The Fix Is In: Torus Intercession Book Four, page 18
“No. But she made sure to tell him that she and I would be joining him on the search tomorrow morning.”
“And he didn’t think that was odd because you and Darcy help out all the time.” I glanced at Benji, noting how focused he was before I turned back to her.
“That’s right.”
I was quiet for a moment. “Why would you volunteer to join the search, though? Caleb left you.”
Her whole face scrunched up.
“Suzie?”
Her breath sounded choppy. “About a week after he left, I got a job as a beautician, working with Darcy at her shop. I’ve had my cosmetology license for years and always kept it current, and I’m glad I did because it gave me options. I wasn’t at the bar anymore.” I waited as she took a moment before continuing. “And I have to tell you, that change was like a weight off me, and Pete felt it too. Us not being together twenty-four seven has made all the difference in the world. He’s a completely different person from the man he was when Caleb was here.”
I nodded, waiting.
“Everything in our relationship has changed,” she explained, smiling for the first time. “We take turns cooking, we split the chores fifty-fifty, and––”
“That’s all great,” I conceded, “but what does that have to do with Caleb?”
“Looking back on everything now, I don’t think us not being around each other was the only reason for the change in Pete.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, even though I could already follow her train of thought.
She began wringing her hands and looked away before turning back to me. “I think Pete knew about Caleb. I was fooling myself, thinking I could hide anything from him, and I’m wondering now, what if… if—” She couldn’t give voice to her fear, and I understood. It was horrible to imagine.
“What if?” was a dangerous question if you were afraid of the answer.
What if I won a million dollars? What if I met my soulmate? What if I lived happily ever after? Those what-ifs allowed people to dream.
What if I never make enough money to get out of debt? What if I never meet the one? What if I die alone? Those are the questions that could haunt.
And it could get worse, like in Suzie’s case. What if he found out about my affair? What if my husband killed the man I was infatuated with? What if my world just imploded?
“Do you think Pete killed Caleb?” Benji posed the question without a drop of sympathy, so completely clinical. He’d changed in the middle of the conversation. One moment he was upset, even angry, and the next, all I saw was the psychiatrist. It was a bit unnerving to see the switch flip so quickly, in a flash, the night-and-day transformation. He turned all his emotions off like a faucet, and I wasn’t sure I liked that. I definitely never wanted to know what his indifference felt like.
“I don’t know,” she whimpered, the tears starting again.
Reaching down into the storage compartment under the armrest, I retrieved the box of tissues there. I passed it to her. She plucked two and returned it to me. Once she had wiped her eyes and blown her nose, she looked back up at me and Benji.
“I’m terrified to think that Pete could have hurt Caleb. It’s easier to think that maybe I was wrong. Maybe Caleb didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about him.”
“But?” Benji said, staring at her.
“But,” she repeated, “I had no idea I could ever feel that way about anyone, and I swear it wasn’t just me.”
We sat there in the car with the rain hitting the roof in a steady barrage, no one saying a word.
“May I ask,” I began, “who are Pete’s closest friends?”
“Why is that important?”
“Because Caleb’s motorcycle is missing as well.”
She nodded.
“Suzie?”
Clearing her throat, she said, “Stewart and Chuck.”
So his friends were the ranger, who knew everything about the area and terrain, and— “Is Chuck, Chuck Lindstrom?”
She nodded.
And Chuck bought the cabin and the land it sits on from Ruben Navarro, then declared it private property. What would be his motivation for doing that when it had been public land for years?
“Why do you want to know who Pete’s friends are?”
“Why do you think?” I prodded her.
“Your questions make this all sound so sinister.” She bristled, angry now. “I told you this is probably just me being crazy. It wasn’t fair of me to accuse Pete of doing something that there’s absolutely no evidence of, and now you’re trying to drag his friends into it.”
“Be that as it may, you still need to go in and speak to Chief Brasher.”
“No, I won’t do that. Were you even listening to me? I can’t implicate Pete on nothing more than a stupid hunch. Not only would that destroy my marriage, but I’ve seen enough episodes of Law & Order to know a wife can’t testify against her husband.”
“Let’s do this,” Benji began, his voice silvery and smooth. “Tomorrow we’ll all look for Caleb up by the cabin where I saw him that day, and if we find anything that leads us to believe something nefarious happened to him, then you talk to Chief Brasher.”
She was chewing on her bottom lip.
“Are we agreed?” he pressed.
She nodded quickly.
“I need you to understand, Mrs. Belmont, that if you don’t come on the search tomorrow, I will immediately talk to Chief Brasher about what you’ve shared with us. If you don’t, I could only assume the reason for your absence is that your husband did something to keep you from aiding in the search. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You’re saying that if I mention this to Pete, you think he might hurt me.”
“Not might,” he clarified solemnly. “For months now I’ve been on the receiving end of threats to my life because I took a picture of Caleb and someone didn’t want me asking questions about him. If that can happen to me, an innocent bystander who had no idea why I was being targeted, then you absolutely could be in real danger.”
She shook her head. “Pete would never hurt me.”
They sounded like famous last words to me.
“Then we have nothing to worry about, and we’ll see you tomorrow,” Benji concluded. “Now, where can we drop you?”
It turned out her car was there in the parking lot, and I drove over to it. Before she got out of the SUV, she said that she wished Benji had never taken that picture, but she was thankful at the same time.
“I want to know if something happened to Caleb,” she confessed. “But I also am praying that nothing did.”
Once we were alone, I turned to Benji. “Stewart Alameda is your friend, right?”
“I knew you were going to suspect him,” he told me. “You think Stewart loaned me his car so I could drive up into the mountains to see Harold, and then he turned around and shot at me.”
“No,” I corrected him. “I think the first part is right, but I don’t think Stewart shot at you. He’s a wildlife ranger. He’s been trained to defend himself with a rifle and would have hit you if he was aiming at you. I do think he set you up, but I’d put money on it being either Pete or Chuck shooting at you that day.”
“So you think it’s Pete, whom I’ve never met, by the way, who’s been stalking me, and Chuck and Stewart are helping him.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I do. Think about it. Pete lives in Gearhart, he would know the cemetery, so when you were stranded out there that night, I bet he was the one looking for you.”
“This all sounds so creepy.”
“Because it is,” I assured him, reaching for his hand.
He took hold of mine, and I could feel him tremble.
“Suzie Belmont knows her husband is involved in Caleb’s disappearance,” I assured him. “She just doesn’t want to face it.”
“Yes. I agree.”
I studied his face.
“You’re looking at me oddly again,” he informed me.
“That’s because while she was telling us her story, you were angry one second and calm the next, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Feel about what?”
“Your ability to completely compartmentalize. It was a bit eye-opening.”
He squeezed my hand. “In what way?”
I looked down at our clasped hands and then back up at him. “You were so cold, and I didn’t like it,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen you lock yourself down like that before. It was weird.”
“Because I’ve never been at all professional with you,” he said with a grin that lit his eyes. “I’ve been wild for you since the moment we met, which has made being anything but a hundred percent honest with you utterly impossible.”
I liked hearing that.
“My God, I told you about my accident, and I haven’t mentioned that to anyone in years.”
I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his bony knuckles.
“I never even told Justin, and he was my boyfriend, for heaven’s sake.”
“Didn’t tell the ex, huh?”
“No, I didn’t,” he murmured, putting the hand I wasn’t holding on my cheek and gently turning my face to him. “I’m crazy about you, Shaw James, and the only reason you saw my professional demeanor was that me engaging with her emotions was not helping.”
“Explain that,” I demanded, holding onto his hand with both of mine.
“As she was talking, I kept asking myself, what if you drove away from me and I never heard from you again? I would move heaven and earth to find out what happened. I would exhaust all my options. No stone would go unturned, and I would have answers. Putting myself in her shoes wasn’t helping. All I could see was everything she didn’t do for someone she supposedly loved.”
I squinted at him. “Or you would have thought I was dead like you did Caleb.”
“Caleb is, for the record, sadly,” he said, taking a quick moment of silence, “most likely dead, so technically, I was right. He is a ghost, he is not at rest, and he does, in fact, need my help!” he bellowed.
“Why’re you yelling?”
“Because you’re being an idiot!” he yelled again. “You think me not alienating Suzie Belmont by sounding judgmental while she was confessing was me somehow not caring?’
“I didn’t know what to think. It was just fuckin’ weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, weird,” I repeated, realizing how stupid I sounded. “I’ve never seen you in, what was that, shrink mode?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it was.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” I told him. “Dispassionate Benji is no good. I don’t like him.”
“For the record, I don’t like him either, which is why I stopped being him.”
Which made so much sense.
“I guarantee if I’d kept equating you and Caleb in my head, I’d only have gotten madder and madder thinking about what I would have done differently instead of listening to Mrs. Belmont without judgment. She would have broken down right there in the back seat, and that would have been it. So I listened to her in a nonconfrontational way, and she told us she does, in fact, think her husband murdered her lover.”
I let that sink in. “She’s been thinking it for a while now.”
“Yes,” he agreed, clipping the word.
I thought a moment. “I’m sorry I let that freak me out.”
“If you’ve never seen a person become a robot right in front of your eyes before, I’m sure it can be a bit unnerving.”
I squinted at him. “I can’t imagine you were ever like that with your patients, though. You talked with them more than anything else, and you’re naturally a warm person, so how did that work with you in shrink mode?”
“Can we please stop calling it shrink mode?”
“Robot mode?” I offered.
He groaned. “Like most people, I warmed up session after session, just like they did. Some of my patients never let down their guard because they wanted, sometimes needed, that distance. Many people do. When you invite familiarity, the doctor-patient relationship falters.”
“And you wanted that, but some of your patients didn’t,” I said, studying him, the way his pupils dilated as I stroked my thumb across his knuckles, and his breath caught, and how he swallowed and licked his lips. He was sitting there utterly mesmerized by me, and to have that effect on another person was heady stuff.
“I—what?”
I grinned at him. “I like that you’re having trouble focusing.”
“I’m not having—your eyes are really the most beautiful color green I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m glad you can’t be like that with me,” I told him. “I never want to be on the receiving end of your emotional disconnect.”
“It’s not even possible,” he whispered.
“I’m the same way,” I said, reaching out to slip my hand around the side of his neck. “Normally people, clients, don’t like me much,” I told him, rubbing my thumb over his smooth jawline. “They’re always ready for me to leave, even before the job is done.”
Nothing, just him staring at me.
“Benji?”
“Hmm?”
I chuckled. “If you start feeling like you want me gone, warn me, all right?”
“I thought you didn’t play games,” he said under his breath before he started moving, climbing over the center console to get into my lap.
“I don’t,” I said, making sure he didn’t tumble forward and crack his head on my window. The man was not at all coordinated, but his desire was the important part, so when he hit my chest, nearly kneed me in the balls, steadied, and then lunged at me, taking my mouth, nothing mattered but that. Nothing mattered but how much he wanted me.
The kiss was hot and wet, and his tongue pushed against mine, dragged and tangled as he feasted before I took hold of the back of his neck and his firm ass and clutched him to me.
He moaned into my mouth and tried to wriggle even closer, rubbing his now hardened cock over my abdomen.
The knock on the window was jolting.
Breaking the kiss, both of us panting hard, we found ourselves staring at a scowling Deputy Chief Ramirez. Benji lowered the window as she stood there in the drizzling rain.
“Hi,” he croaked out.
“Do you not have a house you can do that in?”
“Yes, I…yes,” he answered her, “but we have a lead.”
She crossed her arms and waited. Her timing was terrible.
“I think we should come back inside and tell you and the chief about the conversation we just had with Suzie Belmont.”
“I might need a minute,” I told Ramirez.
The judgmental head shaking was to be expected.
ELEVEN
Brasher and Ramirez were, of course, interested to hear about the connection between Caleb and Suzie, and Suzie and Pete, and Pete and Chuck and Stewart. It took longer than I wanted, and it was after five by the time we headed to the only grocery store in Rune.
It was bigger than I thought it would be, with automatic doors and everything. As we walked through the produce section, I was horrified at the number of vegetables he placed into the cart and had to comment accordingly.
“I don’t eat that,” I assured him, pointing at the kale.
“You will if it’s covered in fake bacon crumbles and slathered in nonfat ranch dressing.”
I shivered.
“We need to speed this up,” he ordered. “I want to go home.”
“I know what you want to do,” I teased him and realized that I had never done so before, ever, with anyone else. He wasn’t even my lover, at least not yet, but I was confident, certain he wanted me, in a way that wasn’t familiar.
“And?” he goaded me. “Don’t you want to go home too?”
“I do,” I assured him, bending to kiss him as he lifted to meet me halfway. My phone ringing nipped that in the bud. “Shit,” I grumbled when I saw it was Owen.
He had called me on FaceTime, which wasn’t his usual, and my boss was standing behind him. All I could see in the frame was a torso and crossed arms, since Owen was seated, but I knew it was Jared Colter because I was familiar with the stance and the bulging biceps.
“Hi,” I greeted a very pained-looking Owen Moss. “What’s going on?”
“Is that one of your brothers?” Benji asked, smiling into the phone.
“No,” I told him, and Owen scowled, which prompted me to say, “what? You should be so lucky as to be related to me. My family is amazing.”
“Perhaps if he was,” my boss growled, bending down so he could see me as well, his furrowed brows and clenched jaw in the frame beside Owen, “he’d know better than to hack into firewalls that he has no business messing with.”
I groaned. “What’d you do?”
Owen cleared his throat. “Your ghost, Caleb Harrison. When I went to look him up to see what was out there, doing my normal due diligence on a name we come in contact with, all his credentials, his birth certificate, driver’s license, it all looked—I dunno—too shiny is the only way I can put it.”
“You’re saying it looked fake?”
He nodded. “How he was getting his PhD, his trip out to Oregon, he was just so ordinary, and not at the same time. Like why was he there? It was so random.”
“And?”
“And I was checking into him last night, not digging deep, and it was all too easy. Everything was right there for anyone to find.”
“I don’t understand,” Benji admitted, turning to me. “What does that mean?”
“It means that Caleb Harrison isn’t at all who we think he is.”
“How so?” he asked me.
“Caleb Harrison is entirely fabricated. He doesn’t exist.”
“Really?” Benji sounded excited. “Are you serious?”
“It would seem so,” I said, tipping my head at the screen.
“It turns out,” Jared began, “that Caleb Harrison is, in reality, Heath Sears, a DEA agent out of Seattle. When Owen dug deeper and ended up hacking into the DEA database”––he turned and glared at his ward before turning back to face me and Benji––“all the alarms went off, and I got to be on the receiving end of a blistering tirade from a friend.”
