Desert Bound (Cambio Springs) (30 page)

It didn’t matter. Alex could bullshit with the best of them. “Well, we appreciate that, Chris. More than you can know. Josie’s a hell of a woman, and her kids are already making friends here. I hope they’re feeling right at home.”

A slight twitch at the corner of his eye before Avery secured his friendly expression again. “They are. Kasey talks about her new friends all the time.”

“They may not have been born here, but their dad was. So they’re some of our own now,” Alex said, noticing the twitch again. Chris Avery sure did not like his niece and nephews being considered part of the town. 

Alex decided to push a little more.

“We take care of our own, you know? Marcus was like that, too. Kept a lot of guys from the Springs in work when things were slow.”

“It’s unfortunate that a lot of his crew has moved on.”

Alex cocked his head. “Is that so?”

Avery shrugged. “Guess he was just that kind of guy to work with. With him gone, a lot of his guys left, too.”

He forced himself to nod instead of growl. “Did that put you short-handed?”

There was the eye twitch again. Alex was betting the man didn’t know his own tell, which might be another reason he was such a bad gambler.

“We’re fine,” Avery said. “We had a lot of guys out for the season, so we just called them in. They were happy to be working.”

And Alex was betting those men were ones that Avery had hired, not Marcus.

Alex bared his teeth into a smile. “Well, I hope they’re the right sort.”

“I know they are.” His eyes were dead. How easy would it be to make the rest of him dead, too?

“I appreciate you keeping me up to speed,” Alex said, shuffling papers on his desk. “Your crew works hard. I’ll look forward to seeing them around when we have more building projects in town.”

“Appreciated, Alex. Take care.” Avery stood up and walked toward the door before he turned back to Alex. “McCann?”

“Yeah?” Alex was still making a show of shuffling papers on his desk, so he didn’t leap toward Chris Avery and tear his throat out.

“Good to know you take care of your own around here.”

He stopped and looked up, his eyes going cold at the gleam he saw in Avery’s.

Alex heard Frank Di Stefano’s voice in the back of his mind.
Secret eyes…

Avery continued, “I’ll look forward to getting that call the next project that comes around.”

“Is that so?”

“Marcus always said the Springs people take care of their own.”

That gleam. That cocky gleam. Chris Avery actually thought he had something over Alex McCann. That he was a shoe-in for future contracts because he knew their secret.

The stupid bastard had just signed his own death warrant.

Alex leaned forward and let his hands come together.

“Marcus was right, Chris. This is Cambio Springs. We
always
take care of our own.”

Chapter Twenty-three

“He knows.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

Alex was pacing at the station house with Ted, Caleb, and Jeremy.

“Are you sure, boss?” Jeremy asked.

“I’m sure.”

Caleb sighed. “Do you have any proof that we can use to actually—”

“He knows, Caleb!” Alex leaned over the police chief’s desk. “He found out about the Springs. I don’t know how. But he used that to force Marcus to clean up after him. Not go to the police about the bribery thing.”

Ted said, “That was probably also self-preservation.”

“Self-preservation would be cleaning that shit up, keeping quiet, and making your criminal brother-in-law ride a desk until you could figure out a way to get him out of your business. Marcus was not doing that. Marcus was covering for Avery and keeping him in the business.”

Jeremy asked, “Because you think Avery knows about the Springs?”

“I know he does.”

Caleb looked between Ted and Alex. “Ted, you think—”

“If Alex says he knows about us, then he knows.” Ted answered Caleb’s unasked question. The Chief of Police
had
to start trusting the McCann alpha. “He’s is not going to read something like that wrong.”

“Thanks, baby.” The quiet words warmed her, despite the chill wind that had swept into the desert that afternoon, bringing rain and even a few flurries of quickly melting snow.

“So Avery knows,” Caleb leaned on his desk. “What the hell do we do about it, McCann?”

Jeremy and Alex exchanged glances, and Ted knew exactly what they were thinking. Once upon a time, human law wouldn’t have had much to do with how Chris Avery was handled.

It wasn’t that every human who found out the secret of the Springs disappeared. For most, they were trusted friends or family of the shifters who lived there, vested in keeping their secrets. And for strangers, wild stories were easy to brush off. Most humans didn’t want to see anything out of the ordinary. They had an excuse for the most bizarre signs. And if the town had gained a somewhat mysterious reputation over the years, that was just fine. It worked to their advantage, most of the time.

But this was different. 

This wasn’t a shifter killing another shifter in a rage. This was a human who had killed a shifter, quite possibly because of what he was. It was cold-blooded murder, but Chris Avery was not a man who could just disappear without questions asked.

Caleb and Alex had their eyes locked. Ted wondered if Caleb understood just how much authority Alex was granting him to keep his eyes like that without tearing out the chief’s throat.

“We have to find something,” Alex said. “Something that will prove he murdered Marcus, so he can be arrested and tried. He’s a human; this is a human problem.”

Caleb sat back. “It’s not that easy.”

“There’s got to be something,” Jeremy said.

The weariness slipped into Caleb’s eyes. “Do you know how many murders happen in the state of California that are never solved?”

“No,” Alex said.

“Four in ten.”

Ted was shocked. She’d had no idea it was that high.

“
More
than four in ten, as a matter of fact. Over forty percent of murders are never solved. Never closed. And that’s not because the evidence is inadmissible in court. Sometimes, there is no evidence. Sometimes, people do cover their tracks. Sometimes, the bad guys are the ones with luck on their side.” 

“We’ve got to find something, Caleb.”

“There might not be anything to find. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Alex. The autopsy didn’t reveal any trace evidence we can use because the remains were compromised by the coyotes. The body had been moved. The gun was a common caliber. There is no clear motive without the bribery investigation, and officially, I don’t know about that.”

“What?” Alex said. “So this is the perfect murder?”

“You don’t have to commit the perfect murder to not get caught. You just have to have luck on your side.”

Jeremy piped up from the corner. “We need to focus on finding Joe Smith.”

“Russell,” Ted said. “His name is Joe Russell. He doesn’t get to keep anything of Allie’s.”

“Whatever. We need to find him. He’s the only link between Avery and Marcus. We might even be able to get a warrant to search for the drugs if we bring Joe in.”

“You’re not going to bring him in,” Alex said. “He’s scared shitless.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Of Ollie.”

“Of everything,” Ted corrected him. “He’s panicking, but he doesn’t have money. Not by the look of him the other night. He couldn’t get far. So we should look close.”

Caleb picked up the phone. “I’ll call Dev. See if anyone has spotted him near the river.”

Jeremy pushed off from the wall. “And I’ll start canvasing the cheap motels around the interstate. Those are probably going to be our best bet.”

Ted watched Alex. Saw him struggling to control his instincts. The instincts that told him Chris Avery was a threat, and threats to his people and his home should be eliminated.

“Come on,” she said, rising to her feet. “I have lunch stuff at home.”

“Ted—”

“Food, Alex. You need to step back for a little while. Let these guys do their work.”

Caleb mouthed,
Thank you
as she pulled Alex to the door. She felt for the chief. It couldn’t be easy trying to operate legitimately with a near-feral shifter breathing down your neck. Caleb was doing the best he could, but he was right. In the real world, sometimes luck was on the side of the bad guys.

Alex followed her back to the house, but he was still brooding. She started to make sandwiches as he stared out the window.

“How’s the clinic?” he finally said.

“Fine. Slow. No new strep epidemics to keep me on my toes. It was so slow this afternoon, I moved the one appointment I had to take the afternoon off.”

“Want to roll around in bed for a while?”

Her pulse spiked a second before her mouth turned up at the corner. “Need a distraction, do you?”

“You’re the best kind.”

“Are we really just going to roll around in bed, or are more elicit activities going to be indulged in.”

“Elicit.” He pulled her into the bedroom, and Ted forgot about the food. “Very elicit.”

Alex spent the next hour exploring the boundaries of what Ted considered ‘elicit’ and pushing them very close to ‘depraved.’ But she loved every second of it. And she laughed as much as she moaned. It had always been that way with Alex.

“It’ll all work out,” she whispered, fingers running through his thick hair as he lay his head on her breast.

He lifted his head. “When did you get so relaxed?”

“Me?” She arched a haughty eyebrow. “I’m always relaxed.”

“Right.”

“You just irritate me more than most people.”

“Mmmm.” He pushed up and slid a hand behind her back. “That’s because I get under your skin.”

Her breath hitched, and she arched her back, bringing her body closer to his mouth. Never one to pass up an opportunity, he took it. 

“You know what?” he whispered, his mouth trailing down to her belly-button.

“What?”

“I like being under your skin,” he said. “Makes it a little more fair you’re so far under mine.”

The phone rang in the middle of the night. Before she could lift her head, Alex was answering it.

“Hello?”

Silence. Then his voice growled. 

“Tell me where you are.”

The motel in Barstow was on the edge of town, a run-down relic just off the interstate that still offered rooms for twenty dollars a night and had posted hourly rates. There were a few big rigs parked across the street, and a few more cars in the parking lot. The lights flickered as they walked across the cracked asphalt toward Room 10, a ground floor room at the very end of the building. Ted didn’t see any eyes in the night. No curtains flickered.

Some places, you chose not to pay attention.

There was a low light under the curtain when they stepped up to the door. A slight movement, as if a fan might be running inside. Alex tapped on the door with two fingers, the low sound still echoing loudly down the covered walkway.

It cracked open, and Joe was behind it.

“Is it just you?”

Alex didn’t answer, just walked in and Ted followed. She looked around the room, took everything in. The room had a queen bed with a sad comforter she wasn’t going to sit on. There were no lamps, just an overhead light that Joe had switched off. The only light came from the yellow glow of the bathroom fixture. It was enough to see, but not enough to see well, which was probably a good thing. The smell alone told her Joe had been smoking, but she could also see an overflowing coffee mug near the only chair in the room.

“Talk to me,” Alex said as Ted walked around.

He had no luggage. Not even a backpack. But there was a plastic grocery bag on the small dresser, a bottle of Black Velvet peeking from the top. Ted walked over and opened the top drawer.

“Ted, you can’t—”

“You called us, Joe,” she said.

Just as she suspected, the top drawer held a bag of weed and a few pills she couldn’t see well enough to identify. She slid it shut with a bang.

“What the hell have you done to yourself?”

“Ted—”

“You had a home. A family. Kids who love you. A pretty wife who cooked you dinner every night. And you threw that all away?”

Alex stepped over and took her hand, squeezing it before he looked back at Joe, who’d gone deathly pale.

“Ted,” he said softly.

“Done.” She threw up her hands, disgusted. Angry that they had to talk to the scumbag because he might know something about Marcus’s death.

Alex stepped forward and said, “Joe, you need anything? Have you eaten lately?”

He jerked his head in a nod. “I’m cool. I just… I heard you were looking for me. And I figured, as long as you didn’t bring the bear, I could talk to you.”

“What did you want to tell us?”

“I need to warn you. About Avery.”

“He killed Marcus.”

Joe winced, as if he was in physical pain. “Now… I don’t
know
that. I mean, he might have. But I didn’t see it or anything. I know Marcus was pissed at him. So maybe…”

“He did it, Joe. Why are you covering for him?”

“Hey.” Joe stepped back and raised his hands. “No. Uh uh. I ain’t covering for that bastard. Just saying I don’t know that he’s the one that killed Marcus, you know? Marcus didn’t get on with his family, either.”

“The Quinns did not kill Marcus,” Ted said. 

“How do you know?” he asked. “They do all kinds of shit to each other. They’re mean.”

“Old Quinn was grooming Marcus to take over the clan, Joe.”

Joe looked at Alex, then said, “Oh. I guess they probably wouldn’t then.”

“Tell us more about Chris Avery.”

Joe started shaking his head, looking down at the floor. “He seems cool, but… he is not. Avery knows. About us. About us shifters, Alex. He knows about the kids. All our animals. Doesn’t like it.”

“What does he know?”

“I don’t know, man!” Joe threw up his hands. “He was asking about the water and shit, but I didn’t tell him anything more. Not after I figured out…” The scruffy man stepped back, guilt written all over his face.