Guardian (7 page)

T
he rest
of Alex’s weekend didn’t go any better. He was sure he’d spent every waking hour daydreaming about Titus, but every fantasy turned sour after a while. Either his common sense stirred, or the memory of Ty demanding to know whether Alex was gay reared up and ruined everything.

He’d win this case, and then he’d walk away. There wasn’t anything else to be done.

By Tuesday he was just about over the strangeness of Saturday’s conversation. He had the Curiosity Rover on his desk, and whenever he was on a phone call he’d find his fingertip had taken to pushing it back and forth, silently driving it around his blotter pad while he conducted his business. He was still driving it around after another call when Caroline showed Pat Bannon into his office.

Alex halted and looked up in surprise. He wasn’t expecting Bannon yet. Not until later in the week, at least.

“Have a seat, Pat.” He gestured at the chair and sat up straight.

The private investigator was an unassuming man who wore what he’d once described as “urban camouflage”——nondescript clothing in dull colors, free of designer labels or other branding. He settled into the chair and fished around in his khaki-colored courier bag. “Alex. You keeping well?”

“Same old.” Alex watched while Pat fished out a chunky envelope. The
thud
it made as it hit the desk startled him. “What’s this?”

Pat tapped the envelope with a callused finger. “Kyle Montgomery.”

Alex reached for it with a frown. “Not sure I like how thick it is.”

“You’re gonna like the contents even less.” Pat dropped his bag to the floor and crossed his legs. “Your man ran to California after he ditched Melanie Edwards. He had family there. Had being the operative word in that sentence. They died in a mysterious accident and left all their tasty, tasty money to their only son.”

“How mysterious are we talking?” Alex unwound the string which bound the envelope closed and drew out the manila folder inside. Pat’s handwriting was scrawled in the top right corner:

“Not mysterious enough for the LAPD to bring any charges against him.” Pat sneered. “Lazy assholes that they are. The loss adjuster from the Montgomerys’ insurance firm did more work, but he didn’t find any foul play either.”

Alex eased the folder open and began to sift through the contents. “What makes you say mysterious, then?”

“He did it. I don’t know how he did it, I don’t have evidence that he did it, but my gut says Kyle Montgomery killed his parents. He was up to his eyeballs in debt at the time, to some seriously bad people. Got into some sketchy gambling dens and racked up hundreds of thousands, and they let him keep going ’cause his folks were rolling in dough so they assumed he could cover his losses. He couldn’t. And then, as if by magic, suddenly he
could
.”

“How’d he arrange a murder that a loss adjuster didn’t uncover?” Alex spread some news clippings across his desk and winced at the state of the Montgomerys’ car in some of the pictures. That thing had been crushed so badly Alex couldn’t even tell whether it originally had two seats or four.

“A word in the ear of the kind of people he owed the money to could’ve put that in motion.” Pat leaned across the desk to fish out one clipping and tapped at it. “The other driver was in a truck. Walked away with cuts and bruises, lost his job and his license, got a misdemeanor charge and spent six months in county jail. He’s now gainfully employed at a casino in Reno and doing very nicely for himself thanks for asking.”

“Sounds like a nice reward for doing a few months for murder,” Alex mused. “What about Kyle?”

“Yeah, that’s the fun part.” Pat sifted through the papers until he unearthed a wad of bank statements.

Alex looked them over. The sheets were snapshots of Montgomery’s accounts as they currently stood. Five in all, from savings to checking accounts, then extra sheaves from credit card statements.

The savings accounts were all empty. The credit card statements were almost all at the borrowing limits. The checking account was overdrawn. Alex collated the figures in his head and threw them all together, then exhaled slowly. “Back to his old habits?” He set the papers down slowly. “Fifty grand is a lot of debt for anyone.”

“And it’s probably not all of it. He’s still gambling illegally. Who knows what’s on the books at the dens he’s spending in. My guess is he hammered his accounts to keep his debtors sweet, but now he’s getting bounced and can’t take out any more. He’s got no more rich parents to knock off, either.”

Alex narrowed his eyes and looked over the rest of the folder. Photographs of Montgomery, pictures of his parents and the very nice house they’d owned and which now belonged to Kyle. Witness statements from the accident. A copy of the Montgomerys’ wills. Shots of the driver who killed them.

“Nice house,” he mused. “The accident was in 2009. It’s taken him this long to get back into debt again. Maybe he stripped the house bare and sold everything of value it ever contained before he started to hit the credit cards. But he’s not willing to lose the house, is he?” He shook his head. “Man needs a place to live. And it’ll look good on his custody claim, having somewhere like that to take Phoebe home to.”

“Fancy place, isn’t it?” Pat nodded in agreement. “Good neighborhood, private grounds. So how does a man with no money hire an attorney?”

“He doesn’t point out he’s got no money. When Detwiller invoices him he just doesn’t pay. Or…”

Alex trailed off and leaned back. He felt sick. His hands shook, and he flattened them against the desk to keep them still.

“Yeah.” Pat gave a grim shake of his head. “Drive all the way across the country to get your daughter back when you owe untold thousands of dollars to underground gambling dens? Maybe to loan sharks too? A guy like this slimeball doesn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit him. If he’s come up here for the Edwards kid…”

Alex swallowed tightly. “If he’s come all the way up here for Phoebe, it’s because he thinks there’s money in it.”

“Yeah.” Pat stood. “So I came here quick as I could with what I’ve got so far. Because this asshole needs to be stopped, Alex. I’ve got more digging to do, but I don’t think we’re going to like what I find.”

“I’m already a hundred percent sure we won’t.”

A
lex spent
two hours reading every single piece of paper that Pat left him with, but it was grim. Pat’s instinct made for a good theory, a theory which explained everything from the accident and autopsy reports to the slow and steady decline of Montgomery’s post-inheritance accounts into the debt they were in again now. If Pat could dig up Kyle’s browsing history that might help them out more, but Alex couldn’t hold out hope for something that useful. He could only go with what he had in front of him.

It would have to be enough.

Kyle was a major scumbag. Alex wasn’t sure he even had the vocabulary to describe the man, and he had a fair few words at his beck and call when he needed them. He was pretty sure Titus had the language for it though. Soldiers could swear like it was going out of fashion.

What would Ty do if he got angry enough, though? Alex wasn’t sure. The man seemed to be a bastion of self-control and patience, but someone like Kyle could bring out the worst in anyone, and Alex had no doubt that Titus could be terrifying if he so much as scowled. Men his size tended to attract fear like flies to shit, whether they’d earned it or not.

If he took Pat’s findings to Ty, would Ty play into Detwiller’s hands by intimidating Montgomery?

Alex bit the tip of his tongue and fiddled with the little Curiosity Rover. He drove it back and forth across Montgomery’s credit card statements while his brain churned on options and possibilities.

If this information came out during a trial and Titus wasn’t prepared in advance, he might slip for a second. He might scowl. He might shift in his seat. He might give some visual clue that he was a man trained to kill, a man who could and would do serious harm to Montgomery given half the chance. Alex didn’t know whether it would happen, but he had to do everything he could to mitigate that chance.

Ty was an honest man. A good man. Alex had no doubt he’d do everything he could to protect Phoebe, and it was Alex’s job to give his client the tools to do that job with.

He tucked all the papers back into the folder, then slid the folder home in the envelope. His fingers coiled string around the fastening and he put the envelope into his briefcase.

Was he acting rashly? Pat had arrived earlier than expected and handed him a big fat envelope full of excuses to see Ty again. Was Alex rushing into this? Was he about to drive over to Flushing just to lay eyes on Titus one more time, or was this the best decision for Phoebe?

He wanted to see Ty. He couldn’t lie to himself about that. Whether it was a crush or something more he couldn’t tell, and he wouldn’t be in a position to work it out until this case was closed. But that didn’t mean he could rush things with the case.

Alex tapped his fingers against his briefcase, then made his decision. His client needed to know what Pat had found. And then he and his client would figure out how to proceed from here.

And then Alex had to hope that Ty’s idea of moving forward wasn’t to go beat the everloving shit out of Montgomery.

T
y was tightening
the lug nuts on a Scion’s new wheel when he heard the gentle cough from behind him.

“We need to talk,” Alex said.

Ty’s pulse raced at the sound of Alex’s voice. Was he here about the toy? The erection? No, no. He was professional. He was here for work. He had to be.

Ty shook his head faintly and tightened the last two nuts until he was satisfied with them. He carried the torque wrench back to its proper place and hung it in line with the other hand tools. Only then did he push up his safety goggles and turn to regard the attorney.

Alex stood just by the workshop’s office door, sleek and untouchable, Val at his side.

“This urgent?” Ty gestured to the Scion. “Owner’s stopping by at twelve.”

“It’s urgent.” Alex turned and walked into Ty’s office, and Val’s little bubble butt bounced along after him.

Not about us, then,
Ty reasoned. Not in that tone of voice, so abrupt and businesslike.

Wait. What “us”?!

Ty snorted softly and wiped his hands off on the rag tucked into his belt as he followed. “Okay. Hit me with it.”

Alex placed the envelope on Ty’s desk and shook his head faintly. “I want to call Detwiller for a meeting with him and his client.”

Ty looked to the envelope thoughtfully. It was a good inch thick, and big enough to contain documents. That meant it contained intel, and Alex had made a judgment call based on that intel.

Alex was a smart guy, so the intel had to be meaningful.

Ty moved past him and sat behind the desk. He reached for and opened the envelope and read through it with care. He found news clippings and bank statements, and none of it painted a pretty picture, but he couldn’t quite see why Alex considered it an urgent matter.

The attorney knew something else, then.

Ty finally put the papers down. Alex had sat, and had his hands in his lap, his fingers laced together to stop himself from fidgeting.

“Convenient deaths,” Ty said at last.

“Aren’t they?” Alex agreed.

“You think he arranged for this truck to hit them?”

“I think his creditors did.”

“Wells Fargo are putting out hits now?” Ty blinked.

Alex nudged his glasses up his nose. “Ha. No. But he was in deep with illegal gambling dens at the time, which in LA are almost exclusively run by organized crime cartels.”

Ty sucked on his teeth. “And he’s in debt again now. You think he’s still gambling.”

“My investigator’s trying to find proof.” Alex nodded toward the folder. “But this is more than enough to go to Detwiller with.”

“And what will that achieve?”

“If we can convince him that his client is dirty and that all this laundry will get aired in a trial we might get them to drop the case.”

Ty frowned at the paperwork strewn across his desk. “What are you seeing here that I’m not?”

Alex sucked in a breath and held it.

“Alex?” Ty looked up at the man and frowned slightly.

Alex’s brows were furrowed behind the frames of his glasses. His cheeks were pale, and his eyes bright. His knuckles were white. The attorney could only look more upset if he actually started to cry.

“What is it?” Ty sat forward slowly.

“I am concerned,” Alex said, picking his words with care, “that if I express to you my logical conclusion in this matter you will express… significant anger.”

Ty exhaled. Otherwise, he sat still. Now was
not
the time to zone in on the way Alex’s use of words did things to him that he didn’t understand. “I don’t have anger issues, Mr. Wilson.”

“Then you’re a better man than me, ’cause Montgomery is enough to make
me
angry, and I’m not…” Alex’s hands broke free and waved through the air, helpless and brief. “I’m not a man prone to temper.”

“No,” Ty mused. “You’re not. So out with it.”

“Why does a man who owes money to Chinese gambling dens want an eight-year-old girl?”

Ty pursed his lips. He felt the warmth flood his cheeks. His teeth ground together almost of their own accord, so hard that he could hear them. Every muscle tensed, and he remained stock still.

“There is absolutely no nice, happy way to make that kind of money from—”

“I get it,” Ty cut in.

Alex’s hands retreated to his lap and tied themselves together for comfort. “You’re my client. You deserved to know.”

“Yeah,” Ty breathed.

“And I didn’t know how you might react. I didn’t dare let you find out during the trial. You need to be prepared.”

Ty regarded the attorney and caught the man’s eyes flitting away for a moment.

Alex’s talk of anger suddenly made sense. He was right. This was enough to rile any decent human being, even one who was usually calm. So what might it do to an ex-soldier? Alex had been worried that Ty had some temper hidden below the cool exterior.

He’d been right, of course. Oh, not a Temper with a capital T, no, but everyone had it inside them, the faculty to become upset, to find something so objectionable that it made them want to draw a line in the sand.

“Don’t worry about me.” Ty spoke quietly. “I’m not going to even look at him funny in a courtroom, never mind tell him what I think of him. You can’t bat an eyelid in stress situations. Sometimes a twitch is all it takes to end you. You’re worried I’ll bug out and convince the judge I’m a big old scary motherfucker who can’t be trusted with a child, right?”

“If Detwiller can tar you with any brush, he will.”

“It’s his job. But don’t worry. I’ve had my best buddy blown up in my face and I didn’t even flinch.”

He tried to say it so casually, to make it sound like it was no big deal, but seconds after the words left his mouth Ty’s tension began to leave him. The adrenaline of working out what Montgomery might want Phoebe for began to crash out of his system, and the sinking sensation which followed it wasn’t only down to chemicals.

He didn’t talk about what happened. He didn’t talk to
anyone
about that.

Maybe the news about Montgomery had shaken him deeper than he thought. But he didn’t think it was that. Scumbags like Kyle were all over the world—here, Afghanistan, wherever—and Ty knew how to deal with them.

No.

It was Alex.

Ty lifted his gaze and watched the attorney. The slender, beautiful blond man in his tailored suit and the glasses that set off well against his cheekbones and eyes. All that intellect and grace, and it was all cleverly offset by his adorably silly dog. Was that why Alex picked a corgi? Did having Val along with him all the time make people underestimate him? Distract them from his keen mind and his observational skills? Or was he, deep down, just a little bit silly himself?

Alex blinked under Ty’s continued scrutiny. The tip of his tongue darted out to wet his pink lips.

Ty didn’t want Alex to speak, to intrude into his thoughts. He needed more time. Time to work out why in the hell he’d just mentioned one of the worst incidents of his entire life to this man.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Alex uttered the words every counselor and psychotherapist was born with, and Ty’s urge to bounce them right back again welled up inside him.

“Sure,” he said instead.

Alex’s head tilted aside. “You don’t, though,” he murmured. “Do you?”

Ty let out a short, bitter laugh. “Jesus, Alex, who’d want to talk about that kind of thing?”

Alex nodded softly. “Yeah.” He tugged his glasses off and examined the lenses, holding them up to the light as he squinted to one and then the other. He puffed on them, then returned them to his nose. “Nobody,” he eventually said. “But talking is how we as a species resolve our problems. It’s when talking fails that we resort to war.”

“You think I’d go to war if I don’t talk about what happened to Garrett?” He raised his chin slowly. Goddamn it,
there
was a name he hadn’t spoken in years.

How the hell did Alex do this? The man was under his skin and he’d barely even tried!

“We go to war all the time.” Alex’s voice was a tender thing. “Mostly with ourselves. Sometimes with other people. You ever watch the Black Friday news?” He smiled for a moment. “People going to war with each other over things they don’t even need. Going nuts for a TV or a Blu-ray player. Nobody needs that stuff. But they
want
it. War’s just that on a grander scale. Other people have stuff we want, and they won’t just give it to us for free.” He ran a hand through his yellow hair, and it sprang neatly back into place after. “When we go to war with ourselves it’s because what we want and what we need aren’t on the same page. You want to keep quiet about what you’ve been through. But you need to let it out. Otherwise why would you mention it to me?”

“It was just an example.” Ty was losing the battle, and he knew it.

“Not one you use often, if at all.” Alex gestured toward Ty’s face. “You’re good. You’ve mastered that inscrutable soldier gaze. But pain ticks a few autonomic boxes for everyone except true sociopaths. Pupillary response, skin pallor, vocal tension. You take firmer control over your body when you are in a stress situation. You tamp down on your movements, you go still. I figure that’s a habit anyone who defuses explosive devices develops if they want to survive, am I right?”

“Yeah.” The word rasped out of him, so Ty swallowed.

“So my question wasn’t fair. I know you don’t want to talk about it. But I think you should anyway. I think you need to talk it out.”

“With you.”

Alex’s lips quirked into a faint smile. “I’m here. I’m willing to listen.”

Ty sighed and sank back against his chair. He couldn’t look at the boyish attorney anymore, so he refocused on the far wall while he tried to sort his thoughts into some kind of order.

“There are different levels of EOD expertise. You tend to start out as a soldier who goes on the training course, but then the more devices you make safe, the more specialized you become. Sooner or later you get into a unit whose sole purpose is engineering, including the rendering safe of explosive ordnance. That’s where Garrett and I were at. We’d worked our way up until we were both deployed to Afghanistan. Kandahar. It’s a beautiful place. At first you think it’s desolate, but then you realize it’s got hundreds of thousands of people living there, and the mountains around it were like a picture frame. The people are so friendly, really genuine folk, and they just want to get on with their lives.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, we’d get intel about devices from all kinds of sources. Intercepted communications, word of mouth, radioed in by the British, whatever. We head out, make it safe, and move on.”

Alex said nothing, not even after Ty snuck a look at him. He just listened, his attention wholly on Ty’s story.

“One day we get a call. There’s a convoy going out along one of their main routes and they want us to pre-clear it. Nothing unusual about that. We move out and by one in the afternoon we’ve already neutralized two devices. Something’s obviously in this convoy that al-Qaeda want to blow up, so we carry on and we find another device. We work in rotation. I did the previous, so it was Garrett’s turn. We get suited up and go in.” His voice stuck in his throat. He swallowed, but his mouth was dry as the desert.

Alex stood up and went over to the water fountain without a word. He poured two cups of water. The sound of the machine dribbling water into the cup while bubbles of air rumbled through the plastic bottle on top was a sudden and unwelcome intruder in an otherwise peaceful room, and Ty sighed at it.

Alex placed a cup in front of him, then sat and sipped from his own.

“Thanks.” Ty swallowed. The water was cold, soothing, and it helped him pull himself together. “Anyway. It went off in his face. There’s no way of knowing whether he made a mistake, or the device was more sensitive, or whether if another one of us had been at the front if they’d have done something differently or what.” He allowed himself a slight shrug, if only to show Alex that he was capable of movement. “The suit didn’t save him.”

“That must have been hard,” Alex said as he leaned against the desk.

“You get to know people. You make friends. And even though you’re in that kind of situation, you just don’t think about…” Ty downed his water and tossed the cup into his trash bin.

“You don’t think it’ll end.” Alex nodded softly. “I understand.”

“Yeah.”

There didn’t seem to be much else to say. He pried himself out of his chair and headed around the desk, but it didn’t feel right to just go back to work on the Scion without saying something else. What, though?
Thanks for listening to my bullshit?
Or maybe even
Yeah, that did actually make me feel a bit better.

He opened his mouth, but still hadn’t decided what to say, so he shut it again.

Alex stood. He stepped in close.

And then he slid his arms around Ty’s body and held him tight.

Ty’s breath rushed out of him. He clamped his arms around Alex’s slender shoulders and squeezed.

He didn’t want to let go.

How long would be too long? How long before Alex pulled away and Ty was left alone again?

How long could he make this last?

But it wouldn’t be Alex who withdrew first, would it? No. Ty couldn’t let Alex be the one to do that. He had to put his foot down, to let the guy know this was just a bro thing, a friends thing. Not any…
other
kind of thing. Not while the
other
kind of thing could cost Alex his job.

Ty patted Alex’s back and eased away from him with a gruff nod.

“I’ll call Detwiller,” Alex said. The guy took a hint fast, that was for sure. He moved over to stuff all the papers into the envelope, then he tucked it under one arm and picked up Val’s leash with his free hand. “Once I get a date and time I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks, Alex.”

Alex’s brief ghost of a smile flickered across his perfect features. “For you? Any time.”

Ty watched the attorney walk out of his shop, but the warm press of his body against Ty’s own lingered long after the man was gone.