Chapter Twelve #3
“I think,” Anja rested the marker against the board, “that in all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never once been handed the answer this fast unless somebody wanted me to stop looking.
” She picked the marker back up and, under the tidy Vegas thread, wrote a single word and circled it twice: convenient.
“We should still chase it hard enough to make everyone believe it. Maybe it’s real and I’m paranoid.
But nobody closes this board until I understand why it was so eager to be solved.
A betting syndicate doesn’t need to walk into Leo’s office on a Sunday and read his files by hand.
Somebody local did that. Somebody who could. ”
The Vegas thread glowed on one side of the board, orderly and complete and four states away. The office breach sat on the other, small and ugly and very, very close. Anja glanced between them and knew the answer to all of it lived somewhere in the middle.
Later, after Tyler had signed off and Remi went to walk the perimeter, Leo lingered in the office with Anja.
“One more thing. Not for the board. We lost a partner this weekend. Tim Hargrove. Heart, they think. He’d been ignoring the warning signs.
His wake’s Wednesday, and the whole firm’s expected.
” He dragged a hand through his hair. “He was a good man. Spent thirty years with Curtis. It’s just sad.
I wanted you to know in case it changes anything for the week. ”
Nothing in it touched a betting syndicate, a thumb drive, or a rifled drawer. “I’m sorry, Leo. We’ll figure out the logistics. You should go. People would notice if you didn’t.”
#
Leo followed Anja up the stairs that night without either of them pretending it was a question.
She didn’t slow at her door or even hesitate. There was no flat we’re working like she’d led with twenty-four hours ago. She caught the front of his shirt on the threshold, walked backward, and tugged him in after her. The only words she uttered were a low warning against his lips.
“Quietly. Remi’s one floor below.”
“You’re the one who was loud last night.”
She broke the kiss, offended. “I was not.”
“You were a little loud.”
“Shut up and make it worth being quiet for.”
He did his level best.
It was fast and it was furious, a comedy of two competent adults trying to keep silent in a house with apparently thin floors and a former Army Ranger with bionic hearing sleeping below.
She bit down on his shoulder to muffle herself, and he felt her shaking and realized she was laughing.
Then he was laughing too. They went helpless, breathless, trying not to make the bed creak, which was its own losing battle.
In the middle of it she pressed her face into his neck and hissed, “Stop laughing, you’re making it worse,” which only made it worse.
Afterward, they lay tangled beneath the covers, her head on his chest, both of them catching their breath and grinning like a couple of teenagers who’d gotten away with something.
“We’re terrible at this,” she murmured.
“Speak for yourself. I think we showed real restraint.”
“The headboard hit the wall.”
“Once. Glancingly.”
“He’s going to look at us funny at breakfast.”
“Eh, he looks at us funny anyway.” Leo traced a slow line up her spine, just to feel her go liquid under his hand. “Remi looks at everything. It’s his entire personality.”
She laughed at that and snuggled deeper against him.
Leo was absurdly, dangerously content for a man with an evidence file and a criminal who’d walked through his office with a key.
He decided not to think about it. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow to be afraid.
Tonight there was only the warm weight of her, the dark, and nowhere either of them had to be.
“Tell me something not about the case,” Anja murmured. “I’m tired of dwelling on it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t care. Something true or stupid. Your pick.” She tipped her chin up, and he could make out the gleam in her eyes, even in the dark. “You played ball. You must have at least one story. Everybody who rode a bus that long has a good one.”
“You’re assuming I played minor league ball. We take private jets in the big leagues.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“I’m kidding. I did play in the minors for a bit.
And, oh, do I have a bus story.” His grin spread.
“Actually, I have the bus story. First year in Double-A, we were somewhere in the absolute middle of Iowa when the team bus died. Just croaked. I’m talking smoke pouring out the back, engine giving up on life, the whole thing.
It was one in the morning, there were cornfields to the horizon in every direction, and naturally nobody had a cell signal. ”
“Naturally.”
“So there we were, twenty-five players and a coaching staff standing on the shoulder waiting for a replacement bus that was two hours away. Somebody spotted a farmhouse about a quarter mile up the road. Our backup catcher, a kid named Dewey from Oklahoma who I swear had never made a good decision a day in his life, announced that we should go ask the farmer for help.”
“At one in the morning.”
“Because nothing says reasonable like waking strangers after midnight with twenty-six unexpected houseguests.”
She snorted.
“We all start hiking up this long gravel driveway. It was pitch black and there was no porch light. We were maybe twenty yards from the house when something came screaming out of the darkness.”
Anja gasped.
“We scattered like the hounds of hell were on our tails.”
“What was it?”
“At that moment, I had no idea. Nobody did. We just knew it was loud, fast, and deeply committed to murder.”
She laughed.
“It was a sheep.”
“A sheep?”
“A ram, technically. Built like a tank with anger issues.”
She covered her mouth.
“And for reasons known only to livestock psychology, it decided Dewey was the enemy of the state.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. Dewey took off running around a tractor with this ram right on his heels. Four full laps. We were no help whatsoever because every one of us was folded over, busting a gut laughing.”
Anja’s smile was broad. “What did the ram do?”
“It waited. Dewey climbed onto the hood of an old pickup and figured he’d outsmarted it. The ram just stood there. Didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stared at him.”
“Oh, that’s creepy.”
“After about five minutes, Dewey decided he must be good.”
“I already know he’s not good.”
“No. He jumped down and the ram lowered its head, accelerated from zero to freight train in about three seconds, and launched Dewey so high I’m reasonably confident he saw tomorrow.”
Anja laughed outright.
“The farmer finally came out wearing a flannel robe and carrying a flashlight. He shined the light across twenty-six grown men hiding in his cornfield while one professional athlete was getting repeatedly assaulted by livestock.”
“And?”
“He looked at us for a solid ten seconds.” Leo deadpanned the last line. “Then he sighed, turned around, walked back inside . . . and locked the door.”
Anja lost it.
She buried her face in his chest and laughed, the sound rolling out of her, full and unguarded, nothing held back or managed, and it punched Leo under the ribs and stopped him cold.
Because he knew that laugh.
He’d heard it only once before, five months ago, at two in the morning, in her kitchen in the CObrA Securities complex.
The apartment had laid in shadow, and he’d been standing at her counter drinking a glass of water with no clothes on and no idea what he was doing there or what came next.
From the bed, she’d informed him that most people dressed before raiding someone else’s kitchen.
He’d told her that pants would’ve made the whole thing feel unnecessarily formal.
She’d emitted that same deep, throaty sound.
It had been a door swinging open onto a room she didn’t let many people into.
Leo had carried the sound around for months without admitting it to himself.
He’d catch himself hearing it at odd times—in line for a bagel, half-awake before an alarm—and shove it back down because the woman who made it had let him walk away without a goodbye, and he’d had to teach himself not to want things he couldn’t have.
And here it was again. Same laugh. Same woman.
In a borrowed bed in a borrowed house. The universe was trying to come apart around them, and she was laughing at his sheep story as though it was the funniest thing she’d heard in years.
Leo understood with sudden, uncomfortable clarity that walking away a second time was no longer something he’d be able to do.
“You’re staring,” she got out breathlessly.
Yeah, he was. He couldn’t help it. “That laugh.”
“You told me a story about a sheep. It was funny.”
“No.” He brushed her hair off her face, and his voice roughened. “I mean you really laughed. I’ve heard it once before . . . five months ago.”
The laugh faded, but the warmth behind it didn’t. They gazed at each other in the dark with everything between them finally out in the open where it couldn’t be filed away again.
“You remember that,” she murmured.
“I remember all of it.” He let the truth of it sit there, undefended. “I told myself I didn’t. I’m done lying.”
Anja didn’t answer with words. She reached up, dragged his mouth down to hers, and kissed him slowly. This time when the headboard found the wall, neither of them laughed.