Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
She settled even deeper into his chest as she took a drag from her beer and then murmured, “Well, I think this house tells a tale about Lincoln Whitaker. Just as the cabin tells one about Roosevelt. One was complicated. Brilliant, but complicated. The other enjoyed the simple life. It isn’t surprising, they might have been twins, but they were two different men. Still, something doesn’t add up here.”
She was correct about that too.
He’d had plans for the next day of taking his kid to school and spending the rest of the day getting Nadia’s cameras set up, the American flag she told him she bought, and if there was any time left, working in his workshop.
But he slotted a visit to Harry on his schedule.
After doing that, he gave Nadia another squeeze and asked, “Feel like more cake?”
She twisted her neck again to look at him. “Seriously? I don’t think I’ll be able to eat for a week.”
“Well, I feel like more cake.”
Her sunny smile came back, stating plain she dug that he liked her cake, and while she was still blasting it at him, he let her go, but took her hand and led her to the kitchen where she watched as he cut himself another wodge of her amazing cake.
And she kept watching as he downed it.
FOURTEEN
Case File
Riggs
Late the next morning, Riggs pushed through the door at the sheriff’s department a couple minutes after Harry told him he’d be free to have a chat.
He gave a few nods to the deputies milling around.
But since all of them knew him because he’d done work on their houses, or their parents’ houses, or they’d gone to school with him, partied with him, drank at a bar with him, or they just lived in the same small town, no one stopped him as he made his way back to Harry’s office.
The door was open, and his friend’s eyes came to him from where he sat behind his desk, but Riggs still knocked on the doorframe, since Cade Bohannan and Rus Lazarus were sitting in the two chairs in front of Harry’s desk.
Bohannan was an MP native and retired FBI profiler who now did consultant work and taught courses.
Lazurus was Fret County Sheriff’s new detective. Also former FBI, he’d come to town the year before to track the Crystal Killer. While doing that, he’d fallen for a local, Cin Bonner, and now he was shacked up with her.
Riggs had known Cade his whole life, though Cade had spent a lot of his living elsewhere when he was with the FBI. But Riggs had always liked the man. He couldn’t say they were close buds, but there was mutual respect. On Riggs’s part, this was mostly because Cade had always treated him like Doc Riggs, not John Riggs’s son, and that meant something to Riggs, especially from a world-renown criminal profiler.
On the other hand, he’d only known Rus for a few months, and he called the man his friend. They’d shared beers while watching a game at Harry’s more than once. He was a good man, smart, funny, and making him better, he was a good friend to Harry. He had Harry’s back at work and, Riggs sensed, emotionally.
After Harry lost what he lost, he didn’t let many people in.
But he’d let in Rus.
“Am I interrupting something?” Riggs asked.
“We’re finishing up,” Harry said. “Grab a chair and join us, unless what you have to talk to me about is private.”
Riggs came in, nabbed a chair from the small conference table in the corner and turned it around toward Harry’s desk before he sat in it.
“No. Actually it’d be good to have you all here when we talk about this,” he shared.
The other men glanced at each other, and Riggs didn’t make them wait.
“Nadia, my neighbor,” he said the last just in case Cade didn’t know of her, “has had someone fucking with her.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harry muttered in a harassed way.
“Yeah. Scratching her windows in the middle of the night and banging together some rocks by where Whitaker’s stables used to stand,” Riggs explained. “I grabbed some surveillance stuff, heading back to install it after this. But thought you should have that heads up.”
Knowing him better than the other two in the room, it was Harry who demanded, “You get some video, you phone me.”
“I’ll try to stay in that frame of mind, and whoever’s doing this might not know what she’s going through right now. Even so, that shit is whacked. She’s not happy about it, and it’s arguable, but I’d argue I’m even less so.”
Harry didn’t take his eyes off Riggs, and Riggs got that, because, again, the man knew him well, so he knew Riggs would put himself in front of a bullet for his son, mother, sister or a good friend, but this protective streak with Nadia was telling.