(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (21 page)

I sigh, looking back at Dash and the sales team. He has them all laughing and smiling. It makes me want to stroll over there like the little rain cloud I am. The girl’s face will be precious when she realizes that hot and charming man is dating this little hobo in a hoodie and ripped jeans.

When I look back Mark winces. “So do you have particular dates?”

“I do.” I nod. “Who was that on the phone?”

“One of the Ottos from Hamburg, Germany. The owners of Barrel & Barn. He said the vice president of the United States had called him personally and said I am to—to oblige you in everything.”

“Sounds about right.” I lean in a little. “Dates are November 2014 through to let’s say November 2015. One year exactly. And I need you to be fast, very fast. By the time that guy buys whatever crap they’re selling him, I need to be ready to walk out of the store. Oh, and give him the store discount so he thinks he’s getting a deal. It’ll kill him if he doesn’t get one after all that charming he’s doing.” I turn and stalk back to the mini party midfloor. When I glance back, Mark is scurrying like a little weasel.

As I approach, the girl’s brows draw close. She cocks one of the perfectly manicured things and eyes me up. I nudge Dash like we are buddies, not wanting to kill his sale. “So, rubberwood.”

“African rubberwood.” He corrects me and then frowns. “Don’t you think it looks a little damaged here on the corner?”

I purse my lips and shake my head. “I think that is the thing they do to make it look that way. Like it’s old already, but it’s new.”

The salesguy claps his hands together victoriously. “It is, indeed, distressed to appear antiqued.”

Dash looks disheartened. “They distress perfectly good furniture as a fad?”

The guy’s face falls.

“It’s all the rage,” I comment dryly, glancing back again to check on Mark and the scurrying.

“She is absolutely correct. It is all the rage. And we only have five of the tables. They would be the only set in Seattle.”

“Unless you order online.”

The guy’s love for me wanes. “Right.” His lips move like he might try a different tactic, but I look over at Dash and shrug. “Just get them. You can have them delivered to the house. I’m sure if you buy all five they’ll give you a deal because five is such a randomly odd number. They don’t want one table just chilling here.” I am completely joking since we live on the other side of the country.

But my version of joking is always lost on people.

Dash’s eyes light up, and the guy’s fill with worry. He glances at his boss, the ass manager at the counter. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

The sales team scatters as Dash turns and pulls me into his embrace. I stiffen, not loving the PDA at all. I don’t mind an arm around my shoulder, but wrapped around my waist is a whole other thing. “You are a smart girl.”

I roll my eyes. “So I know how to get things on sale. It’s not an admirable trait. It’s a necessity because I am poor. You may not be, but I am.” I tilt my head, trying to pull back even more. “Wait, if your brother is getting everything, does that mean you’re poor too and have to live on wages?”

He shakes his head. “No. That’s not how that works at all.” He smiles. “I can’t believe I got a discounted price. My father and mother would be appalled that I negotiated a price on warehouse furniture, but I did it.”

“Yes, you stooped pretty low.” I manage to step back, but his hands are huge and strong, forcing me to stay.

“I feel a rush from it. It was exciting.” He presses his lips to mine, ignoring the lack of enthusiasm I’m flashing. He kisses, oblivious to my not kissing back, and pulls back. “Let’s go arrange for shipping them.”

“You realize you have no longer gotten them on sale and the store in DC could have sold you the same tables, right? Now you’ve paid some insane amount of money for them. You should just back out. They can’t make you buy them.”

He wraps a hand around my mouth. “Shhhhhh.”

When we get to the counter, poor Mark is sweating. I’ve clearly asked him to do the hardest thing since inventing the telephone. His eyes dart at Dash, no doubt assuming he’s a mark or a spy or a Fed too, but not sure which. But then Dash speaks: “I would like to buy the tables at a discounted price because of the odd number.” The salesguy rounds the corner and slaps down the tags and gets Dash to start filling out the forms for delivery.

Mark continues whatever he’s doing for me as the guy and Dash finish the sale.

Everyone’s face drops, including mine, when he says England. The cost of the tables isn’t even half the cost of the shipping, but Dash doesn’t bat an eyelash at spending that much. I’m ready to stab Dash, but I don’t, mostly because I need Mark to focus on the paperwork and not on the spurts of Dash’s blood getting on the store’s merchandise.

The pretty salesgirl continues eyeballing Dash and then stink-eyeballing me. I ignore it. I’m actually excited to leave so Mark can tell them what was going on. I can imagine just the way he’ll do it, flailing his arms and exaggerating the whole thing. He seems the type—enthusiastic.

Mark slips me a bag of thumb drives and paperwork as Dash completes the paperwork for the shipping. Mark winks on the sly, only not on the sly. I offer an awkward wave and walk out. “Why are you shipping that to England?”

Dash shrugs. “We don’t have Barrel & Barn in England; it’ll be a novelty there. Besides, it suits a lodge we have in the north for hunting. The wood is similar to the mounting my great-grandfather had done in Africa. I’m almost curious if that was rubberwood he used. So I’m sending it home, and we shall see.”

I don’t know what to say, beyond maybe make a face. Mounting things from Africa certainly means animals, often rare animals. The sort that are endangered.

He offers up a look like he’s annoyed with me. “Not that any of that nonsense matters. From the look of things back there I have to assume he hit on you. Did he?”

“What?”

“He winked, I saw him.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, guys are hitting on me in front of you, ’cause they know they stand a chance at getting me out from under your fat thumb.”

He grins. “You like my fat thumbs.”

I walk faster to escape his version of a dirty joke as he chuckles to himself like an old pervert. I don’t know how to respond to dirty jokes about stuff we have actually done.

17. Frequent flyer miles

 I
don’t understand why in the gods ya had to go all the way back to Seattle to do that. Isn’t Dash getting a wee bit suspicious about the file that doesn’t seem to be ending? Does he suspect you’re avoiding the new job?” Angie asks, gazing over the pages I have brought back to DC. Meeting her at the office for nighttime chow and research hasn’t ever happened before. We meet for random things, usually involving my health and welfare. Or things not work-related at all.

“No, he thinks this is routine. You and he are never part of the debriefing afterward, so I have been able to buy a bit of time with that. And whenever anyone from the team flies, we use one of the Fed jets, so it’s no hassle. Or helicopters for short distances. It isn’t like going through the airport.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Right, but you and Rory have never had a file unsolved before.”

“I know. It’s driving me insane. I don’t know what to do. The Feds are on it, the locals are on it, everyone is on it, and it’s going nowhere fast.” I sigh, feeling a sickness wash over me every time I think of it. “We are searching high and low for connections to possible avenues we haven’t searched yet.” I lean on the desk and sip my tea.

She has an orange highlighter, and I have a yellow one. She marks down the bed purchases, since Mark was only able to print out the days where one sold, with all the other sales included. After spending three hours searching the Internet for the exact bed and then flying all the way to Seattle, this is nothing.

I highlight the customers who left an address to run in the system. I’m assuming we won’t find Mr. X in the system, but weirder things have happened, directly to Angie and me.

“So, on a scale of one to ten, how bad was Thanksgiving?”

I scoff. “Forty.”

She laughs. “They were that evil to ya?”

“Hands down, Dash’s family are the most evil people I have ever met. I mean aside from this job and criminals, but then again I never spent enough time with them to know what they were truly capable of.”

She stops laughing. “You’d know right away if you were sitting next to evil, true evil! You’re very good at judging people. I’m shite. One drink and I love everyone.”

“Except the English and all the Irish, apart from Rory, and none of the Germans, and—”

“All right, all right, ya sassy wee thing. I don’t hate all of them; just more often than not they are assholes. And don’t be fooled, I do hate Rory. Who ya kidding on that one? The man’s a savage. And when he kisses, he spits too much. Got a glandular thing. You have to rein him in or you’ll drown.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Oh gross, too much!” I shake my head, still scanning the page. “No. I don’t think I’m that good a judge of character. And even if I were, everyone has a preconceived notion of people they know through someone else, which changes everything. You would not know in a case like that.”

“Enlighten me, O wise one,” she snarks and leaves another orange mark on the page.

“Firstly, you go into something like meeting a person’s family with preconceived notions. These people raised Dash, how bad could they be? They’re upper class and clean, so you assume they aren’t half bad. We can’t even fight it; as a people we find it hard to find attractive people guilty. Secondly, your preconceived notions are usually confirmed in your first few minutes of meeting them, when they’re on their best behavior. You’ve already given them several chances, and they have behaved in the way they have, so you automatically make a judgment. It’s called a first impression, and we absolutely do it. So that means that later on, when they fuck up, we make excuses for their behavior, instead of seeing them for what they are. Thirdly, the moment someone is family or friend or friend of a friend, we offer them more of a chance. We don’t want to hurt the person we love, and we offer the offender an olive branch out of the kindness of our hearts.”

She rolls her eyes. “All but you, ya mean.”

I shrug. “I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to see that most people are awful, and watching a person make excuse after excuse for their loved one’s terrible behavior is hard, but you learn a lot by seeing it. I don’t trust people because I have to, not normally. I trust them because they earn it, and there are not many who have. But it’s always someone I least expect to trust.”

She scoffs. “I have yet to see ya make a bad call as far as a man went, friend went, or suspect went. You even nail it when it’s a vic and the rest of us believe, but you’re not sure. It’s ’cause you’re so quiet and creepy, sitting there taking it all in.”

“Well, it’ll happen the other way one day, and you’ll see. No one is a perfect judge of character.”

“Dogs are.” She looks up at me and sighs. “But to make fun of and try to ruin the happiness of an orphan who has made her way in the world? They really are special people.”

I lift my cup of tea and she lifts hers, and we clink glasses before returning to our work.

She passes out an hour later, and I want to too, but I have to keep going, scanning through the videos on the thumb drives Mark gave me. Angie doesn’t have the show in her head that I do. I have to solve this. It’s never happened before.

My eyes are closing and the clock strikes three when I finish cross-referencing all the people who bought the beds with the information left in the system. My phone vibrates with a message from Dash—Miss you, come home! Binx is making me pet him. He’s worried.

I roll my eyes and plug the next thumb drive into my laptop and fast-forward to the time of the purchase. Each person resolves themselves in my mind when I can cross-check them in the system, check their social media, and scratch them from the list.

In my head I know it’s likely I’m looking for law enforcement or a spouse of an officer. Or I’m looking for someone who works with the City of Seattle and has access to inside information. When I come across a banker who’s five feet tall and chubby, I don’t even bother with the social media.

There were seventy-nine of those beds sold in the time frame I have. I believe the bed was purchased in January or February, when he knew he was going to abduct or kill her. He’s made himself vulnerable then.

The majority of the purchases were made by women; I eliminate them immediately. I might not have seen Mr. X, but I know he was handsome enough to land a bunch of college girls, and he wasn’t a she.

My eyes grow heavy, so I get up to make another coffee. From the kitchen I am still sort of watching the video as I fill the water reservoir in the coffee machine. I am yawning and stretching when I swear a section of the video glitches. I hurry over, rewinding and watching as a man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses comes up to the counter. He points as he talks, waving his hands back to where the beds are. He’s white, tall, broad, and fit, and that’s about all I can see. All shit I knew before we started this.