“Layne –”
He leaned into her. “Do it or I carry your ass to your car.”
“I think he’s doing something to the girls,” she whispered and Layne leaned back.
“Come again?”
She shook her head and stepped forward. “I heard it today, in the bathroom, two freshmen talking through the stalls. One of them is Alexis McGraw. She’s a pretty little thing but about twenty years older than she actually is. She comes to Youth Group here and I heard her bragging about sharing her gum with the Youth Minister.”
“So?”
“It had been chewed.”
Oh fuck.
“And they didn’t use their fingers when they handed it off,” Rocky finished.
Damn.
“Could she be lying?” Layne tried but not holding much hope in the attempt.
Rocky took in a breath. “She’s older than her years and she’s dying to grow up and she’s obvious about being impatient for that to happen. So, yes, she could be telling tales but with that, and the rest of the stuff I’m hearing, I can’t sit on this but I also can’t start a witch hunt either if it’s just a bunch of overenthusiastic kids who really, really like Jesus.”
Layne studied Rocky while his mind went over what he knew.
That ‘burg was in the bible belt and religion was vital to that community but that didn’t translate to the roster of the Youth Group at the Christian Church that had been skidding by with around ten or fifteen members for the last thirty years adding over fifty new recruits in the last six months, most of them girls.
Fuck.
Layne made a decision, turned to the copier just inside the door and switched it on.
“What are you doing?” Rocky asked.
He turned back to her and held his hand out for the file. “We could take pictures, sweetcheeks, but it’d take forever, the copies would suck and we got a copier right here. Hand me the file and see if they keep attendance records for Youth Group.”
She stared at him a second, eyes wide. Then she gave him the dimple. Then she handed him the file and whirled around, her ponytail flying, and opened a filing cabinet drawer.
*
“I don’t see anything here,” Rocky noted and Layne looked at the back of her head.
He was sitting on her couch sifting through Youth Group rosters and making note of names and how attendance wasn’t inching up, it was shooting up, the vast majority of new recruits female.
Raquel was cross-legged on the floor beside his leg, head bent, the back of her neck exposed, an opened bottle of fancy-ass beer in front of her and she was reading through the personnel file on TJ Gaines, the Youth Minister.
“You’re not gonna see anything, Roc, especially if it’s bogus, not until I run his shit through my systems at the office tomorrow,” he told her.
Her neck twisted and her head tilted back to look up at him.
“Do you think we should go back tomorrow night, set up camera surveillance or something?”
Yep, she was cute.
“No, we aren’t gonna do shit. I run him tomorrow, I find dirt or even that he lied on his application, I turn it over to Merry or Colt or Drew and they run with it.”
“That’s it?” she asked, sounding disappointed.
He grinned at her and somewhat lied. “Baby, on TV, they make my job look exciting. Most of the time it’s done either sittin’ at a computer or sittin’ somewhere else. The action man shit is a stereotype based on total fiction.”
Her eyes dropped to his middle and, to hide what that said, she quickly turned and grabbed her beer, tipping her head back to take a sip.
When she put it down she turned back to him and asked, “What if there isn’t any dirt?”
“There isn’t any dirt, we go deeper.”
“Cameras?”
“Cameras are expensive, it’d take forever to set them up, I’d need the feeds to come into the office, I’m not set up to do that and I don’t have the cash to get set up so I’d need recording devices which are bulky, therefore hard to hide, and someone would have to go and collect the DVDs. Each time I go in, I court gettin’ caught. I’m good but the law of averages on that kind of operation are never on your side. And, I go that way, I got hours of DVDs to watch, most of the shit on ‘em not worth watchin’, and I don’t have hours to waste.”
She turned her body toward him and rested her bent arm on the couch beside him. “So what do we do?”
“Again, we don’t do shit, sweetcheeks. I’m workin’ this case because you’re worried and what I’ll do is send in undercover recruits.”
Her brows shot up. “Undercover recruits?”
Layne leaned down, reached around and grabbed her ponytail, giving it a gentle tug as he got close to her face. “Jasper or Tripp. I’m thinkin’ Tripp. He’d do good at bein’ a Jesus Freak. Not to mention, the Youth Group is filled with girls. He’ll be all over that.”
Tripp would be all over that for the girls but mostly Tripp would be all over it because his old man asked him to do it and Layne would let it slip that it was a favor for Rocky.
Her eyes got bright and she whispered, “That’s brilliant.”
He let her hair go, handed her the rosters and she took them. “Your job is to look over those rosters and call me tomorrow with Tripp’s target.”
“His target?”
He nodded. “A girl, on those lists,” he tipped his head to the papers in her hand, “who’s been goin’ to Youth Group awhile. Not a new kid, someone who’s been around, could have seen things, heard things.”
She nodded.
Layne went on. “And she has to be open to Tripp. A shy or plain girl who’ll be flattered at attention from a kid on the football team.”
She shook her head. “I’m not setting up some girl to –”
He put his finger to her lips and she fell silent but he felt her lips part under his finger as he watched the intensity shift into her eyes.
In about a week, or, hope to God, sooner, he’d kiss her after seeing her eyes get like that.