Chapter 3 #2
As he quietly wrapped the scarf around his neck and the bottom half of his face, he did another visual scan of the neighborhood.
He’d worked undercover with the DEA on a small, specialized team and was excellent at blending in when he wanted to.
People were usually so focused on their own lives with very little situational awareness that it was surprisingly easy to blend into most places.
Dog walker guy was gone, and he could hear vehicles nearby. Some doors shutting. Then a pizza delivery car drove by slowly, parked in the middle of the road before someone jumped out and raced up the short steps of a nearby rancher.
A neighborhood was one of the places where it was more difficult to blend in if the majority of the residents had lived there a long time.
He had no way of knowing what kind of neighborhood this was though, so Cormac stuck to the shadows, using one of the ancient oak trees as cover as he waited for the delivery driver to leave.
He thought about tailing Daniela, but instead he texted the address of the place she’d run from to Micah. Can you find out who owns this? He could have looked up the property records but it would have taken him valuable time he didn’t have right now.
His brother was magic—the response came seconds later.
Yep. Didn’t even have to look it up. It’s Greg Temple’s home.
Huh. Temple was a clerk at the courthouse in Wrightsville. Worked with multiple judges, had been there for almost a decade. Cormac only knew of him because of a picture that had shown up in the files of a criminal named Louis Cain earlier that year.
Micah had discovered a stash of photos, most of them clearly used for blackmail. Except one picture with Temple and Daniela talking to each other in a wintery setting. He and Micah hadn’t known what to make of the picture, but Micah had gotten the man’s information.
Cormac cursed himself. He should have recognized the address. He had the same information Micah did about Temple
He didn’t show up to work today, Micah continued.
Ice slicked down his spine. He wanted to ask how his brother knew that, but would later. Daniela had just run from the man’s house. That didn’t bode well for Temple.
One more thing… Did you talk to Krystal?
Yeah, for a second. Cormac would call her back in a few minutes. First he wanted to check on Temple. Something felt off, and the way Daniela had rushed out of here… He didn’t like any of this.
Daniela killed someone today in self-defense.
He read the message, reread it, stunned. What. The. Hell. A tidal wave of protectiveness welled up inside him, but he held it at bay. He was going to talk to Daniela later this evening one way or another, but first things first.
Send me details. I’m walking up to Temple’s place.
He shoved his phone in his pocket as he strode across the street. Pizza Guy was gone and most of Cormac’s face was covered. If he ended up on a security camera, Micah should be able to take care of it. If not, it would be difficult to figure out his identity anyway.
But as he reached the short little pathway, he saw a smashed security camera on Temple’s front porch, pieces of it scattered around. It looked as if it had originally been placed above the door.
And the front door wasn’t properly shut.
Shit, shit, shit.
Sliding out the pistol he almost always carried with him, he eased the door open. It creaked slightly and he could immediately see something physical had happened. Without turning around, he shut the door behind him with his foot.
The living room to the left was in disarray. A sitting chair was turned on its side, a couple frames smashed. Glass glittered on the rug.
A floor lamp lay on its side, still casting an eerie glow over the space.
Pistol up, he swept the downstairs. No one was there and the house had a too-still quality to it. Daniela had run for a reason—and he had a feeling he was about to find out that reason.
As headed up the stairs, the familiar scent of death hit him even through his thick scarf.
Oh no.
Moving cautiously, he paused at the end of the hallway. There were three doors open, but only one had light spilling from it, beckoning.
He knew what he was going to find before he went into the room. Ignoring the buzzing of his phone in his pocket, he scanned for any cameras or traps and eased open what turned out to be a bathroom door.
The buzz of blowflies greeted him first. He gagged at the stench, glad for his scarf, but stepped just inside the entrance anyway, saw Temple sprawled in his tile shower.
He’d been dead for hours—the blowflies would help tell the coroner just how long.
Temple had been tortured, the slices along his torso, forearms, and thighs indicative of that. Blood was all over the shower walls and pooling in the tub. His death hadn’t been easy.
Cormac left the way he’d come, only pulling out his phone once he was back in his brother-in-law’s truck.
He called Micah immediately. “Temple was tortured to death in his house.”
***
Cormac walked through a quiet backyard, using the shadow of trees as cover. Luckily no spotlights had been triggered as he slowly made his way to Daniela’s house via her neighbor’s yard.
“You sure you want to do this?” Micah’s tone was neutral.
It had been a couple hours since Cormac had found Greg Temple’s body. He’d thought about putting in an anonymous call to the cops but wasn’t sure if that was the right move.
He wasn’t doing anything about the guy until he knew exactly what Daniela’s involvement with him was. She hadn’t been there long enough to kill the guy—and Temple had been dead for hours regardless. It wasn’t as if the guy was going anywhere.
Since Cormac wasn’t sure if there was any sort of evidence linking her to…anything, he wasn’t going to inadvertently put her in the crosshairs. He simply needed to talk to her—and figure out a way to convince her not to out him to her family. So nothing big.
“Yeah. Thanks for disabling her security system. Call me if you guys need help with anything tonight.”
“We won’t, but sure. And stay safe. I don’t like any of this,” Micah added as if they hadn’t had this same conversation already—more than once. “For the record.”
“Just see what you can find at Temple’s place,” Cormac said before he hung up. He couldn’t repeat the conversation again.
Micah and Apollo were headed back to Temple’s townhome to do a full sweep under the cover of darkness.
They’d be wrapping themselves up in crime scene gear so they wouldn’t contaminate anything, but were mostly going to be searching Temple’s computer and any potential hiding places before the cops got wind of the murder.
Cormac figured they had until morning when Temple didn’t show up for work again. Tomorrow was Friday. If the killer was smart, he’d have killed Temple then instead, and the body would have likely sat undiscovered for the whole weekend.
According to Micah’s research, Temple didn’t have a cleaning service, no pets, and didn’t appear to entertain often. And no significant other that Micah could find. The man had lived like a monk essentially.
But he’d clearly been hiding something.
People didn’t get tortured like that over nothing.
He shelved that thought as he slipped into Daniela’s backyard.
He’d used Micah’s app to track her back to her art gallery so he knew where she was for now.
After leaving Temple, she’d gone to work, which tracked with the Daniela he’d known.
When they’d first met, she’d spent a lot of time at her gallery.
Some of it was to escape her family, he thought, but she really loved helping build the careers of budding artists.
Even if she was running away from her day—who could blame her after the morning she’d had—he figured she had to come home eventually. And they were going to have a conversation one way or another.