Fortune bloomed when some time after (and it was so long, both Midnight and I were having second thoughts, her because this was boring, me because quite some time meant plenty of it to lose courage), Coert walked out alone with his phone to his ear.
I watched as he walked to the side of his sheriff’s truck but stopped there between his truck and another car and kept talking.
I ignored my head screaming, No! He hates you! Just go to your lighthouse, light a fire and plan a cross country road trip with Midnight for a long visit back to Denver, one that’ll last until everyone comes out for Christmas, meaning Coert will have Lars again behind bars and you can go back to avoiding one another.
Instead, I took hold of Midnight’s lead, opened my door, climbed out, she climbed out with me, and we started across the street, moving toward Coert.
I saw what appeared to be a family walking down the sidewalk but I paid no mind to them as I heard Coert saying curtly in his phone, “Trouble follow you from Denver?” And without giving who he was talking to even a second to reply, he demanded, “Answer me!”
I bit my lip and wondered if approaching him in this mood was a good idea.
However, Midnight had clearly caught our direction and she hadn’t forgotten Coert this time, so she had another idea. This being she started straining to get to him.
I knew immediately when Coert noted our approach, feeling the heat of his eyes as they cut to me.
But when Midnight made it to him, dragging me right along with her, Coert showed he was not a man to take a bad mood out on a dog. He did this by bending to her and giving her some scratches at the same time getting some puppy kisses.
And talking.
“Your notes are thorough, but your intuition and ethics are shit. You led him right to her . . . and me.”
Uh-oh.
I stopped.
In the streetlights I saw Coert’s eyes skewer mine before they dropped to my dog.
“Sit,” he ordered.
Midnight sat and I considered doing the same thing.
“My dog,” he said into the phone.
His dog?
“If Moreland was alive, he’d wring your neck,” he snarled.
Uh-oh.
I felt dread fill my veins.
Coert just kept speaking.
“Since I’m still alive, here’s a warning and you should listen to it. Don’t get close to my town again.” He paused then he said, “I know that. But the fact remains, you not only made it easy, you had an opportunity to stop it altogether.”
With that, he took the phone from his ear, beeped it off and scowled at me.
“You got great timing,” he declared.
“What?” I whispered.
“We closed in on Lars this morning.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked hesitantly, because it not only seemed good, it seemed fantastic, but he didn’t seem to think the same.
“It would have been, if he hadn’t cleared out before we got there. By the state of the place where he was crashing, right before we got there. Didn’t get the chance to take anything with him. Left clothes behind. Even ammo. And lots of other shit I spent the afternoon combing through that was interesting.”
I didn’t like the idea of Lars having ammo, even if he left it behind.
“Why do I get the feeling that you’re using the word interesting but you mean annoying?” I queried.
“Because I just got a return call from your husband’s investigator and he admitted that, on Moreland’s orders, he started tailing Lars the second he was released from prison. He also stated he thought Lars made him but he couldn’t be sure. But he backed off. Lars then vanished. My buddy Malc in Denver has a son, who’s a PI, who Malc’s got lookin’ into shit. Part of that is Malc’s boy Lee helping himself to this investigator’s notes and reports. And what Lee found was this guy never picked up Lars’s trail again, definite indication that Lars made him and this guy knew it. Problem was, this was a screw up of massive proportions and this guy knew that too. So in his reports to your husband, he made up shit about keeping tabs on Lars when what we found in Lars’s hideout was that Lars followed that jackass, that jackass clearly never made him and so that jackass led him to every member of his old crew.” A weighty pause and then he finished, “And us.”
“Oh no,” I whispered.
“Oh yeah,” Coert returned. “So he’s been unwittingly aiding and abetting an arson and murder spree, and on top of that, for two years, your husband didn’t know the man he’d hired to keep tabs on people who could make you unsafe made you fuckin’ unsafe.”
“And you,” I said, my voice shaky.
“What?” Coert asked.
“And he made you unsafe.”
“You lived in a mansion, Cady. I’m the sheriff for Derby County. He’d find me, no sweat. You with a husband who goes to those lengths to keep informed on anything that might harm you, nothing would harm you. This investigator should have been the first to catch on to what was happening. Not go to lengths to hide his screw up at the same time not link together that he’d lost Lars and his old crew was dropping like flies.”
I pressed my lips together because I had nothing to say since it would be useless to confirm to Coert something he knew was true.
Midnight shifted to the side so she was leaning on my legs.
Coert looked into the night then looked at me.
“What are you doin’ here?”
“It’s the town council meeting and I thought you’d be here, so I thought I’d come so I could get updated on what was happening with Lars.”
“Isn’t Monica calling you?” he asked.
“Well, yes.”
“And don’t you have my number?”
I didn’t and I did. I’d erased it from my contacts but I could easily resurrect it from his texts.
“I erased it,” I admitted.
He seemed to grow in size, this making Midnight go to all fours, as he asked irately, “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”
“I was drunk at the time.”
His brows snapped together. “What are you talking about?”
“It was the night of the fire when you were accusing me of having something to do with the fire when I actually did but I didn’t know I did at the time.”
“You don’t have anything to do with that fire,” he clipped tersely.
“Lars is here to hurt me or you, so I do.”
“Don’t shoulder blame that isn’t yours.”
“It’s hard not to when four business owners are suffering for me making poor decisions nearly two decades ago.”
“Stop that shit,” he growled. “It’s a waste of energy because what another person does is not on you. And think it’s important to point out, I didn’t think you had anything to do with the fire.”
He didn’t?
“You made it sound that way.”
“I thought you were with someone or knew something about someone who might know something about the fire.”
“That, Coert, is saying you thought I had something to do with the fire.”
“It is not.”
“It very much is.”
“It very much fuckin’ isn’t.”
How could he not see that it was?
“If I knew something about the fire, I wouldn’t call you and then not tell you I knew something, anything about the fire. Especially not inebriated. I’m chatty when I’m inebriated, as you well know. And furthermore, it was incredibly insulting you’d assume that.”
“Cady, history and you parking your ass in Magdalene then goin’ off and pissin’ off your brother with some unknown but reportedly unpleasant friend is hard to ignore.”
“Only because you won’t let history go,” I retorted hotly, this not being where I’d hoped the opportunity I was creating and the risk I was taking was going to go.
But in my defense he was such a grudge holder!
“You’re right.”
I blinked.
“I’m . . . right?” I asked for confirmation.
“You wanna know the truth . . .”
I wasn’t sure I did but it wasn’t a question because he kept talking.