Protector (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 3) (2 page)

They’d never come home.
 

The three brothers had stayed up all night, getting more and more worried, until they’d finally gone to the police station first thing the next morning.

Garrett took a deep breath, still staring at his hands. He’d gone over it a thousand times in the past few years, but he’d never said it out
loud
to anyone before.

“Things get a little spotty after that,” he said.

“Just tell me what you can,” Elliott said. He could hear the sound of a pen on paper, but Garrett didn’t look up.

He and his brothers had never seen the crash site. Before he knew it — by the end of that second day, Garrett thought — the car had been hauled up out of the canyon and taken to a wrecking yard back in Blanding. By the time he and his brothers found out where the car had gone, it had been reduced to scrap metal already, and the Sheriff had just shrugged their questions off.

“How about your parents themselves?” Elliott asked.

Garrett looked up, right into her big, soft, brown eyes.

“Was there any evidence of foul play on their bodies?”

Garrett shoved his hair out of his face again.

“We never found out,” he said. “They were taken back to Blanding for an autopsy, since there was no facility in Obsidian, but apparently the hospital had some kind of mix-up and cremated them instead.”

Elliott stopped writing for a moment and pursed her lips.

“Weird, right?” Garrett asked.

“It does happen,” she said, and tapped the end of the pen against the paper. “Doctors and hospitals fuck up way, way more than people want to believe.”

She paused for a moment, then narrowed her eyes.

“Who identified their bodies?” she asked.

“The Sheriff,” Garrett said. “It’s a very small town. He knew who they were.”

“You never saw them?”

“I saw a picture,” he said.

Even now, remembering it made his stomach turn. It had been in the small Sheriff’s station in Obsidian, and the Kane County Sheriff, an overweight man named Raymond Tusk, had slapped the photo down on his desk in front of him, Seth, and Zach. Then Tusk had just walked away, like he didn’t give a damn.

Over the years, Garrett had chalked that up to Tusk’s own incompetence. It was probably easier for Tusk to get angry at three teenagers demanding evidence that their parents were
really
dead than admit that he’d fucked up.

That hadn’t made his parents’ pale, bloody faces any easier to stomach. He’d had nightmares for years afterward. When Tusk had died a few years ago, Garrett hadn’t been sorry.

“You’re sure it was them in the picture?” Elliott asked.

“I’m sure,” Garrett said.

“So someone
did
take photos, at least of the bodies,” Elliott said. “What about the accident scene?”

“I only ever saw two pictures,” Garrett said. “One of the bodies in the morgue, and one of the car after they found it the next day.”

“Do you know if more exist?”

“I haven’t found them.”

She nodded, writing.

“There were no witnesses, I’m assuming,” she said.

“No,” Garrett said.

Tell her
, he thought.

She was looking at him, brown eyes sharp.

“What is it?” she asked.

Garrett swallowed.

“There was another car that night,” he said. “The gravel road went right past our property, and at night, especially, we’d know if someone was coming down it.”

“Was that unusual?” she asked.

Garrett just nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Hardly anyone but us used that road. There was another road right in the middle of town that most everyone else used. Most nights there was nobody on that little dirt road off the mountain.”

He paused.

“I remember it because I thought it was our parents,” he said. “It was a sedan. I couldn’t see what color, but it looked like the car they had. It turned onto the highway and went into town, and I remember thinking,
wow, two cars in one day
.”

“Did you ever find out who it was?” she asked.

“No,” Garrett said. “The police didn’t believe me, so they never tried to find it.”

Elliott flicked him a skeptical glance.

“I know it was a long time ago,” Garrett said. “And I know you probably think that I’m confused, or my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I
know
what I saw.”

She blinked.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I believe you.”

She glanced over her notes for a moment, then looked back up at him.

“This could be suspicious, or it could be a case of a few screw-ups in a small town,” she said.

Ellie pushed the paper away, then looked at Garett again.

He thought about her hips under his hands, tearing off her sensible shirt and swiping his tongue past one erect nipple —
 

“Is there any reason someone might want your parents dead?” she asked.

This
was where things got very, very tricky.

Garrett had had insomnia for as long as he could remember, even as a kid. One night, lying awake in bed, he’d looked out of his window.

In the yard below had been his mother, walking away from the house. They lived on the edge of town, there were no other houses behind theirs — just the vast, unspoiled Utah wilderness.

As he watched, she’d turned into a giant bird and taken off.

He’d assumed he was dreaming.
 

That is, until he saw it again. And
again
.

There was
no
way he was telling Ellie about that part.

“They were very unpopular in town,” he said slowly. “Most of the people in town kind of closed themselves off from my mother’s family, and my father, when they got married.”

Ellie listened.

“Over a hundred years ago, in the 1870s, I think, there was a drought. And the only person who had a good harvest was my ancestor,” Garrett said. “The rest of the town decided that he’s made some kind of deal with the devil, even though it’s just because he was smart enough to stake his claim next to the river.”

Ellie frowned.

“People are still mad about that?” she said, incredulously.

Garrett shrugged.

“There has to be some other reason,” she said, her eyes narrowed.

“If there is, I wish I knew it,” Garrett said.

Ellie looked at her note paper like she wasn’t sure what to write down.

“Were they mad enough to murder your parents?” she asked, skeptically.

“I don’t think so,” Garrett said. “But it’s all I’ve got.”

She leaned her head on one hand and tapped the pen on the desk again.

“I’ll see if I can turn up some evidence,” she said. “A police report, a hospital file,
something
. But don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

Garrett reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash drive, then placed it on the desk in front of Ellie.

“That’s got everything I’ve been able to find,” he said. “Maps to the crash site, articles, press releases from the police, the hospital, the whole thing.”

Ellie closed it in her hand.

“The password is ‘Obsidian15,’ but the O is a zero,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “Very secure.”

“I try,” Garrett said.

“I’m not sure how long this will take, but I think at least two days,” Ellie said. “I charge fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.”

“Sounds good,” Garrett said. He stood from his chair and stretched. “Let me know what you find.”

Ellie tore a post-it note from a pad on her desk and handed it to him.

“Give me your number,” she said.

Garrett wrote it down, then tossed the pen on the desk and pushed his hair out of his face again.

“It was nice meeting you, private investigator Ellie,” he said.

“Same,” Ellie said, and stuck out her hand.

Garrett shook it again, fighting the urge to pull her toward him, to feel her body underneath his hands.

Then he let go, turned, and walked back down her stairs.

Chapter Two

Ellie

As he closed the door, Garrett turned and, Ellie could
swear
, gave her a little half-smile before closing it. Then she heard his steps retreating down the stairs until they were gone.

Ellie flopped back into her chair, the force of it rolling the big leather thing a couple feet backwards. For a few seconds she just stayed there, motionless.

That was like a cliché from an old movie
, she thought.
Only with the genders reversed.

She swallowed and finally sat up straight, rolling herself to sit in front of her desk again.

I didn’t even think I liked disheveled men
, she thought, staring at the notes in front of her. She couldn’t read a word of them, because every time she started trying to formulate a list of what to do, all she saw was Garrett, smirking and saying
I brought trouble
.

It was all Ellie could do to stop thinking of
how
he could trouble her, with his dark hair and gold eyes, his thick, ropy arms, his dimples when he smiled.

There were lots of ways. Ellie was imaginative.

After a few minutes of getting
nowhere
, she stood up and went to the windows. Main Street was below her, and for a few moments, she watched the people below. It was three, so the high school had just let out and there were plenty of teenagers walking around, eating candy or drinking coffee and horsing around. Some parents with kids. A smattering of people who looked like tourists, though Grand Junction wasn’t exactly a tourist attraction.

Okay
, she thought.
Quit thinking about how much you want Studmuffin McMurdered Parents to toss you around, and think about how you’re going to help him.

Below, in the doorway of a closed shop, two teenagers tried to suck each other’s faces off. Ellie crinkled her nose and left the window.

Right now, her workload was pretty light. There were two divorce cases, her least favorite. She took them because they paid the bills, but figuring out what someone’s soon-to-be-ex spouse was lying about was never much fun.

There was one missing jewelry case, which sounded more interesting than it probably was. Ellie
wished
there had been a big jewelry heist in Grand Junction, but instead, she was pretty sure that this woman had left her favorite earrings in a hotel room. Instead of tracking down jewel thieves, she was going to have to call every hotel on the woman’s two-week itinerary, ask about their lost and found, try to figure out which housekeeper had cleaned the room the woman had stayed in.

The last thing besides Garrett’s parents was a collection agency who wanted her to find someone for them, because the person owed money. As much as she hated it, that was Ellie’s favorite kind of case. Even though she felt bad finding someone for loan sharks, she loved the thrill of figuring out
where
and
how
the person had eluded them.

I wish I could do those, except not turn them over at the end
, she thought, looking at the file on her desk.

Hands down, Garrett’s case was the most interesting thing going on right now, and hands extra-double-down,
Garrett
was the most interesting thing that had walked into her office... well,
ever,
in the five years since she’d set up shop.

He’s your client
, she thought to herself.
Quit it. Be a professional
.

Well, the faster she solved this case, the faster he wasn’t a client anymore.

Ellie inserted the flash drive into her computer and fired up her billing clock.

* * *

At 4:45, Ellie felt like she’d made a good start. She’d gone over the information on the flash drive — Garrett hadn’t lied, there wasn’t much — and made an extensive list of possible leads to follow.

Experience told her that most weren’t going to pan out, especially sixteen years after the incident. People died, they moved away, they just didn’t
remember
what happened on a day that didn’t mean much to them.

Ellie did her best not to have preconceived notions about cases, but this one seemed pretty simple: a bunch of rural cops had fucked up. If there was a cover-up, they’d been covering up how much they’d screwed up, not foul play.

Occam’s razor and all that
, Ellie thought.
It’s way more likely that someone messed up than that they successfully covered up a murder for sixteen years
.

She pulled the flash drive back out of her computer, tossed it into a drawer, and locked the drawer.

As she pulled the key out, she heard footsteps coming back up the stairs. For a moment, her heart beat faster.

Maybe it’s Garrett again
, she thought.
Maybe he forgot something, like to ask me to dinner
.

There was a polite knock on the door, and then the door opened without waiting for a response.

“Howdy,” said the woman standing there.

Ellie almost burst out laughing, remembering her professionalism at the last moment.

“Hi,” she said. “How can I help you?”

The woman looked like a cartoon cowgirl from a Saturday morning cartoon: plaid shirt with western designs stitched over the pockets, tight jeans with a big belt buckle, blond pigtails, brand new cowboy boots.

Snakeskin
, Ellie thought automatically.

The woman smiled, came in, and shut the door. Something about her made the back of Ellie’s neck prickle the tiniest amount, and she thought of the pistol in her desk.

“Are you taking on cases right now?” the woman asked, still smiling.

“I am,” Ellie said, automatically.

Maybe someday she could decline a case, but not
now.
She had bills to pay.

The woman sat in a chair, facing Ellie.

“I’m wondering if you could look into a fellow for me,” the woman said. “I can give you a photo. I just need to know where he is, where he goes, what he does for a couple of days.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows.

“Divorce?” she asked.

“Sure,” the woman said, her smile never wavering for a moment. “He’s a real piece of work, and he thinks he can put me out on the street and live in
our
house with his mistress.”