“Miss Becca, the police are here,” Walt said, placing the emphasis on the po.
Not sure of her voice, she nodded to the empty space and carefully picked her steps back through the overturned piles of her brother’s life.
Walt waited at the door for her with kind, sympathetic eyes. How far they’d come in such a short time. For all she knew, he might’ve been the last person to see Charlie. Alive, her brain added, giving silent voice to her worst fears and raising an image of her older brother, Scott, in her mind’s eye. He’d died of a drug overdose a few weeks after his college graduation, and it had shocked the hell out of all of them. They’d gone to different colleges, and she’d had no idea Scott even used. She couldn’t live through the nightmare of burying a brother again. She wouldn’t.
Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes. No. No way she was falling apart. Or assuming the worst. She would find Charlie and figure out what the hell was going on—and who was behind it. With both their parents gone, they were each other’s only remaining family. And she refused to let her little brother down. She’d done enough by refusing to listen to him last week.
Becca shifted into crisis management mode, sliding into the cool, dispassionate discipline the most critical cases in her emergency department required—the one that helped make sure lives got saved, not lost.
A pair of light green eyes flashed into her mind’s eye, and the rest of the man’s face—the angled jaw, blade of a nose, and grim set of his lips—filled in around that cold stare. Nick Rixey. If Charlie’s note meant he’d been a member of her father’s Special Forces team, he would’ve had training and skills she really could’ve used right about now. If her meeting with him yesterday had gone differently. If he’d just heard her out. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. A blaze of anger flooded through her veins. No use yearning after what wasn’t and would never be.
Car doors slammed out front. Becca stepped out the door, the transition between Charlie’s cave and the late afternoon sun making her eyes squint and water.
Would they take her more seriously than they had when she’d filed the missing persons report? Please, God, let them actually help me this time. But if not, she’d damn well figure this thing out.
One way or another.
Charlie’s life might very well depend on it.
Chapter 3
Rixey’s mind was still standing in the back corner of Becca’s yard, keeping watch and waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Had been all damn day. The distraction was making him sloppy. And sloppy pissed him off.
Sloppy meant mistakes. Like missing the perfect opportunity to intercept the witness in an assault case he’d been tracking all afternoon. It was like his brain needed a frickin’ tune-up, because he sure as hell wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
As he sat at his desk completing the affidavits for the three sets of papers he’d managed to successfully serve, he had no illusions about why that was.
His instincts refused to let go of this thing with the woman. It was like a fucking stone in his shoe, rolling around and jabbing at him. Normally, he was all about paying attention to instinct—sometimes it was all a man had on his side. And, generally, he trusted his instincts. They almost never failed him.
Almost.
The one glaring exception had been a spectacular crash and burn of a failure that had left men dead, injured, and changed forever. Himself included.
And it had involved a Merritt.
Now he didn’t know whether the instinct rubbing his hide raw over Becca should be trusted or if his recent history was mindfucking him.
The forms chugged from the printer and Rixey scrawled his signature in all the appropriate places.
He leaned back and stretched, the reclining desk chair supporting his weight, then scrubbed his hands through his hair. The light in the room dimmed considerably, drawing his gaze to the window. Clouds were rolling in, blotting out the remains of the evening sun.
Too quiet. Too still. Too alone.
Story of his mothereffing life these days. Goddamnit, he missed the guys. The ones who’d died and the ones who hadn’t.
Nope. Not gonna go there.
Becca . . .
Rixey was up and out of the chair before he’d even thought to move.
In his bedroom, he suited up just as he had the night before, a whole lotta déjà vu filling the space between his ears.
Only one way to un-fuck his head. He had to put boots on the ground and eyes on the subject. Shit. And he needed more intel, which meant he was gonna have to talk to her this time.
Keys, phone, and jacket in hand, he made for the living room.
His brother walked in the apartment door just as Rixey reached for it. Jeremy’s gaze dropped to the holstered gun under Nick’s left arm, and he frowned. “You’re going out serving tonight?”