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Authors: Roxie Noir,Amelie Hunt

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BOOK: Protector (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 3)
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There was something weird about the way the woman spoke. She didn’t
sound
quite upset enough to be hiring a private investigator for a divorce — Ellie saw a
lot
of tears, angry and otherwise, in her office.

Besides,
Ellie thought.
I’m not sure anyone’s ever called their husband’s lover a mistress before, at least in front of me.

The woman kept smiling, then dug through her enormous purse.

I’ve heard ‘whore,’ ‘slut,’ ‘new fucktoy,’ and even ‘tart
,’ she thought.
Never ‘mistress.’

“Here he is,” the woman said, handing over a photo. “James Wilson. The asshole himself.”

She slid a photo across the desk, and Ellie nearly did a double-take.

It was Garrett.

Ellie summoned every ounce of will she had and kept her face carefully blank, simply scanning the photo for details. It had been taken from some distance, and Garrett had his hands in his pockets, a leather jacket on, as he walked somewhere.

“Where was this taken?” she asked, carefully.

“Outside their love nest,” the woman said, cheerfully. “The address is on the back.”

Ellie flipped it over and read the address. She forced herself not to think
anything
, afraid that her face might give away that he’d been there only a few hours ago.

“I see,” she finally said. “What kind of information are you looking for?”

“Just anything,” the woman said. “You just gather data and my lawyer can decide what’s useful. You know how it is.”

Ellie nodded, and the woman stood.

“Keep the photo.”

“My rate is seventy bucks an hour plus expenses,” Ellie said — this woman looked like she could afford it.

“Sounds fine,” the woman said, and held out a card in one well-manicured hand.
Marlene Robinson
, it read.
 

“Call me when you’ve got something?”

“Sure thing,” said Ellie. “It’ll be several days, I’ve got a full case load now.”

The woman smiled again and walked for the door. Ellie noticed she was walking a little gingerly, like maybe her new boots had given her blisters.

As she left the office, Ellie spotted the rhinestones on the back pockets of her jeans.

Then the door shut again, and she was alone with the picture of Garrett. Or James. Whatever the fuck his name was.

“What is going
on
?” she said out loud to her empty office.

* * *

Ellie twirled spaghetti around her fork as her sister-in-law extolled the virtues of the single, educated, high-earning lawyer she’d shown houses to that day. As a real estate agent, Krissy was
always
meeting people she deemed suitable for Ellie.

Well, as long as the main requirement was that a man owned a house.

“He was telling me that he went to UCLA Law,” Krissy gushed. “And now he’s a junior associate at Banks, Banks, and Jackson, and I hear personal injury law is a
goldmine
.”

Not what I hear
, Ellie thought.

“Most of the personal injury lawyers I know aren’t particularly happy,” Ellie said. She sucked the end of a spaghetti noodle into her mouth.

Or interesting
, she thought.

Unbidden, her mind went to Garrett / James.
Again
.

Too interesting
, she thought.
Mysteriously dead parents, an ex-wife, and a mistress? Too much
.

Not that she necessarily believed the cowgirl. One of the newspaper articles Garrett had scanned onto his flash drive had had a picture of what was
clearly
himself at fifteen.

Ellie just didn’t know
what
to think.

“So
anyway
, since he bought the house, I’ve got his number,” Krissy said, winking at Ellie.

Ellie had forgotten to pay attention.

“Okay,” she said.

“Great!” said Krissy. “You know, my friend’s brother also has a friend who just moved here from Denver, and he’s — “

“Hon, maybe give Ellie one suitor at a time?” her brother said, smiling gently at his wife.

“I’m sure she can handle a few men at once, Cody,” Krissy said, winking.

Ellie’s parents were notably silent.

Cody patted his wife’s hand and looked at Ellie.

“Anything good today?” he asked the table at large.

“We had a kindergarten student fall into a toilet,” Ellie’s mom said, matter-of-factly.

Cody snorted, trying not to laugh. Their mother was the principal of an elementary school in town.

“He okay?” Ellie asked, also trying not to laugh.

“Just upset,” her mom said. “Very, very upset.”

“One of the guys caught someone doing one-twenty on the interstate,” her dad said. “That’s close to the department record.”

He was the chief of the Grand Junction police.

“What’s the record?” Ellie asked.

“One-twenty-four,” he said. “Set on that straight stretch outside town in nineteen eighty three. How about you?”

Ellie took a sip of wine and considered for a moment.

“I had a weird day,” she said. “First, a guy came in wanting me to investigate an accident that happened fifteen years ago.”

“That sounds exciting,” Krissy said. “What kind of accident?”

“Car crash,” Ellie went on. “Then, right before I closed up shop, this rhinestone cowgirl comes in, asks me to follow her ex-husband for a divorce case, and hands me a photo of the guy from earlier, but with a different name attached.”

Everyone at the table frowned.

“You’re sure it’s the same guy?” Cody asked.

Ellie nodded, chewing spaghetti.

“Rhinestone cowgirl?” Krissy asked.

Ellie told her what the woman had been wearing, all the way down to the snakeskin boots.

“Those are
expensive
,” Krissy said.

“It was weird,” Ellie said. “Maybe she was trying to blend in, and thought that’s what people wear in Colorado?”

Krissy just shrugged.

“I meet people like that sometimes,” she said. “They’re always from Texas. Every single time.”

Cody laughed.

“Maybe the rodeo’s in town,” he said.

“Do women ride rodeo?”

“Women do all sort of things these days, Ellie,” her mother said.

“The guy didn’t say anything about getting divorced?” her father asked.

“Nothing,” Ellie said.

And believe me, I was paying attention
, she thought.

“It’s probably just two people who look a
lot
alike,” her father said. “Happens sometimes. There are a couple of cases where people have wound up on death row for looking too much like someone else.”

Ellie’s eyes widened.

“Not that this will end with someone on death row,” he said quickly. “I’m just saying, people look alike sometimes.”

“You’re probably right,” Ellie said. “That makes the most sense.”

“Life is rarely that interesting,” her father said. “Who wants ice cream for dessert?”

* * *

Over the next few days, Ellie kept looking at the photo of the rhinestone cowgirl’s ex-husband. It
really
did look like Garrett, but the more she looked, the less sure she was.

Did Garrett’s nose have that very slight crook in it, like it had been broken once? Were his eyebrows quite shaped like that? Wasn’t his hair a little darker?

Other than looking at the photo, Ellie didn’t work on the rhinestone cowgirl’s case at all. She finished up the other divorce cases and found a man who’d been hiding out from credit card companies in Montana.

She
also
looked into Garrett’s case. That one was the hardest by far, mostly because sixteen years ago, almost nothing had been digitized. It seemed like the internet hadn’t really come to Obsidian until recently, so she kept hitting that wall.

Kane County hadn’t digitized
anything
more than five years old: not death records, accident records, police reports,
nothing
. Ellie had to go to Google Earth to find out that the road where his parents had died had been washed out by a mudslide in 2009, and was now completely closed to traffic.

What little she
did
find suggested she wasn’t going to get very far by calling the police and asking nicely, so she decided to call the hospital in Blanding first and ask
not
-nicely.
 

She spoofed her number to a Washington, D.C. Area code, and after twenty minutes of battling her way through a phone tree at the hospital, she finally reached someone in management.

“Yes?” said a bored, harassed-sounding man.

“This is Agent Clarissa Sampson from the Department of Homeland Security,” she said, her voice sounding official even to
her
. “I’m calling because we believe an incident that happened May 3, 2000, may be linked to a current investigation.”

The other end of the line was silent for a moment.

“Did you say Homeland Security?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ellie said. “We’re currently investigating a group that may have been involved with this incident.”

One hundred percent lies, of course, but Ellie had found that invoking Homeland Security was far and away the fastest route to get information.

“Terrorists?” the man said, sounding breathless.

“I can’t give out any information, I’m afraid,” she said. “The nature of the investigation demands the
utmost
secrecy.”

“Of course,” he said. “What can I give you?”

It took another forty-five minutes, mostly due to technological wrangling, but by the end of the phone call Ellie had scans of all the paperwork she’d requested up on the screen: death certificates, admission records for the Monsons, pages and pages of forms, and a list of hospital personnel who’d been working that day.

Even though it was a small hospital,
that
was a long list, and Ellie sighed inwardly.

“Thank you
very
much, Mr. Porter,” she said, trying to finish the call.


Please
, call me Tom,” he said. “I’m only sorry I didn’t work here then and can’t help you more. It sounds like it was a
terrible
crash.”

“Yes,” Ellie said.

“You know,” Tom said, his voice dropping. “I’ve always suspected that there might be a sleeper cell right here in Blanding.”

Shit
, thought Ellie.

“Sometimes, at night, you see fires way up in the hills,” he went on. “And if you go up there, no one’s there. They’re just empty fires. I think it’s a signaling method. That the
terrorists
use.”

It’s teenagers,
Ellie thought.
There’s nothing to do but get drunk around a fire in the middle of nowhere, and when adults come up, they run away
.

“I’ll have someone look into that,” she said.

“Sometimes, when I make a phone call from my house, the line is very staticky,” he went on. “But only sometimes. Am I being listened to? By the terrorists?”

It took Ellie another twenty minutes to get off the phone.

Chapter Three

Garrett

Garrett stood back and looked at the wall. It had taken him all week to get it set up again in his new sublet here in Grand Junction, but it made everything so much
easier
.

The pictures, posters, and shelves that had covered the wall were stacked in one corner. They were stacked carefully, but he still had the feeling that the lady who’d rented him her apartment for two months might not be thrilled about what he was doing.

He sat on the brown leather couch that he’d dragged to face the wall, sat, and looked at it. Garrett tried to always sublet apartments from women, because frankly, their places were just
nicer
. They usually felt a little homier, more lived-in.

The last place he’d rented from a guy had been a bachelor in Madison, Wisconsin, and it had been a little depressing. Nice enough, and it had all the right amenities, but it just didn’t feel like a place where someone
lived
.

Garrett leaned back and put his arms on the back of the sofa, looking at the wall.

I can never have a girl over here
, he thought.
This makes me look like a serial killer.

At the very top, up against the ceiling, was an index card with a question mark on it, red string connecting it to three other cards.

On the left, his parents. In the middle, his brother Seth. On the right, his brother Zach. Crammed between Zach and the ceiling, like he’d remembered at the last minute, was an index card with his own name.

Every card but his own had the word SHIFTED written in red in the lower right-hand corner. Seth was connected with short red string to a card that said QUARCOM. Zach was connected the same way to MUTAGEN, and below those, was a mess of notes, maps, spreadsheet printouts, and a million other things.

In the next room, on the kitchen table, three computer monitors hummed away. Garrett knew he could have set this up electronically, and it would have been a lot easier to move stuff around, but this way made it easier for him to
think
.

Okay
, he thought.
So think
.

He stared at the wall for a moment.

Think Ellie’d go on a date with me?
He wondered.
Maybe I can just call her to pull her off this case, and then ask her out or something.

I wonder if she’d say yes, but maybe she’s married. Maybe she’s seeing someone.

Just the thought darkened his mood and made something in him
seethe
. He looked at the wall and read the names over and over again, trying not to think about Ellie with someone else.

After a minute, his phone rang, and he pulled it from his pocket. A Grand Junction number.

“This is Garrett,” he said.

“Elliott Velasquez,” a familiar voice said on the other end.

“Hey, Ellie,” he said.

A grin spread itself across his face.

“I’ve made some decent progress on your case,” she said.

Garrett imagined her, sitting in her desk chair, her soft curves in another button-down-shirt-and-pants ensemble.

“That was fast,” he said.

“Could you come in tomorrow morning?” she asked. “These things are usually best face-to-face.”

BOOK: Protector (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 3)
8.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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