five cases my brothers and I had already looked into.
I wasn’t a pompous ass—a second set of eyes never hurt, and there was always a chance that Pete could find something we’d missed.
But I wasn’t about to trust him completely. Not on a case this important.
Pete’s eyes flashed with a hint of fire. “Make sure you send me all the files you have on each.”
“You know I will,” I shot back.
Sherri sighed as Pete stalked away. “Do me a favor and try not to kill him on the way to closing this case.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I grumbled, turning back to my computer to send the douchebag everything I had on the five possibles I was assigning him.
I cracked my neck and focused on the other eight cases. Highlighting a missing backpacker, I sent the file to my phone. I needed to get out of this claustrophobic office and into my real workspace. I always did my best work in the forest, in the quiet.
Checking to make sure the files had made it to my phone—tech was really not my thing—I grabbed it and my keys. As I headed for the door, my cell dinged.
NOVA:
I think you gave me a foot fetish, Boss.
Below the text was a photo of Nova’s feet in tall grass, her toenails, still a sunny yellow, peeking through.
How could toes manage to be cute? Maybe I’d taken a hit to the head when I was working on the apartment and didn’t remember it.
Me:
You know this means Brae and Wylder will think you have a foot fungus now, too.
NOVA:
Naw, my feet are too cute to be fungusy.
Me:
Fungusy isn’t a word.
NOVA:
I made it one.
That was Nova, through and through, making her own rules. And she should. She’d lost a year of her life. She should live exactly as she wanted to now.
Me:
Give ’em hell today.
NOVA:
You wrangle those trees into submission, Boss.
I chuckled, slipped my phone into my pocket, and headed for the front door of our office building.
The moment I stepped outside, I inhaled the fresh air.
There was something about being stuck inside an office: the recycled air with no open windows, the artificial light.
I hated everything about it. The only reason I could manage what I did was because I got to spend so much time outdoors.
It hadn’t always been like this. There was a time when I thought I would be a lawyer or maybe go into finance, possibly take over my father’s import/export business.
But all of that had changed when we discovered who our father really was.
That he was a monster who preyed on women who looked exactly like our mother—a woman who had disappeared years before.
That he stalked and killed them, burying them in the orchard on our property and saving trinkets from his kills that allowed him to relive them over and over again.
Everything changed when Dex and Mav found those IDs and locks of hair—and then Edmond Archer had found them. He had nearly killed Maverick and only stopped because Orion ended him. And I came to terms with the fact that I hadn’t been there when my brothers needed me the most.
Too caught up in my own bullshit. Too cool to stay back and watch my little brothers like I should’ve. I just had to take my girlfriend out to that movie she was dying to see. Too selfish.
And when I came home to find it crawling with police, FBI, and paramedics … I lost the ability to breathe. Everything in the house felt like it was closing in around me. And the only place that gave me respite was the forest.
It had stayed my refuge. The forest was my home now, in every way.
“Kol.” A deep voice cut into my swirling memories as I crossed the parking lot.
I looked up to see a familiar figure in a Juniper County Sheriff’s Department uniform.
Roger Oakley wore the evidence of what he’d been through in the past four months.
A best friend who’d ended up being a serial killer.
A boss who’d turned out to be involved with a cartel pot–growing operation and had gotten himself killed.
And he also wore the pressure of trying to clean up a department completely wrecked in the wake of those discoveries. He looked older than his thirty-one years. Dark circles rimmed his blue eyes, and his sandy-blond hair desperately needed a cut.
“Hey,” I greeted. “What are you doing here?”
“Coming to find you, actually.”
The Travis Moore case had been handed off to the state police and the Forest Service in a joint investigation, with the sheriff’s department serving as support. There were too many conflicts of interest for them to run point, and they needed time to pull themselves together after all the upheaval.
“Travis’s case?” I asked.